27 May

happy birthday KFM

KFM is 4 years old today:

http://verens.com/2006/05/27/file-manager-for-fckeditor-day-one/

demos of older versions no longer available, but it’s interesting to know that it’s lasted four years!

of particular interest in my own case, is that there has been no major functionality change in the last two years or so. KFM today is basically the same as KFM two years ago; just faster, more secure, and better coded.

07 May

closing a filament-group menu on mouseout

The filament group menu plugin is one of the better ones out there.

But it has a few flaws. One of the major ones is that they’re not developing it anymore, leaving that to the jQuery UI team. But, development on that is really painfully slow… I don’t expect to see a working menu for months. Even the demos linking from the jQuery UI Menu page are hardly inspiring – they’ve got practically no functionality at all. Hardly useful.

For that reason, I’m okay with taking the current fgmenu code and extending it.

Here’s a simple fix, which has been asked for on their blog. I can’t comment on it because comments are closed.

To close menus onmouseout, all you need to do is to add a mouseout to all menu items, and if it’s triggered, then a second or so later, close all menus.

Obviously there’s a little more to it than just that. Read the code if you want the full details.

Just add this bit to your fg.menu.js file:

$('.fg-menu,.fg-menu-top-level')
  .live('mouseover',function(){
    this.mouse_is_over=true;
    clearTimeout(window.fgmenu_mouseout_timer);
  })
  .live('mouseout',function(){
    this.mouse_is_over=false;
    window.fgmenu_mouseout_timer=setTimeout(function(){
      var o=0;
      $('.fg-menu,.fg-menu-top-level').each(function(){
        if (this.mouse_is_over) o++;
      });
      if(!o){
        $.each(allUIMenus, function(i){
          if (allUIMenus[i].menuOpen) { allUIMenus[i].kill(); };
        });
      }
    },2000);
  });
03 May

what I'm up to

As usual, I’m behind on stuff.

I just submitted chapter 3 of my upcoming book “CMS Design with PHP and jQuery”, and chapter 4 was due to be complete and sent two days ago.

My clavichord project stalled when the cumulative number of mistakes made it incredibly unlikely I’ll complete it in a usable fashion.

In work, I’m behind on a pretty large online-store project, but in that case I’m okay with it – I wasn’t slacking; things are just very busy at the moment.

My piano playing has also stalled – I’ve been trying to learn The Heart Asks Its Pleasure First for the last month. I’m stuck on the final page, where the left hand is all over the place and the right has an intricate tune to play. Its all in my head, but I just can’t play it smoothly. Thinking of putting that on the back-burner and going onto Bach’s 2-part inventions instead.

upcoming

Packt have asked me to review Expert PHP5 Tools. Looking forward to it. It’s got some stuff in it which I’ve read about but never tried. Including: UML design of applications, incorporating tests into subversion submissions, and automated documentation of source (among other things).

My piano teacher found an examiner who will be testing in Monaghan next month, so I’ll finally be able to get grade 2 out of the way. I’ve been practicing grade 2 and 3 tunes for months. Playing 6 tunes every day before I do anything else has been reducing th amount of time I have for the rest of my practice, so I’ll be glad to get this one passed as well.

I’m trying to push myself to get the current book finished as soon as possible. This is difficult as writing a CMS is a much more complex job than writing a cookbook of techniques. The chapter I just finished had 40 pages in it. By the 40th page of the previous book I was already into chapter 3. Chapter 2 wasn’t much smaller either!

When this book is finished, I’ll be starting a new one, on building a clavichord as cheaply as possible. Because I failed with the current one, but learned quite a lot from it, I feel I’ll get it right this time, and would like to document it as I go. There’s a lot of math involved in building a clavichord, and I think I may even get a good programming application out of it!

After that, I’m thinking of starting up contact juggling again, and completing the book, this time with videos.

When I get the time, I’d also like to get back into building robots. I think the gardening robot is a bit beyond me at the moment (involves some very complex AI), but I thought I’d try build a digger bot. You tell it what you want dug, where to put the debris, etc., and it gets to work.