Let's not be silly

Why would I type 10 characters in my console when I could simply hit the up arrow key ~30 times instead?

Paperwork organization time

People who know me, know how excited I am with all this:

I am going to have sections for all our various papers / bills. So excited!

Some men want to watch the world burn.

I come into work today, and I see these in the break room.

[caption id="attachment_456" align="aligncenter" width="840"] Yay Donuts![/caption]

Then, tragedy strikes.

[caption id="attachment_457" align="aligncenter" width="840"] Waait a sec..[/caption]

Shatter OST; Friday Music Recommendation

I am always on the lookout for music that I enjoy, that I can also code to. I've decided to start sharing some of my favorites and new finds every Friday.

To start, I cannot recommend the Shatter Original Soundtrack highly enough. This is a smooth, electronicy album full of energy yet doesn't distract. Each track is unique, with lots of varying melody.

As an aside, it is a great soundtrack. It stands on its own, and tells its own story.

Feeling like taffy

I have about 9 things I am excited to work on. It's hard to choose which one to focus on at a time. Does anyone else feel like this sometimes? I'm going to try focusing on no more than 2 in a week.

HTML5 contextmenu is rad.

WHat? What?

https://www.gandi.net

Right click on their logo, in Firefox.

It uses the contextmenu element. I've never seen it in the wild before.

<header contextmenu="logomenu" id="header" class="logged" data-contextmenu="Download our logo" lang="en">
    <h1><a href="/" title="\o/ Gandi">Gandi</a></h1>
    <p id="baseline"><a href="/no-bullshit" title="No Bullshit?">no bullshit ™</a></p>
    <menu type="context" id="logomenu">
        <menuitem label="Download our logo" icon="/favicon.ico" onclick="window.location = '/press#logo'"></menuitem>
    </menu>                
</header>

SO COOL. For web app stuff, that could be SUPER COOL.

Kids sick again

The kids just got over an ear infection (Atlas) and walking pneumonia (Freyja) and yet seven days after their antibiotics are gone, now that both have coughs. Atlas' sounds fairly croupy too. :(

Happy Surprise; Sword Art Online Progressive books

I was a big fan of the Sword Art Online anime Season 1. The mechanics and story really hooked me. So, when I came across these books on Amazon, and read that they offered a lot more information than the anime, I figured I'd buy them. I'm not a big manga fan, but always nice to support creators.

WELL! I did a poor job on my reading comprehension, because these are actually novels. I'm so excited to read them!

If you have even a passing interest in MMO games, or have some gaming history in one of them, I highly recommend the anime. And I'm sure the books will be great too.

/usr/bin/env: node: No such file or directory

If you are getting this error, odds are you are trying to run something nodejs related on a Ubuntu/Debian Linux distro and having problems.

I was having this problem, then found this excellent help from StackOverflow:

sudo ln -s "$(which nodejs)" /usr/bin/node

You need to symlink the nodejs executable to node

The reason for this is that when you do "apt-get install node", it installs an unrelated package, so they had to choose a different name so it wouldn't conflict

Ubuntu/Debian install node as nodejs, so it doesn't conflict with node, a package of the same name.

What makes this hard to deduce is if you install nodejs by:

sudo apt-get install npm

Which will install npm and nodejs. The npm will know where node is, so you can install things via npm install but then if you try to run something you installed, like grunt, you'll get the above error.

Stop fighting and embrace the JS

I've slowly come to the belief that if you want to keep working on front-end web development, you are going to need to get your JavaScript skills pretty polished.

I've been using JavaScript for a long time, but only through the window of jQuery. I'd have many event listeners and do ajax things when appropriate, hitting API endpoints I made. That is all well and good, and honestly for simpler information sites that is probably appropriate. However when you start needing templates to insert returned data into, and are trying to push more application logic onto the clients browser, it quickly gets messy.

There are many front end JS frameworks out there, but like always I tend towards lean and extendable. I've started playing with mithriljs. I fully admit it was the name that attracted me to it. I am still taking baby steps, but so far I'm liking it.

I paused on working with mithriljs to brush up on my JS skills, since some of what mithril is doing is more than the simple JS I'm used to dealing with. I started reading through the O'Reilly book JavaScript, the Definitive Guide. Around 80% of what I come across I already know, but then I hit some element I'd never used before, or learn some nuance I wasn't aware of. It's awesome!

Anyway, I am going to try to journal my progress and share neat things I've learned. Stay tuned!