Bee

Bee
Originally uploaded by LoopZilla

Testing out flickr's blog this button.

Why I prefer JQuery to prototype/script.aculo.us?

Because it's more pipe friendly, more powerful to traverse the DOM tree and last but not least more maintainable.

1. pipe friendly: Like unix pipe, you could select amazing complicated elements using chains of filters like this: $("a").addClass("test").show().html("foo");
   
2. powerful DOM traversal: Still use for(var i=0;i to loop through your list and do something to the parent elements? That's so quaint compared to this $("div#nav span").parents("p").attrs({'font-weight':'bold'}). Image what could be done by combining this with "chinas of filters"!!
   
3. maintainable:I was totally blowed away when I first saw jquery's selector syntax. Simple it is, but it allows we use the same CSS/XPath selector syntax in javascript. Combine this with "DOM traversing" parents, prev, sibling and "Filters" like lt(5), eq(0), gt(4), contains and you could do magic with only one line of code. Yet more readable. CodeEye also mentions a couple of very nicely constructed, highly readable selector here and a very nice, neat FAQ page built using jquery at here.
   

Yes, do everything with one line of code and make the code more readable. This is the magic of jquery.

Jeff Hawkings, the author of On Intelligence and founder of Palm,
founded this new company called "Numenta". To quote Slashdot [1]:
"Numenta's goal is to build a software model of the human brain
capable of face recognition, object identification, driving, and other
tasks currently best undertaken by humans. "

Yesterday they released the first version of their free development
platform and the source code for their algorithms to anyone who wants
to download it. [3] Even better, Numenta offers a three week, one
hour webcast for FREE. [2]. Go and register it if you are interested.

I've been dreaming of applying his theory into use for a long time,
but just don't have the time/money to build something. Now the time
has come. :-)

Alex

1. http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/06/220213
2. http://www.numenta.com/htm-jumpstart-subscribe.php
3. http://www.numenta.com/for-developers/software.php

How to ignore .svn directories in grep?

This has bothered me for a while. A google search shows two popular implementations to work around this: using grep's --exclude parameter or use find to filter out the hidden directories. I chose the --exclude parameter approach since it is pretty neat and easy to integrate into my own bash environment by defining an alias.

Here is the alias definition in my ~/.bash_profile

alias g="egrep --exclude=\*.svn\* -r -n "

Password-less login for dreamhost
It turned out to be fairly easy once I figured out the right manual to refer to. Here are what I've done.

• Concise guide to Passwordless Authentication for Windows users
  
• Add a "putty.exe" shortcut on your quick start bar with `C:\Tools\putty.exe -load "dreamhost"`
• Auto start Pageant.exe

How to add reddit.com button to your blogger account?

I'm using the new blogger classic template. So YMMV. But the basic idea should be the same.

• Go to "Edit Template"->"Edit HTML",
• Expand all widgets HTML code by checking "Expand Widget Templates"
• Scroll down to near the bottom, replace<div class="'post'">
  <a name="'data:post.id'/"></a>
  with
  <div class="'post'"><a name="'data:post.id'/">
  </a><a name="'data:post.id'/">
  <script>reddit_url='<data:post.url/>';</script>
  <script language="javascript" src="http://reddit.com/button.js?t=1"></script></a>

Javascript tags generator: A MUST have for serious Ajax developers using vim

The following python script could build tags file for your javascript files. It's still version 0.0.1, but it does support extracting most methods and class definitions. Here are a list of the syntax it supports for now. If you find this script misses something, please let me know and I'll add them for you.

Supported Syntax

# - functions
#   * function info(msg) {
#   * info: function(msg) {
# - classes
#   * var logger = {

Usage

#   jstags.py logger.js
#   ls *.js | jstags.py
#   find ./ -name *.js | jstags.py

Source code

#! /usr/bin/env python
#
# jstags.py
#
# Create a tags file for javascript programs, usable with vi.
#
# Benefit:
#   Just in case you haven't used tags in vim, you could jump
#   to class/function definition using  and jump back
#   using . Once you start using tags, you can no longer
#   live with it.

import sys, re, os
tags = []    # Modified global variable!

