maphilight: image map mouseover highlighting

UPDATE 2011-05-04: Version 1.3 released. Works in IE9. (There’s a pattern here.) UPDATE 2010-05-22: Version 1.2 released. Works in IE8. I just released maphilight, a jQuery plugin that turns image maps into wonderful graphical masterpieces. Image maps aren’t so popular any more, for some strange reason. So a quick definition: an imagemap is an <img> …

Fixing sortForce in jQuery’s tablesorter

jQuery has a table-sorting plugin, part of their official UI project. It’s quite a nice table-sorting library, handling the common cases, with options making it configurable to suit many people’s needs. However, I ran into a problem when using it in a project. The documentation and the functionality don’t quite line up. It has an …

Practicing JavaScript with Dilbert

I discovered that there was a flash widget displaying Dilbert archives in color, back to the start of 2007. Naturally I thought to myself “aha, there must be an XML data feed somewhere in that!” Some light flash-decompilation later, I discovered that I was right. I then seized on this as a learning opportunity, and …

Three gigabytes free…ish

WordPress.com announced yesterday that all users get three gigabytes of upload space for free. This is a teensy upgrade from 50MB. This seems to be primarily for psychological reasons, because there’s a big fat * after the upgrade. The footnote is that Mr. Mullenweg mentions in this post that “[y]ou still need a space upgrade …

Why I can’t play Dungeon Runners

Last night I thought to myself “hey, I know, I’ll try out Dungeon Runners!” It’s a pseudo-free pseudo-MMO, which could be described as a Diablo parody – that’s the sort of game that sounds appealing to me. Sadly, I discovered that Dungeon Runners is not a game I can play. You see, it requires that …

How to generate PDFs from XML using Apache FOP in Ruby on Rails

The title is a bit of a mouthful. Sorry. Before we begin, I present the caveat that this code should not be used on a production system. It launches a java runtime for every single request, which would cripple you. This would need (a) output caching, and (b) some sort of persistent FOP server process …

Thoughts on Ruby on Rails after one day of work

I started looking at Rails (leading to my talking about scaffolding) because I wanted to try writing my next work-project in it. I don’t know about others… but I hate learning a language/framework in isolation from a project. Writing an insipid tutorial project that I don’t care about doesn’t involve me, and so I don’t …