dangerouslyawesome

I'm Alex Hillman, the co-founder of IndyHall and a guy who makes things better in Sunny Philadelphia.

I work on Beanstalk, Postmark, and DynamicWear.

I think technology is cool, but people are infinitely cooler.

firefox 2.swoon, + new site coming

Neil Lee’s optimized firefox builds for Deer Park were my a must-have for mac, and he has finally updated for Firefox 2.0.

Ive been using 2.0 since a couple of weeks into RC3…first at home on my iMac, and once I was satisfied, at work as well. And satisfied I am. It’s no secret that I can’t live without this browser, moreover, many of its extensions are SO important to my daily work. Even though Safari has some similar tools, FF is just more elegant about the whole thing. And, I’ve gotten really, really good at developing in Firefox and knowing how the same page is behaving in other browsers…most of the time, anyway.

Though, despite all of its awesomeness, the Mozilla builds are notoriously slow as crap on macs…I mean, they’re usable, but they get laggy and lack the “snap” my windows machine has (when it’s not busy crashing), or safari’s performance in its native OS X. Luckily, Lee’s custom builds for Intel, G5, and G4 macs fill in that gap. I just installed is Intel build, and its really the most refreshing experience my web browser has given me in a while. All of the wonders of FF2.0, but with all the snap of Safari (even gives Camino a run for its money, performance wise).

Speaking of…I have Camino installed…but I wish i could make it my primary browser, or even give it a permanent home in my dock. But its blatant lack of support for Firefox Extensions (i understand the technical limitations of why that is…its just unfortunate) makes it useless to me. Sure, pimpmycamino helps, but really, its barely a band aid.

My only complaint, really, is that something is up with tabbrowser preferences…though tabmix has been suggested as a replacement.

Notice that I didnt say a single thing about a certain blue E that recently released its 7th incarnation. I’m saving up all of my muster for that write up once i get my breath back. But its coming.

And on the topic of coming, I finally have the designs for weknowhtml.com, thanks to Dan at Enhanced Innovations. The site looks incredible…I’ve started development, and am going to work feverishly to launch with the November 1 CSS Reboot. So keep your eyes peeled for that.

the production line

a project’s production line is limited by 3 factors:

1. quality of product (ideally high)
2. speed of turnaround (also ideally high)
3. budget (ideally low, at least from the perspective of the person paying the bill)

the trick is…you can only have two at a time.

of course, the maximization point of this equation is where all three lines cross and optimize with the right quality, speed, and cost. but in the real world, you only get 2.

• which 2, as the customer, would you choose?
• which 2, as the producer, would you choose?

via denny

ninjas vs pirates

during THIS pumpkin season, pirates won.

Avast, ye scurvy sea dogs, salute the jolly roger me wench carved tonight.

another swfobject problem, deproblemed

flash/rich HTML coexisting is definately turning up a whole new, fun set of challenges. So far, some of my favorites are: * having rich modal windows appear behind flash elements (fixable using the iframe shim technique) * setting focus of various elements (fixed by creating a variable in our base page class that let me set the default focus to any elment by ID) * today’s, having to do with the ExternalInterface.AddCallback method in flash, and its playing nice with swfobject.

In essence, we have a login function that pops up one of those nifty DHTML layers with a login box. Our top navigation is all flash, and has a login call to action…so having flash call javascript functions isnt hard, but getting javascript to “poke” at the flash and have it run an internal function is a bit trickier. Utilizing the aforementioned callback method, its fairly simple. The problem we had was, in Internet Explorer, order of operations was a bit out of whack.

we got an error on: __flash__addCallback(coreLoader, "loginNav"); coming from INSIDE the flash…what seemed to be happening was the javascript that set up the object “coreLoader” wasnt running at the right time because of the time it took for swfObject to set up the embed. So, adding coreLoader = $('coreLoader'); immediately AFTER so.write("topNav"); set up the object again, this time not filling the object with a null (because swfObject had correctly identified an embed with id=coreLoader), and allowing the internal flash “addCallback” function to work.

hm, technical writing is difficult. but i felt the need to document this problem (even if it wasnt very well) for my own future reference, and hopefully someone else will find it handy as well.

the more general moral of the story is: pay attention to order of operations, they may save your life some day.

i dont like to brag but…

my windows PC, NONE of my windows PCs, have ever gone 19 days, 13 hours, and 13 minutes without a reboot. And still been snappy, or even useful..

Things ive done in the last 19 days and change include:

• dvd ripping with handbrake
• photoshop/imageready work
• textmate development
• parallels use for IE browser testing
• firefox open ALL the damn time (memory leaks, huh?)

i know ive got a pretty max’d out configuration, but really…i need to reboot my windows PC at work TWICE a day because windows rot is so bad it becomes unusable…and the only programs i use are firefox, IE, visual studio 2003, and imageready.

so, for the record, 6 month windows rot requires 2 reboots a day, 7 months of OSX and i can still go 2/3rds of a month without a reboot. my name is alex, and im a happy mac user.