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!

Bussing home

Trying the WordPress Android app after about a year. Seems much better.

Tara says she and the kids made a cake today, and I'm pretty excited to have a piece. :)

Why Makespace is crazy-useful

UPDATE: In 2016, Makespace discontinued the service I described below. It still operates in certain select cities. Not mine though, so I had to get all my stuff delivered back to me. It was quite disappointing.

I keep meaning to share this. When we moved up to Portland, we knew we were getting into a smaller apartment for 2 adults and 2 kids. There just wouldn't really be any extra storage for out of season clothes. I was getting worried, then I came across Makespace.

Makespace is a service where, for $6.25 a box per month, you can ship boxes to them for free, they store them, then when you want one back they'll ship it back to you. The only thing you need to pay for in addition to that $6.25/month per box is when something is shipped back, and the longer it is stored in their warehouses the less costly it is to return to you.

We use it a lot for storing out of season clothing, our wedding attire, and some things we can't really utilize in our current apartment but we can use in the future.

This is a discount code link that gets you $75 off if you're interested: https://makespace.com/invite/5Gn/

Working at Dark Horse Comics

After a great time working with the most excellent Ben and Blake at The Canary Collective since 2013, I've moved to a Senior Developer position at Dark Horse Comics. I started last Monday.

It's been a great experience so far! Besides the fact that employees receive large stacks of comics just because, the rest of the devs and staff are pretty great. The stack is really impressive, self hosted openstack installation with a large number of servers to serve up all the digital comic content. Also I'm being introduced to monitoring and alerting tools I wasn't aware of like New Relic, Sentry, etc. It's good stuff. They also believe in cross-training, so I get to pair program with people in the team who use entirely different programming languages. It is awesome and I'm excited to grow my knowledge base.

Having a commute has been a nice change too actually. It gives me time to decompress before arriving home with the family, so I can be more present and not thinking about work elements so much.

All in all, very happy. :)

Best question I've ever seen

Today I came across the best question I've ever seen:

Would a mermaid be kosher?

The fascinating part is this issue was addressed before the year 200AD.