Pablo Averbuj

Yahoo UI Libraries

I’ve been a little reluctant to jump onto this newfangled DHTML/Ajax bandwagon. Sure it sounds fancy and looks nice, but you can’t fool me. I used to write web applications and making things look the same in IE and Netscape was hellish. After playing with the Yahoo UI Libraries, I have an update. The bad news: It’s almost but not entirely like before, it can still be painful. The good news: The UI libraries are very good, and they help a bit.

By this point, I’ve probably spent somewhere around 20 hours playing with the Yahoo stuff. I’ve had a lot of problems with making things happy in both IE and Mozilla/Firefox, none of which are Yahoo’s fault. I was able to make a fancy floating navigation bar that can be dragged to either the left or the right side of the screen; it can be hidden (and hides differently depending on which side); the user can pick between two levels of opacity; it remembers what side you left it on, whether you left it showing, and what zipcode you entered into the weather search. All this required me to write about 300 lines of javascript, and spend much more time with IE than I am accustomed.

Here are the bugs that consumed the greatest amount of my time:
1: the way that YAHOO.util.Dom.getClientWidth() works, IE returns a width that includes the vertical scrollbar, this making my navbar appear about 20px too far to the right (and making the horizontal scroll bar appear). Solution: I added document.body.clientWidth to the set of attributes explored.

2: Mozilla/Firefox has a bug with opacity = 1 that makes the element blink. Solution: I set my maximum opacity to 0.98 instead of 1. This is really an absurd bug.

There were more CSS incompatibilities that drove me really nuts. The state of browser compatibility is *better* but not entirely resolved. The Yahoo UI libraries and design patterns are excellent, I highly recommend them.

More WRT54G fun

The last entry before this website went on hiatus was about the WRT54g I had just gotten. Since then, a friend let me borrow one of his spare WRT54g (thanks sungo), which allowed me to start playing with OpenWRT. I have to say I’m much happier with OpenWRT than I was with sveasoft’s firmwares. The versions I’m running haven’t provided a web UI, to which I had no attachment. Instead I manage everything via SSH/CLI. It boots with a pretty small foot print. Then I can install packages similar to how I would on a Debian box. This gives me a lot more flexibility and much more manageable.

Once I got the borrowed one running OpenWRT in a suitable configuation, I turned the second access point into a client. This solved my isolated living room issue. The main wrt54g has unrestricted wireless association, but it won’t route any traffic. It runs a VPN server for such a purpose. The second linksys sits in the living room and acts as a wireless client. It associates to the wireless lan, then VPN’s onto the network, then acts routes the local living room traffic (xbox, tivo) over the VPN. Really works beautifully.

An Ubuntu Experiment

Despite my best efforts, lethargy gets the best of me. This website hasn’t been updated in far too long, mostly because I’ve been really busy planning for our baby that is due in March. But that is neither here nor there.

For Christmas, Leigha wanted to give her dad a computer. Leigha’s dad has never used a computer, of any kind. I thought this was a fairly rare opportunity to see how well a user could get by with Linux as their first OS. I took an old P3-500 that was laying about, and I chose Ubuntu 5.10. I had quite a lot of trouble with the ubuntu installation process, but it appears to have been media / cdrom related. Next I chose Netscape ISP because it’s cheap and it helps my employer. This was another trouble spot. Netscape sales folks were completely unhelpful in determining whether it would work on Linux (they even said Mac’s aren’t supported).

Ubuntu dial-up support had an bug that worked to my benefit. The way that dial-up was configured, the computer would start to dial up to the internet when it went through the network setup phase. This turned out to be a feature I wouldn’t have thought of on my own. Since he only needed the computer to send email, it meant that by the time XWindows finished loading, the computer was already dialed up.

So the experience is actually pretty positive, when you think about it. He turns the computer on, it starts dialing while booting, XWindows starts and it’s already connected. Firefox auto-launches with GMail as the home page (with automatic login already set up). When he’s done, all he has to do is shut down. This seems to beat the Windows experience of boot, wait, login, wait, dial-up wait, browse, wait, shutdown.

We also bookmarked a few sites to get him started, CNN and Leigha’s website. It didn’t take him long to find the gallery on her website and leave some comments on pictures. So far, I think the experiment was pretty successful. I’ll be really curious to see what happens when he meets a Windows computer.