def main():
   if sys.stdin: files = [s.strip() for s in sys.stdin.readlines()]
   else: files = sys.argv[1:]
   for filename in files: parse_file(filename)

   fp = open('tags', 'w')
   fp.write("!_TAG_FILE_FORMAT\t2\n")
   fp.write("!_TAG_FILE_SORTED\t1\n")
   fp.write("!_TAG_PROGRAM_AUTHOR\tAlex Dong\n")
   fp.write("!_TAG_PROGRAM_VERSION\t0.0.1\n")
   fp.write("!_TAG_PROGRAM_URL\thttp://thetruedelight.blogspot.com/2007/01/javascript-tags-generator-must-have-for.html\n")


   tags.sort()
   for s in tags: fp.write(s)

patterns = { re.compile('\s*var\s*(\w+)\s*=\s*{'):'c',
       re.compile('\s*function\s*(\w+)\s*\('):'f',
       re.compile('\s*(\w+)\s*\:\s*function\s*\('):'f'
}

def parse_file(filename):
   fp = open(filename, 'r')
   while 1:
       line = fp.readline()
       if not line: break

       for pattern in patterns.keys():
           m = pattern.match(line)
           if m:
               c = m.group(0)
               n = m.group(1)
               s = "%s\t%s\t/^%s/;\"\t%s\n" % (n, filename, c, patterns[pattern])
               tags.append(s)
              
   fp.close()

if __name__ == '__main__':
   main()

Facts about Unicode which you might not know

1. There is no such thing called "Plain Text". All text and strings are byte data stored in memory and disk. So a better word for previous "Ascii string" might be "binary string" or "byte string".
2. The operation system needs a way to transform meaningless in memory binary data into meaningful string to display on monitor, print on paper. In the old time before Unicode, this semi-standard byte-to-string mapping table is called "Code Page".
3. A byte can contain 256 characters with the low 128 characters common agreed as "ASCII" character set, but for the rest 128 characters, different country/culture choose a different way to use them. Thus a 0xc5 should be different in Hebrew and Russian language.
4. IBM PC has defined one way to use 128-255 byte space, which is common called "latin-1" character set, or "iso-8259-1". This character set is so standard that many modern softwares, like MySQL, still makes it the default encoding for database connection, which causes tons of headaches. Someone even calls it "Character Set Hell".
5. Chinese and other east asia characters requires at least two bytes to represent a word. Thus, the need for a multi-byte string. In Window, this is where the notorious MBCS comes into play. Plus the tons of methods in ATL/MFC to convert from one type to another.
   
6. A more precise way for "UTF-8" is "an unicode string encoded using UTF-8 encoding rules". So first of all, UTF-8 can be used in transmission from one machine to another, but inside a computer, it still needs to be converted into bytes. UTF-8 is not Unicode.
7. Unicode is a standard way to define how to represent any given character in memory. It has nothing related to how the character rendered on the monitor or on paper. It's only a world-level unique way to ensure that given any character, no matter it's a Thai, Chinese, Russian, Hebrew or French, there is only one single way to represent it in binary format.
   
8. Unicode, as an internal representation, looks like like U+0048 U+0065 U+006C. When it's encoded into ASCII encoding and saved, it'll be the as 48 65 6C. The ASCII string could, understandably, be decoded into Unicode representation.
   
9. The decode process requires an explicit definition of which encoding the input string is "encoded" in. Otherwise, the system level default encoding will be used.
10. Major modern database software, Oracle, MSSQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SAP DB, Sqlite, all supports storing unicode string as content.
    
11. UTF-8 is a preferable way to transmit and store data in because it has two unique characteristics: 1) UTF-8 is fully compatible with ASCII character set since it either uses one byte for 0-128 characters, or three bytes for the rest. Since most network applications, especially HTTP protocol accepts only ASCII character set, UTF-8 is the only encoding choice that's compatible with these network protocols. 2) UTF-8 contains the same character set as defined in Unicode. The process of encoding Unicode into ASCII is downcasting because it shrinks the amount of characters that could be represented.
12. In order to make your web pages display correctly, it's recommended to include a META tag in your HTML code: meta equiv="Content_Type" charset="UTF-8". If you're using Apache, you could add AddDefaultCharset utf-8 into your httpd.conf to let Apache server add this to all the web pages your website is servicing.
    
13. If you need to make your web forms have multi-lingual support, like Google's search textbox, you'll need to
    

References
I've done a quite extensive reading on this topic. Basically I found all the articles on this topic and continue reading them until I could no longer find any concepts that's new. Here are a few links I'd recommend:

• Joel's absolute minimal unicode paper. A MUST read.
  
• End to end Unicode Web Application in Python. [PDF}