JavaScript books, recent projects, Line rider!, Rock climbing

I went on a bit of a shopping spree on Amazon. Besides a few Kindle books (sci-fi, etc) I grabbed a few new JavaScript books as well: JavaScript Patterns – Stoyan Stefanov Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja – John Resig, Bear Bibeault If you are looking to utterly destroy an entire afternoon (or more), definitely check out the HTML5 version of an oldie but goodie, Free Rider HD!! (also know as Canvas Rider) [Read More]

Week in Review 2/1/13

Was playing with animating some stuff on a page and started trying to work with animating box-shadow. I realized it wasn’t working and after some research figured out that it just doesn’t work. A super handy and easy plugin solves that problem though. The latest episode of the Suburban Strength Coach podcast is up! Started watching the Single Page Apps with HTML5, Web API, Knockout and jQuery on Pluralsight with my team at work. [Read More]

Use “debugger;” in your JavaScript to trigger the browsers debug mode.

While watching the excellent course on Single Page Apps with HTML5, Web API, Knockout and jQuery by John Papa over at PluralSight, he dropped a nice little nugget of information that I was totally unaware of. You can add debugger; as a line by itself in your JavaScript and when your code gets executed by the browser, the browsers built in debugger will stop on that line. Think of it as a way to throw breakpoints right into your code. [Read More]

Finishing Last…

I’ve been doing Crossfit for exactly 4 months now. In that time I have seen and experienced a tremendous improvement in my physical fitness and strength. However, I’m still a noob. And never is it more obvious than at the very end of each workout session. I always, consistently, finish in last place. While there is never a feeling of pressure or intense competition, they do post the scores on the whiteboard, and there are leader-boards and you just can’t help but notice when you finish last! [Read More]

Wodify, Zen Coding, Backbone.js book, SimCity beta!

Created a super basic/handy lift calculator – I’ll use this initially during my first bunch of sessions until I get comfortable doing the math on the fly. Its just painful trying to do percentage calculations while lifting, and then breaking down those results into how many different weights you need to add to each side of the bar! This tool will compute all of that in one shot! My Crossfit box started using Wodify. [Read More]

First session of the CFG Barbell Club!

I had my first session of the Barbell Club tonight and it was absolutely amazing! I hyped it up in my head for so long and then this past week started really getting nervous for it. My biggest fear was that, even though I’ve been doing Crossfit for 3 months, I haven’t spent any time doing the actual lifts. We covered the basics of the core lifts during on-ramp (my first month), but that was a crash course and 3 months ago! [Read More]

ImGettin.it launch! DMC!!! JavaScript/Node.js/Backbone.js

Soft launched ImGettin.it over the weekend! By soft launch, I mean, bought and setup the domain, and got a test version of the site live. Login works, and the site “works” for the most part, but is very much not ready for prime time yet. I still need to get a lot of things working and most importantly I need a basic admin for the games database. The data that’s up right now is just test seed data – while pretty solid is far from complete or even valid. [Read More]

Up / Down HTML arrow characters (for sorting, etc)

I was searching for the opposite of the caret, or circumflex, character (^) and couldn’t really find one. Typically, in a pinch when I’m mocking, I would just use the caret ^ and a lowercase v – but they don’t look the same. There doesn’t seem to be a good opposite for the caret character – but I found 2 extremely useful HTML character codes to use instead: ∧ (∧) and ∨ (∨) [Read More]

Crazy nested for loops (i.e. a Beautiful Mind)

I was working on a project today, that dealt with a large amount of JSON data. The project needed to allow the user to filter the data by a bunch of different filters and options within those filters. Initially I started using Underscore.js thinking this would help, but in the interest of time (had to get it done today!!!!) I decided to just do it quick and dirty. Well, I succeeded in the dirty department: [Read More]