Thank You Hal Helms

Posted At : December 7, 2009 1:41 AM | Posted By : Jason Olmsted
Related Categories: Random, Coldfusion, Javascript, Personal

As many might remember, Hal Helms backed out of his speaking engagement at CFUnited 2009, but offered to make it up for free. Understandably, that caused comments by many, but, hey, Sarasota is just an hour-or-so away, so I was happy to hear it.

Having trekked over the Skyway bridge and back a couple of times now with Alex, I can say that I am really glad things worked out the way that they did. In total, eight of us converged upon the office of CityMind to meet with Hal and bask in his wisdom.

Ben Nadel is a better source to learn about Hal's commercial Real World OO classes, but this weekend was somewhat informal and focused a good deal on philosophy and business practices - with some CF Object Oriented Programming and jQuery examples and discussion thrown in for good measure. For me, this was very timely, as I have just finished reading The Passionate Programmer and have been contemplating some of the non-technical details of my career.

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Resident Evil - IE Browser Zombies

Posted At : June 21, 2009 3:17 PM | Posted By : Jason Olmsted
Related Categories: Javascript

In the long-long-ago, I spent a lot of time developing rich interfaces for internet browsers using Javascript, tables, css, crazy image splicing and the ever increasing design requirements of my brother - a designer whose ignorance of technical limitations has been invaluable in the stretching and augmentation of my own skills. For over a decade I rode through the tumultuous browser wars, fanatical flame wars of html standards purists and varying degrees of pressures from both ignorant and savvy customers/clients/employers.

And then I discovered programmatic flash development. Slowly at first through beta Flex 1.0 and then a jaunt with Laszlo and now I am somewhat more fully engaged with Actionscript 3.0 and Flex. The road has been hard and fun, and the exploration of the Flash Platform threatens to provide a source of amusement and productivity for the forseeable future.

All of this is just a long-winded prelude as to why it is so difficult to go back "home". I am working on a DHTML project and I can say that I f@#*ing hate Internet Explorer. The depth of this disdain can only be appreciated by the thought that, with only 32 lines of Javascript, I have shredded the browser to the point where it no longer shows up in either the Windows Task Manager or even the Process Explorer. Effectively, I have a zombie IE window that will not go away absent restarting the whole OS - isn't that fantastic?

IE Zombies