In my last post I said that ExtJS is a front-end widget system. No doubt you could use it to create an entire system, front to back, in nothing by ExtJS, but that’s not my project nor is what I plan to talk about in these posts. Which brings us to the first question you need to answer when setting up your ExtJS environment: what am I going to use as a back-end? There are probably lots of right answers to this question, and a great deal of debate over which one is more right, and I gleefully leave that fight for others. For my purposes, the answer to that question is merb (it’s like rails, but better), so if that’s not your platform of choice, you will have to make some adaptations of your own. Read more…
probonogeek ExtJS
The Washington Post published an OpEd yesterday by Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire and the Ranking Minority Member of the Senate Budget Committee. His words, penned under the title A Budget to Beggar Us, should be considered reflective of the Republican Senate Caucus on the budget… and should have us all very worried. I might expect this sort of knee-jerk ideologically motivated writing from the House, but to see this from the Senate is very disheartening.
As an exercise, I’m reproducing the entire article below and will respond to each point, because he’s pretty much wrong on every issue and a summary rebuttal just isn’t going to cut it this time. Read more…
probonogeek Politics
I’ve largely avoided discussing the individual appointments made in these early days of the Obama Administration — with notable exception — because the appointments have all been more or expected and get tons of ink already. But a couple of news items have been floating around that inspire me to comment on the process as a whole, in particular as it applies to White House advisors. Read more…
probonogeek Politics
When I was a Student Senator at the University of Washington, we used to debate resolutions on all manner of topics. Some were serious, some were silly, some were — perhaps — beyond our jurisdiction. A popular tactic of those opposed to these resolutions was to make claims about “wasted time” or “not how real legislators act”… not sure how one can be more real than to be elected to a state entity that makes decisions, regardless of how limited in scope they may be, but I digress. The point is, so called real legislators know how to mix it up with resolutions as good as anyone. Read more…
probonogeek Politics
Dana Milback of the Washington Post has taken his satirical, yet observant, pen to the topic of creating a counter-terrorism Truth Commission, and idea proposed by Sen Patrick Leahy, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The long of the short of it is… there doesn’t appear to be legislative support for the proposal, nor is the executive very excited about “looking back,” as they say. Read more…
probonogeek Politics
Complaining about the press is about as old as the press itself. Goodness knows that there is a bad history of the government trying to either shut the press out entirely or intimidate them to publish pro-government reports. Neither is good, and I’d rather what we have to nothing at all. Having said all that, allow me to rant for a few paragraphs about how inane reporting has become on the topic of government institutions. Read more…
probonogeek Politics
Today I wrote my first WordPress plugin. Its purpose is to load the ExtJS libraries into a WordPress post whose category has been set to “ExtJS”… just like the post you are reading now. See, ExtJS is a heavy library, and even minimified it clocks in at nearly 600 KBs. I don’t want to have to pay that bandwidth cost if I don’t have to, nor do my readers who aren’t the least bit interested in ExtJS. So the plugin takes care of loading only when the post is about ExtJS. Read more…
probonogeek ExtJS
To get any use out of ExtJS you need to understand javascript. It’s inescapable. This is not a framework were you are going to be writing ruby code that generates javascript for you, like you may have experienced with Rails/Prototype. There may, someday, be that sort of integrated support… but not today, and quite frankly, it would be an abomination of the framework anyway. If you are an old pro at Javascript, chances are this isn’t going to be very informative, but if the last great Javascript trick you learned was how to change the browser’s status bar, you may learn a thing or two. Read more…
probonogeek ExtJS
Last night President Obama gave a speech to a joint session of Congress on the economy. It was great. I won’t bore you with why it was great… if you saw it, you already know that, if you didn’t watch it. Also, like, every political pundit and poll says it was great too. So, like, yeah… it was great.
But for those who hung on for a few minutes after the President’s speech you got the opportunity to see the great Republican hope give their… rebuttal? refutation? response? It was, in my political opinion, a train wreck. On this point I am also not alone. Bobby Jindal is the Republican Governor of Louisiana and seen by many as the Republican’s best shot at retaking the White House in 2012. Which isn’t saying much to begin with. But, if this is the best they’ve got, well… I think the Democrats have nothing to fear in 2012. Read more…
probonogeek Politics
Back in the late 70s Washington State had a powerhouse of a Senate delegation in the combined forces of Sen. Warren Magnuson and Sen. Henry Jackson. To quote wikipedia directly:
one of the most effective delegations in the history of the United States Senate in terms of “bringing home the bacon” for their home state. Washington State received nearly one sixth of public works appropriations, even though it ranked 23rd in population.
But just as Texas is in decline now, so too did Washington’s political clout wane. It was under a Speaker of the House from Washington State, Rep. Tom Foley that the Republican Revolution of 1994 took place, and since then Washington hasn’t had much going for it on the national scene. Read more…
probonogeek Politics
