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
If you don’t build websites, the answer to the second question is you don’t. There are better things for you to spend your limited internet time learning about… like, did you know there was a Simple Wikipedia project? I didn’t until just a few minutes ago.
Okay, now that we are just down to the web developers and the wannabe web developers, lets try and get the basics established so that future posts will have a common language we all agree on… or, at least, that I agree on and that you will be forced to understand to extract anything from my ramblings. Read more…
probonogeek ExtJS
I really have fallen in love with the inove WordPress theme. It’s clean, yet stylish… modern, yet grounded. It is nearly perfection. But for my particular needs, it is not exactly perfect. Thankfully, the source is available and appears to be released under the Collective Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. That’s handy, because this blog is under the same license.
So, this afternoon I grabbed the source, spun up a git repository for it, and started making the changes I wanted to better fit my needs. I’ve now gotten it good enough to use on my blog, which means the code needs to be “shared alike”, per the terms of the license. To that end, I invite anyone who is interested to grab the code from its github repository. Maybe the original author will take a peak at some of the option settings and incorporate them into the official version. Read more…
probonogeek Technology
In November of 2008 I traveled to frigid Chicago to attend the inaugural sprint of my company’s new content management system. It was a week long affair where we started the work of building a multi-client Merb based CMS to replace the old work horse of the company, a proprietary Zope product known as ListMonster. ListMonster had served us well for many years, but its age was beginning to show and we knew the time had come for a serious upgrade. David, as a major proponent of all things Ruby, wanted to us to either develop in Rails or a new fangled MCV system known as Merb. In the end I’m not convinced that particular decision was really all that big of a deal, as Rails and Merb as so similar that Rails 3.0 will be Merb 2.0, and Merb 2.0 will be Rails 3.0. But the Merb decision wasn’t the only big decision made that week, we also agreed to use ExtJS for all front end development. Read more…
probonogeek ExtJS
Most Americans understand, at some level, that they have certain constitutional rights. Most probably can’t name any but the most popular, and even then probably don’t understand the full scope or limits on those rights. Thankfully, we live in a time when most of these constitutional rights have been heavily litigated, producing reams and reams of case law. Today, if you were to be arrested in a way that violations an established constitutional rights, all you would have to do is pay for a lawyer to argue the case before a judge (sometimes just to the cops) and you get off for cheap. Heck, even a public defender can do that much.
In situations where the rights have not been litigated, or the case law is contradictory (a.k.a. racial factors in public education), you don’t have such cheep options. You either accept the status quo — generally set by the executive — or you hirer a lawyer to argue the case before a District Judge, an Appellate Judge, and then finally the Supreme Court. Such cases often run into the seven digits once everything is done. Thankfully, when most Americans find themselves on the expensive end of a Constitutional question, they can appeal to the ACLU to help out. The ACLU will marshal its army of pro bono attorneys and argue the case from start to finish. Pretty handy service. Read more…
probonogeek Law
For the past several months, Sarah has been making noise everytime a new labor statistic comes out showing new job loses… and every time I reminder her to look at the unemployment levels from 1982, numbers we still haven’t exceeded. My argument essentially boiled down to, “Yes, things are bad, but they have been much worse and this country is, if nothing else, a country of survivors.” I liked my argument for its simplicity and optimism. It seemed like the right thing to believe in the Obama era. Recently, I’m not so sure I’m buying it anymore… and it’s got me worried. Read more…
probonogeek Politics
