Commavee

Tech Tip: Resolving screen flicker when a DOM element is updated asynchronously

Posted by John Minnihan - 13/02/10 at 04:02:53 pm

This tech tip is useful enough to warrant its own post.

If you are updating a DOM element via javascript, for example replacing the content or changing the style, you may notice screen flicker during the update.  Screen flicker on any div update is usually the result of a collision of heights of the elements that are changing.

Be sure that there’s adequate space (or at least no overlap) between the div you are updating and any adjacent divs. The flicker is caused when the DOM renders the new placement & has to ‘adjust’ the overlap.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Themes, themes, themes…

Posted by John Minnihan - 23/01/10 at 12:01:51 pm

You may have noticed that I’ve been changing the theme of the site today.

I’ll settle on one I like soon, but this exercise – which I undertake every 3 – 6 months – made me consider why I do this.  It would be easy to say that I simply bore quickly with any given theme & want to try others, but the real reason is more subtle… and vastly more interesting.

I believe that visual cues are a huge part of effective communication.  Experimenting with different themes allows me to see, for myself, the results of these changes. 

Popularity: 1% [?]

Mountain biking in Vail

Posted by John Minnihan - 28/07/09 at 10:07:10 am

We’ve just returned from four days in Vail. This trip was to celebrate my birthday, but the theme was mountain biking.  On Sunday, we took the gondola up to the top & rode our bikes back down.

We stayed in Vail Village, which is a short bike ride from Lionshead, where we caught the Eagle Bahn Gondola up to Adventure Ridge at an elevation of 10,350 feet.

The system they use to get bikes to the top is pretty cool – the seat in each gondola cab flips up to reveal a bike rack large enough for two full-size mountain bikes.

The bikes are set into the cab (two each) and off they go.  We rode in the next cab & headed to the top.

At the top, there are a couple restaurants and other attractions, for example a trampoline bounce rig (you strap into a harness that is hoisted up 15 feet & you perform wild acrobatics as you bounce), as well as the convergence of many trails.  It is here that we caught the start of the Village Trail.

Village Trail is “the longest and most pleasant route on the mountain” (from the 2009 Vail Summer Trail Map).  It is a 7 mile gravel road that winds down the mountain in broad, sweeping arcs.  This isn’t a technically challenging trail, but worked very well for our different skill levels.

One advantage to using this trail is that it allowed my oldest son & I to pull ahead of my wife and youngest son and just go fast. At one point, I know I was traveling at nearly 40 mph down the trail.   This was both awesome and a bit terrifying, as neither of us was wearing any safety gear other than a standard biking helmet.

Near the top of the trail, we saw a slightly curious sight: dozens of snowmobiles parked in a meadow.  This is where the Ski Patrol‘s snowmobiles are parked off-season.  Notice how many of the sleds have orange-flagged whiptails – this provides additional visibility in deep snow.

It was really cool riding down the mountain & passing alongside (and underneath) so much of the lift equipment.  The signage that guides winter skiers is less useful to bikers, but still provides cues about where you are on the mountain.

The Northwoods Express ski lift is just off the right of the trail at this point, as you can see here.

We all met up here & had a water and snack break before continuing down the rest of the trail.

This is also where the trail took a large, sweeping turn and then went more or less straight downhill for approximately 1/2 mile.

Keeping in mind that this is a beginner’s trail, the angle of descent wasn’t crazy, but it was definitely the steepest part of the trail.  This is where we picked up our greatest speed, mostly because the trail was hard-packed here and visibility was so good.

From here, we continued down and took a short single-track cut-off to connect to Windisch Way, which led us straight into the Village.  Quite by luck, we pulled into just behind Los Amigos (400 Bridge Street, Vail CO), a wonderful Mexican restaurant with excellent food & service.  Just as we arrived, it began to rain.  We enjoyed our lunch while waiting out the storm, and then rode back to the condo.

If you get to Vail in the summer, you really have to check out the trails on Vail Mountain.  There’s something for everyone and I highly recommend it.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Video of Greenpeace climbers on Mt. Rushmore

Posted by John Minnihan - 09/07/09 at 12:07:26 pm

No matter your opinion of the political statement these activists were making, you have to respect someone who can literally get blown off the side of a mountain & not lose sight of the objective of the climb.  Pretty amazing stuff.

Tags: greenpeace, mt rushmore, gloabl warming

Popularity: 3% [?]

Tech Tip: Multi-line Perl regex pattern match

Posted by John Minnihan - 18/06/09 at 09:06:53 am

Yesterday, I encountered an analysis issue that appeared to be resolvable with a simple pattern replacement technique. 
Continue reading Tech Tip: Multi-line Perl regex pattern match…

Popularity: 26% [?]

