A Modest Construct

It’s more than halfway through January, and I’ve made pitifully few posts. I’ve only one book in my meme so far (though, in my defense, I’m currently reading five books, with a sixth to be added soon).

It’s a cop-out, I realize, but I’ve been terribly busy lately. This previous week was my fiance’s last in town before heading back to Macomb (home of Western Illinois University, a three-hour drive, and a soul-sucking morass of small-town irrelevance); in addition, I’ve been in the throes of house-hunting, in an effort to capitalize on the currently-depressed real estate market. Sadly, it seems, my buying a house will not come to pass until late summer, when my lease expires: my landlord, despite having no such verbiage in the lease I signed, decided that early termination of a lease would run me $2,500.

On the educational front, I’ve started two more grad school classes; both need books this time. I’ve managed to cut the cost of one of them from $200 to $100 by buying an electronic format. The other, I’m not sure about yet. The classes are a heaping of additional deadlines among the many I already deal with. Not that I’m complaining; two online classes is hardly a strenuous life, but I currently like the capacity for very much patience.

My immediate boss at work (not just manager, but technical expert, as well), recently became a father, and has been out for a week and a half. It’s amazing how many support issues trickle down when he’s not there to catch them: mostly it’s simple user mistakes, but sometimes its seriously issues with recent upgrades that require more time than I’d like. In my spare(!) time, I’ve been alternating between managing our new hire (who, in turn, is managing the new student worker), and doing some initial codebase cleanup for a new SVN branch I’m going to make which will eventually become our new redesigned and unified portal.

jQuery, the javascript library on which we’ve standardized, released v1.3 last week. I hadn’t intended upon switching so early (to avoid any bugs), but the new release of jQuery UI 1.6, which requires jQuery 1.3, may force that issue. Then, too, I’ve noticed a lot of performance issues and IE6 bugs with the release candidates of 1.6, and so we may not do much with them after all.

Some of the work I’ve been doing is trying to find a decent modal window solution for our portal. We use them in several places; generally, it’s pseudo-replacements for confirm() and alert(), but sometimes they serve as genuine subpages for additional data input. Our currently codebase, which has been developing since June 2007, contains a mix of jqModal and BlockUI. I looked into the new jQuery UI Dialog component, but it was too bulky, buggy, and didn’t quite have the robust API I was looking for. Perhaps in a version or two…

jqModal is quick (performance-wise), but its implementation bothers me. The plugin I’ve come to enjoy as of late is boxy, which apes the look and feel of Facebox (which in turn apes the look and feel of Facebook’s modal script), but which comes with a much better API, I think. It’s got built-in methods for alert() and confirm(), as well as a few others, and is relatively fast. My only worry is that the API still isn’t stable (current git branches break existing invocations) and that it has no good way to set position or dimensions.

My goal, however, is to do some cleanup on the existing codebase, abstracting wherever possible, while designing the logic for the application redesign. I would prefer not to do a general redesign and then have to spend weeks upon weeks fixing cruft and broken hacks wherever they exist in our codebase (which, as of mid-January, stands at about 110,449 LOC).

This is all a long and circumlocutory way of saying that I hope posting will pick up soon and I can gain some ground not only on my book meme, but on posting in general.