jasonSeney('blog');

Web Dev Time Estimate Strategy

Per Task:

[1] Planning + coding time (could split estimate if applicable)
[2] QA Time
[3] Post QA bug-fix time estimate
- Will be longer for front end (cross browser) dev or complex user interaction
- Shorter for content updates and server side/db dev
[4] Overall enviroment/code setup and multi-dev collaboration time

Javascript Argument Sort

function argSort(){return Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments).sort();}

Great article on a current XML coding challenge by IBM on Antonio Cangiano’s blog. Ton’s of prizes and a few contents to choose from. Hurry, contest ends January 31st!

View ithere

Gmail Hack 2 - HTML Email

Want to send your own HTML content in a Gmail message from the web interface?

If you have firebug installed, you can simply right click the big empty box where your message goes, and select “inspect element”. There will be a body tag highlighted (inside an iframe) which you can right click and select “Edit HTML”. This will give you an empty box in firebug to type or paste in your HTML.

An added bonus is the content will be rendered in real time in the Gmail message box, so you can see the result of the html entered. Sounds complicated at first, but takes no more than 5 seconds. Don’t get Gmail get you down - hack it! :)

[ Python & Ruby Log ]
Author: Jason R Seney

Key: [+ good] [- bad] [~ indifferent]

_____( Python )____

+ Exellent scientific computation libraries
- No syntatic markup, just indents
+ Tons of built in functionality
+ Consise code
+ Easy imports
+ Has automatic enumeration with ” for i in array: “
~ Many functions are global for type “casting”
ex: str(x) where x=4 , len(myList) where myList = [1,2,3]

_____( Ruby )_____

+ Interactive mode usefull for quick tests of code
+ AWSOME Regex support! Sooo easy to use and get back references
ex. “This is a test”.match(/(\w+) (\w+)) puts x[0] puts x[1]
- No support for incrementors/decrementors ( “n++” or “—i” etc)
- Can use {} or “do … end” or “if … end” which leads to inconsistancy
- Uses blocks instead of for(int i=0; i

Hacking Gmail to push fetched email

Gmail has “fetch” capability which enables grabbing messages from other POP accounts at a rate of approximately once every hour.

Slow…

I use this to automatically grab my work email from an exchange server, tag it, and forward it to my cell phone via text message (my # @ messaging.sprintpcs.com). This allows me to filter and log all messages in Gmail while pushing to mobile, albeit very slowly.

The Fix Part I

Gmail uses an ajax request to force a check on the email account when you click “Check Now” in Account Settings. By using firebug to grab the link that the GET request is sent to, we can just automate sending to that URI.

I did a quick jQuery script to send a GET to that URI at a timed interval. About 7 lines of code, and just let it run in a browser. It kinda worked I think. I can get my requests down to every 5 minutes. Considering it takes about a minute to check the mail, I guess that’s not to bad.

Now, on to a real server side program that can completely automate this reliably! :D

The Write Less, Do More,
Javascript Library. jQuery is amazing.