Quick file & directory cleanup tools

Posted by John Minnihan - 15/06/09 at 06:06:19 pm

Every sys admin needs to quickly free up disk space from time to time, and here are two well-tested scripts I use for exactly this purpose.

The first is a simple command-line use of exec that uses find to construct of list of matching file names, in this case all gzipped tarballs, and then runs the rm command on them.  The curly braces "{}" act as a holder for each file name from the list, and the trailing "\" is used to escape the ";", so that it is passed to find as a literal command terminator.

#find . -name *.tar.gz -exec rm {} \;

You may find (pun intended) that you need a slightly more sophisticated way to construct the list of things to remove.  For example,  to recursively delete all files & directories from an arbitrary depth in the file-system, except for special files or directories.  To accomplish this, I use a small Perl utility I wrote that uses the File::Find module. 

Here is the actual script I use generalized out with a fake $top and /some-pattern-to-exclude/. This script will crawl down (actually the direction that finddepth goes is up) a list of files & directories, and unless the pattern is matched, each file in the directory & then the directory itself is deleted.

How does this work?  Pretty simple – the File::Find module loads some routines, one of which is finddepth. The first argument it expects is a routine to run against all files & directories found, starting at the location named in the second argument.  The wanted routine is run on each element in finddepth’s list & you can use  finddepth’s variables to make your wanted routine smarter.

Tags: tech tips, perl, sysadmin

Popularity: 3% [?]

Don’t install TortoiseSVN v 1.6.2?

Posted by John Minnihan - 20/05/09 at 06:05:23 pm

Update: TortoiseSVN 1.6.3 is stable and works well — jbminn

A friend of mine forwarded this to me a few days ago; I filed it away under ‘refer to later’.   Later just arrived, as I saw someone tweet about a TortoiseSVN issue on Vista.

I’m relaying this here in the hope that it saves folks the hassle of figuring it out themselves.

I [installed TortoiseSVN 1.6.2] this morning, and it just failed silently, After digging out some logs etc, I found the very helpful Microsoft message "Application did not start because its side-by-side configuration was not correct"
That has to be one of the most non-enlightening error messages of all time.

I had come across that myself before with ScreenCap, and I was able to figure out that it has some mysterious connection to the .NET framework. However, my work-around was pretty ugly, and not useful in this case.

My recovery for tortoise is that I had to uninstall the new version, restart 3 times to make sure that windows forgot about it it, and then install the older (1.6.1) version.

From previous experience with this side-by-side nonsense, this seems to be Vista specific because I’ve never seen that message in an XP machine. Interestingly enough, I didn’t see a bug report on the tortoise site, but I only did a cursory look through the list.

Tags: twitter, tortoisesvn, vista

Popularity: 6% [?]

Glue Conference 2009

Posted by John Minnihan - 16/05/09 at 08:05:12 am

The inaugural Glue Conference was held this week & it was, as expected, fantastic.

When I saw Eric last November at Defrag, he told me he was starting another conference.  My one sentence response was ‘let me know how I can help’.  He promised he would.

Fast forward a few months and there I was at Glue as both a sponsor and panel moderator.  From a business perspective, it was time & money well spent, as I had the opportunity to meet & socialize with some truly amazing technologists & entrepreneurs.   The venue at the Hyatt is very well suited for conferences, and in the heart of downtown Denver, is easily accessible via taxi & light rail.

I’ll leave the deep analysis to others for now, but I do want to share with you the quote I left for Eric on the post-conference survey.  I think it speaks for itself:

"What an amazing group of people. Where else could I have had a one-on-one conversation with Bob Frankston while Mitch Kapor was standing less than 20 feet away, after having had drinks the evening before with a group that included an America’s Cup winner (hey T.A.!)."

Tags: gluecon, defrag

Popularity: 3% [?]

Astroturfing

Posted by John Minnihan - 10/04/09 at 06:04:53 am

Please don’t waste your time – and mine – astroturfing here.  I’ll just delete the comments as soon as I see them.

I really, really welcome genuine comments on any of the posts I’ve ever written (the ajax logfile tailer & the elliptical mileage calculation posts are especially popular), and I read them all.  But the moment I determine you’re fronting a comment for advertising purposes, it gets deleted without a second thought.

Save yourself the trouble, really.

Tags: astroturfing

Popularity: 5% [?]

Pink Floyd – Which One is Pink?

Posted by John Minnihan - 28/03/09 at 06:03:57 am

Yesterday, @pkedrosky mentioned having watched a great Pink Floyd documentary on VH1.  I searched around a bit, and though I couldn’t locate the entire program, I did find these six parts.

Edit: The videos have been removed due to Terms of Use Violations… I’ll get some good sets up there – there are many.

Popularity: 5% [?]

• @n3wjack The issue I was trying to resolve was UX, so I'll attack it from another angle. Thanks. # 1 hour ago

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