Yearly Archives: 2007

Guinness Jazz Weekender

Guinness Jazz Weekend

Last weekend I went to Cork for the Guiness Jazz festival. I’m not really into Jazz at all but I had been told that it is a good weekend regardless. I went down on Saturday afternoon by train – (first time in first class which I reckon is well worth it). Saturday night was spent in a non-Jazz pub with Live music which was class.

Sunday day was spent boozing in a pub in Douglas, live music from 1pm. Then back to Hotel for a very very nice meal, some Jazz and then out to meet friends.

Monday I was hungover.

Not too much Jazz but the atmosphere in Cork for the weekend was great. I’d recommend it and if I’m here next year – I’ll go again.

Thursday night Karting

Myself and the Prague team went Karting last night and then out for dinner and drinks. It was a great night – So far, Prague is awesome and the I’m afraid to say that the rumours are true – the ladies here are strikingly hot.

Prague team out boozing

Me and the Prague team (minus Filip who was ill). From left to right: Me, Yauhen (Eugene), Viktoria (Vika) and Frank.

IE – why oh why do you taunt me so??

I’ve been working on a couple of plugins for the YUI editor to allow insertion of Flash Movies (YouTube and Google Video). It’s all working swimmingly well in Firefox and Safari but in IE – it just would not work. Why? because of IE’s JS engine bastarding implementation of innerHTML and pasteHTML. I know that innerHTML is not part of the ECMA spec but it is well supported across browsers and is alot quicker than document.createElement. The YUI editor uses it extensively too. I’ve also never encountered problems with it before.

My JS plugin for the editor takes and parses a Google Video URL and inserts it into the editor content area using the appropriate YUI editor action “inserthtml”. In Firefox – I get the alternate image as it doesn’t render the markup in the editor’s iframe properly and as such does not know to load the Flash plugin (this is fine and I have no problems with it). Internet Explorer inserts the HTML and then displays a broken flashmovie icon (white with red x in top left indicating it can’t find the movie specified), which is not fine. This is the markup I insert.

Correct markup

IE (6 and 7), in all it’s wisdom decides that that is not what I really want to insert -in fact what I really want is –

Incorrect markup

Hmmmmm….. No that’s not what I fucking well want – you piece of shit(or so I was shouting late last night). This is due to the JS engine’s HTML normalization – excuse me what?????. Very annoying. To get the editor to display the movie I had to (“shock horror”) add the deprecated embed element.

Another problem was that when submitted server side – we use a HTML parser and IE’s version of the markup would not parse correctly as the attribute values were not quoted. So I have one momma of a regex to fix the object element.It all works now and works well but it’s so disappointing that it happens like this.

In summary – firstly: beware of innerHTML especially when inserting an object element and finally: I hate internet explorer more than I ever did.

RSS enclosures -revisited

I studied RSS in detail a while back for Aggreg8 and for my Content Syndication presentation (also on Google Base). I’ve only just now revisted the spec and was quite taken aback that there is only one enclosure allowed per RSS item. Quite a limitation considering the wealth of media (images,videos,audio) being published and syndicated these days. There was talk about changing this in a future version or extending RSS 2.0 (using namespaces) or using mediarss but nothing seems to have made it back into the official RSS spec – or have I missed something?. Atom allows as many as you want using the atom:link element.

What’s Ammado?

Ammado Logo

Well the veil has been lifted a little and I can reveal what it is I have been working on.

Ammado is a social network targetted at charities and people interacting with charities.We’ve got all the usual stuff like communities, comments, image pools, message broadcasts etc etc.

I’ve been working on all sorts but mainly the Ajax stuff and trying to get the CSS in shape.The system is still in “Beta” so go easy on your bug listings.

In a few weeks you’ll be able to see the snazzy YUI editor integration I’ve done with YouTube and Google Video plugins, as well as an ajax image gallery and upload feature. Awesome!!! I hear you say.

If you’d like an invite email me