not falling down

Yesterday, for my job, I implemented some web-marketing stuff that included me actually typing out the following text, which... well, I don't want to reproduce it for fear of google, but I've rot13ed it below; click the button to read it.

Where was I entering this marketing text, you ask?

A MySpace page.

It's not like I was pretending I hadn't sold my soul long ago. I just hadn't realized it was going so cheap.

So I opened Facebook and saw this much of an ad on my screen:

And I was like, “What, does she need emergency reverse liposuction? I mean, obviously she DOES, but is that going to save her–oh.” Because by this point I had copied the image out and could see the first frame of the animated gif, to which it apparently never resets:

Hi! St. Jude? Call me. We need to talk about this concept called “above the fold.”

All right, I freaking live with The Surrealists, it’s about time I memed it up, right?

Presenting Dr. O’Callaghan’s Scientific Fist Names Generator.

This is all 30 Rock’s fault really, even if they didn’t invent the gag. I love 30 Rock.

I’m a twit now. I have an extremely small justification for this, as follows.

Part of the Anacrusis FAQ says “I’ll get to long-form when I’m ready for it,” and I’m ready for it, so I’m writing long-form–specifically, the South book. I hate it when people announce on their blogs that they are Writing A Novel, with slight exception for that one thing in November. But the fact is that my only successful projects are done a) with at least the appearance of rigorous scheduling and b) in the public eye, so I’m going to start microposting my daily page count. With luck this will keep me from going back and polishing the first chapter over and over. Seriously, guys, the first chapter is really good.

The twi–ugh, microblog is now a sidebar on the main NFD page, and it’s got its own feed, of course.

I never remember that when I need to apply a style to a server-side generated element, I don’t have to dig ten stupid lib files deep into the PHP or whatever and add a class attribute, I can just put it in a span (or div) and style all the elements of type x within that. So in case you forget the easy way to style server-side generated elements: put them in a span or div and style all the elements of type x within that!

Okay, hi. Working a lot.

Maria visited last week, and alleviated any potential self-absorbed silliness just by being here. But we also went to Brighton and the Tower of London (pictures soon), and played lots of games, including some with Leonard and Sumana. London had changed its mind and decided to be cold, but at least it didn’t start snowing until she was on her way home. I am still not doing my fair share of the cooking.

Dear my web developer friends: Hi. I’m building an AJAX application and I have some Javascript questions. Yes, if I were an earlier version of myself I’d stop reading now too.

The application is intended for use by small groups of people–say, two to ten–collaboratively, for a few hours at a time. There may be many small groups working simultaneously, but activity won’t overlap among groups, only among members of a given group.

Say Alice, Esha and Mallory are using the application, which means having the page open in a tab or window. Each of them has a panel on that page showing what the other two are up to. Alice has five heads-up tokens, and she flips two of them over; I want Esha and Mallory to see that her tokens now consist of three heads and two tails within a few seconds of her doing so. This should not require any activity on Esha’s or Mallory’s parts except having the application page open.

I’m building this with Javascript and PHP/MySQL, no Java applets or anything. Is there any way to accomplish what I want that doesn’t involve polling–that is, using setTimeOut(XMLHttpRequest(…)) to refresh the activity panels every five seconds? setTimeOut is nonblocking on the client side, but that’s a huge number of requests per time period and it scales horribly.

I’m considering the obvious optimizations (having the client side taper off in request frequency during periods of inactivity, and writing the activity data to static files so I don’t have to hit PHP and MySQL with every request). Like most optimizations, though, they don’t address the central problem of nonscalable methodology. Is there anything in Javascript that would let the client accept pings from the server side when the data updates? I don’t think there is, but I’m hoping I’m wrong.

Three years after switching to NewsBruiser, I finally have NFD looking like I wanted it to look all this time but was too lazy to figure out the CSS. Me, not it.

I’ve been writing HTML for over ten years and CSS for over six, just because it wasn’t hard to learn and I could do fun stuff with it, and now I find myself in the position of the guy who makes a living off his hobby. Admittedly, so far this has been largely the tedious bits–like if I spent most of my day trying to shake a little broken flange out of an O-scale model train–but compared to my previous job of shaking out, say, crusty ketchup from a broken bottle, it’s aces.

Today is my last day as a systems analyst in Troveris, the software division of Trover Solutions, an insurance subrogation company. I don’t want to try and explain insurance subrogation and you don’t want to hear it, so let’s just say this: insurance subrogation is not a bad or evil job, but it is boring.

Tomorrow, I start my new job as a consulting web developer for iNDELIBLE, a design firm in Manhattan. Unlike with Trover, there’s no point in trying to hide this blog by never linking or mentioning them, as my boss is already aware of it (he saw it during my phone interview as part of my web portfolio). I’ve been moonlighting on projects for them for the last three weeks, and I already enjoy the work more than what I’ve been doing. I’ll continue working from home while consulting; assuming all goes well for the next few months, I’ll be moving to New York in October to work in their offices as a full employee.

iNDELIBLE’s offices are in the same building as Fog Creek, where Sumana works, and it’s entirely due to Sumana’s agency on my behalf that I got this opportunity. I was and am very lucky to have a friend like her in my corner.

I need PHP to go up one level of a directory, then go back down several more, to include a file. I don’t know how to do this, but I’ve been getting around it by using a URL instead of a path; now Dreamhost is turning off the option of using URLs in include statements, for (good) security reasons, so I can’t do that anymore.

I also absolutely can’t find a way to do it the path way. It won’t work with an absolute path from the root directory, nor from the highest web-accessible directory (I’m in a Linux / Apache environment, if you hadn’t guessed). I can’t use ..s to ratchet up, or do any other kind of relative movement I can think of. Does anyone know how to get what I want?

Actually, Lisa, I think you’re the only PHP programmer who reads this, so maybe I should have just emailed you. But I might be wrong.

Update 0224 hrs: Never mind. I found out how to do it, but it doesn’t help, since I need to have Apache parse the file (a NewsBruiser portal CGI, if you hadn’t guessed) before I grab it, and an internal include obviously doesn’t do that. I’ll have to use the curl library, once I figure out what it is.

And I know I’m a bad programmer for going with this setup in the first place, but I had the choice of frames, meta refreshes or dumping a load on PHP, and it was rocks and frying pans all over.

I should mention that one of the reasons my resume is changing is that the thing I talked about late Wednesday night? Totally happened. Bam!