Sam’s random musings

Painless JavaScript Using Prototype:

The article reads like an introduction to Prototype, starting with the basics of installation and mentions of the helper functions. Following that, they move into more complicated things - extending the class, binding functions, and handling iterations “the Ruby way” (enumerable and hash).

They finish off things with a look at three more developed topics - how to use the library to help manage HTML forms, simple examples of how to alter the DOM of a page, and, of course, using Prototype for Ajax. The form functions allow you to work quickly and easly with HTML forms. This includes things like putting the focus on a field, serializing the results of the form. They show how the DOM functionality can insert/remove content on the page, and provide a simple example of the Ajax methods to connect to a remote PHP script.

Reading this can be a very aha moment for you. There are a lot of ways to implement AJAX (though most of what people call ajax is really just dhtml effects (IMHO)

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

Dipshit Washington Post Columnist Richard Cohen Claims Algebra is Useless:

P.Z. Myers calls him out as the moron that he is. (Via Atrios.)

This is a MUST read if you have ever thought to how would I do this if I didn’t know any math…

(Via Daring Fireball Linked List.)

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Quick Tip: Text Truncation with JavaScript:

A random tip here. This snippet allows you to truncate a paragraph, and add a ‘…’ to the end of the truncation. When a user clicks on the ‘…’ it expands out to the full text.

Nice clean trick

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

Ok, I admit it I love the winter Olympics (except ice dancing that is so LAME) but every time a person from another country wins (which is quite often and I am fine with that), I am reminded of how uneducated we americans can be. Every single one of these athletes understands our lame reporters questions and speaks english (as well as their native tongue and I bet most of them even have at least one other language they are mostly fluent in). heck I couldn’t even pass spanish in high school. Now granted it was a bit of rebellion and just plain stubbornness. But it still makes me feel like we are cheating our kids not to help change this american-centric linguistic idiocy we call education.

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p>Jonathan Snook’s Prototype Cheat Sheets:

Jonathan Snook has posted some graphics (”cheat sheets”) over on his blog today - various sized disections of the popular Prototype Javascript framework.

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

(Via Firewheel Design: Sparkplug.) * I want my workspace to have a mind-bending paint job, too! * Better get a move on or you’ll miss out on your chance to own a RHODESIA MADE ZIMBABWE ENHANCED iPOD,RHO-ZIM X1980 * LED Light Stickers * want a monkey to call

include_once / require_once Wrapper Class optimized:

When I posted my Idea of building a wrapper class for include_once and require_once, I didn’t think, that the many php developer would like it. But I was wrong, fortunately.

Thanks to Mathias Taylor for benchmarking. Special thanks goes to Cristian Strian for his suggestion to optimize the class, and make it faster. That is the optimized wrapper class.

This is interesting and I think if you do a lot of includes (like in a framework) there might be benefits to looking into ways to speed up include methods in your code.

(Via Pure PHP - PHP unconventional.)