a timocracy of one

A friend and former employee of mine, Stephanie Geerlings is looking for work. She just put her new portfolio site up, so it’s missing a couple things, like a contact link, so go ahead and email her at stillsmall at gmail if you are interested. If it doesn’t go without saying, she comes recommended by me. ;)

This year was great for infographics of the primary season, over at the NYTimes. Good data visualizations definitely give you a better grasp on the data, and you can see all at once things that might have been hidden before. It seems to me creation of good infographics is a here to stay needed skill for online journalism and reporting now.

For instance, check this out to see that yes, despite the horse-race the media might make of it, Obama is going to win the general.

I wrote an article on the work blog on the basics of how (and why it has t be done this way) to use Google AdSense in a FaceBook FBML app.

It does not matter if you set

ajax.requireLogin = false

it will still just error out. And may I mention that the facebook ajax error gives NO diagnostic information. There is an error handler you can set, but it accepts no parameters, it is just a function call, so you can say, “Ooops, there was an error, who knows why.”

Oddly enough, it works fine in Safari, so I didn’t notice it until I tried to debug something in Firebug. Then I tried IE to compare, and realized that this was only working in Safari, of all things. That’s one step better than having an Opera only feature fer crissakes. Anyways, here is the “bug in the facebook bugzilla on ajax throwing an error unless the user is logged in”: http://bugs.developers.facebook.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1009

myLineseries.setStyle("itemRenderer", new ClassFactory(DiamondItemRenderer));

It works similarly for lineSegmentRenderers, even custom ones, like Quietly Scheming’s Dashed Line Renderer. I just need to figure out how to set a parameter for the renderer created by the class factory now, so I can use different patterns of spaces to make different dashed and dotted lines.

Apparently my earlier posting about our job openings be scaring people off people who don’t want to do PHP. There is at least one Rails dedicated opening. While we are also looking for someone to work on the PHP app we are not looking for people only to work on both: I only work on the Rails app (and associated ruby libs I’ve written for said app). So if you want to only work in Ruby or only in PHP or don’t care and would do either go ahead and apply, not only the last case.

Planet Caboose was down for a bit, and a lot of my reach comes from that, since way more people probably read that then my blog. Unfortunately, that downtime came right when I was posting that the company I work for is looking for 2 bad-ass developers in San Francisco, ASAP. So I’m posting this, for those that certainly missed the original announcement.

Edited for typo: downtime != downtown

The company I work for is looking for 2 more software engineers, to work on our two main apps: http://www.yieldbuild.com/ and http://hubpages.com/. They are written in RoR and PHP, respectively, but my boss says he is not looking for anyone with a specific set of preexisting language skills as much as just someone who is wicked smart and a solid developer. In fact, skill with unmanaged languages wouldn’t hurt (but certainly is not required).

It’s a really cool, laid-back place to work, especially for a start-up. Our money situation is solid. Some of us occasionally fly RC helicopters in one of the meeting rooms. A number of us (but not all, so it’s not like you have to) go out for beers on Tues/Fri. You know the general SOMA start-up thing, but with a good business plan, revenue, and without the hype or extravagance you might have seen the last time on the roller-coaster.

Drop me a line at timocratic@gmail.com if you are interested or want details, and then I’ll hand you along to my boss.

Update: You won’t get stuck doing PHP if you applied to do Rails. I don’t touch the PHP, myself, and at least one position will be filled solely for working on the Rails app. First come first serve, and/or depending on skillsets and all that, you know? If you want a job working on Rails, just say so.

It just works better. I always thought it was just a way of cutting them so they look all fancy, but it has real advantages: they don’t roll away off the cutting board and they seem not to stick to the bottom of the pan/wok as tenaciously, since there is a little lip that your utensil and other veggies can catch under.

I know we are not supposed to attribute to malice what could be covered by stupidity, but…. Unless they put someone who couldn’t tie their shoelaces, without almost choking to death on them, behind a keyboard as a key contributor, I can’t see how they managed some of the feats they did, other than out of a seething hatred for web developers to come.

Here is how to shrinkwrap a block level element around its contents, for instance.

#yourelement {display:inline-block;}
#yourelement {display:inline;}

Ya, that’s right, the second declaration on the exact same element doesn’t actually overwrite as it does everywhere else in CSS, but in a completely unprecedented move*, it combines with it in some unholy way to create a Frankensteinian abomination of css.

Basically the first declaration triggers hasLayout, and that combined with setting display to inline, in the second one, causes inline-block behavior.

WTF, mate?

* No really, where else in ALL of selector style programming does overwriting a value not overwrite it. Hell in any programming that is a little bit of dark magic. Now I’m picturing the IE lead making a Faustian bargain to get his job, and then doing Mephistopheles bidding once he was there.