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I know this is old but I finally tried upgrading my uploader implementation at http://tivac.com/upload/ to YUI 2.8. Ran into some nasty problems where the SWF would never fire its contentReady event.

Turns out, it’s a known issue with the Uploader component in YUI 2.8 and it’ll be fixed in the next patch release.

Important Issue: Due to a current bug, the current version of uploader.swf hosted on yui.yahooapis.com in the YUI 2.8 branch is NOT compatible with the uploader.js hosted on yui.yahooapis.com. Until the next bugfix release, you can work around this issue by either locally hosting the older version of uploader.swf (available here), or locally hosting the uploader.js and making the following changes to it:

• On line 509, in swfObj.addVariable(“elementID”, swfID);, replace “elementID” with “YUISwfId”.
• On line 512, in swfObj.addVariable(“eventHandler”, “YAHOO.widget.FlashAdapter.eventHandler”);, replace “eventHandler” with “YUIBridgeCallback”.

That only had me frustrated for 5 minutes, thank god I read the documentation.

HI GUYS LOOK AT ME LOL

This is neat but I miss my goddamn smart playlists. New ratings system is streamlined and the new player UI is very smooth and intuitive. I’m definitely missing some of the power in the old one (play count, smart playlists) but the ease of podcast stuff takes some of that sting away.

The social is pretty cool, I like the flash badge a ton.

http://social.zune.net/member/tivac

These guys are going to be hot hot hot!

That’s actually a really misleading post title, the upgrade to 2.0 Beta 1 was easy as could be.  Not much appears to ahve changed cosmetically beyond the headers for each option in the post page.  I hear there’s lots of crazy backend changes like caching and whatnot, but right now I’m having a hard time caring or finding any of the good explanations I’ve read in the past while.

Oh, and I really really like this new theme once I fixed some annoying little things about it and got a new header image.

So thanks to a friend I was able to check out the beta of the new Y! Mail setup. This is the result of their purchase of Oddpost a while back and I have to say I’m pretty impressed. I enjoy dabbling with some more advanced javascript tricks and technology, but this makes me look like I can barely add two numbers. Dragging/Dropping messages worked fantastically and was really pretty, new folder creation was simple, the keyboard shortcuts all work really well, etc. Resizing of the different sections works pretty much how you’d expect as well. The best description I can come up with for it is that it’s like using Outlook Express in a web browser. It works in both IE and Firefox (both the 1.0.x branch and 1.5 Beta). This whole interface is very slick, and I am jealous beyond belief at the skills of the folks who wrote this. I’ve done AJAX interfaces before (here and here), but nothing on this scale.

Update: Ahaha, clicking on the “Subject” button in the compose window is a fun little easter egg. It dumps a random subject into the text field, here’s a sampling

• Happy New Now!
• I’ll take that drink now.
• Sensitive boyfriend sweater
• puking rainbows
• Unique and secret method in the history of preparing a treat for those who love spicy dishes.
• Dang! That’s the 10th Commandment I’ve broken today
• The twins just turned 2 and 4 this month!
• Get out of my dreams, get into my car.
• I AM the walrus.

Anyways, pictures ahoy!

Also, looks like google’s blogsearch is up (Try this one out). Nothing new or interesting brought to the table here that I can see.

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UPDATE: I don’t have any invites to give out, I don’t know how Yahoo is deciding who gets into the beta. Sorry guys.

I made my first contribution to an opens ource project tonight. I was kinda bored so I decided to have a look at WordPress’s bug tracker. Lo and behold, there was a bug I felt confident I could handle. In my giddy rush to help out I goofed in a couple of places and submitted a non-functioning patch.

Whoops

I corrected my mistake quickly, but still feel like a total tool for not bug-checking better. D’oh.

The bug that I may or may not have actually helped out on.

I was linked via Sitzmar to a new FireFox extension called Rip. It’s functionality is somewhat similar to AdBlock in that it allows you to remove content from a page via filters. That threw me at first, and I kind of dismissed it at first. After taking another look, the similarity ends there.

Rip is cool in that it borrows a page from GreaseMonkey and allows you to set up filters so that the criteria will only apply to sites that match said filters. The intelligence behind how it chooses what to remove is all based on XPath, something that I hadn’t seen actually put to use until tonight.

The actual implementation seems pretty quick, there is a little bit of a “hitch” once the page loads and it kicks in but nothing too extreme. The CPU spike isn’t awful, but I could see it proving to be slightly annoying to have your computer bog down for a second if you opened lots of tabs that Rip needed to deal with.

The default set of “Rips” installed with the application is pretty good, it covers ads on sites like SlashDot, VCD Quality, and Wired. I’m not sure how well-suited to adblocking Rip really is, since a good set of AdBlock filters will cover most ads you could ever encounter. Rip would definitely be more time-intensive were you to use it as your only adblocking mechanism.

Fortunately, Rip and AdBlock appear to play nicely together. So I can use Rip to remove stuff like an entire navigation column I don’t need, and AdBlock to take care of any ads that may be scattered around. Combine that with GreaseMonkey to fix some annoying websites (HotMail, I’m looking at you) and it’s a pretty potent combination.

I like being a FireFox user, I get to play with neat stuff.

So after a lot of thought and deliberation, I decided that it was high time I joined the laptop party. I will admit to some measure of jealousy when seeing Nick and Mike with theirs, my Pocket PC just wasn’t cutting it for goofing off in class. I needed something with more juice. I ordered a reasonably tricked-out Dell Inspiron 700m. After some coupons, free upgrades, and what have you I ended up with the following configuration.

• 1.8 GHz Pentium M
• 512 megs of ram
• 60 gig hdd

All said and done, it came out to almost exactly $1200.

It showed up today, fully two weeks sooner than Dell had estimated. While I don’t mind them leaving a little wiggle room in their estimates, it was pretty disheartening when I first ordered it. I left work as soon as I found out and proceeded to skip my afternoon class while I removed all the crap that comes on a Dell. Right now it’s running XP Home, not a big deal in and of itself. However, there’s a bunch of Dell stuff that I can’t remove so I’m thinking of just reformatting the entire thing and tossing XP Pro on there.

Oh yeah, some pictures.

This thing is TINY. I was worried that the keyboard was going to be a problem, but it’s work out really well.

I decided to give the Microsoft Virtual Desktop powertoy another shot. I’d played with it in the past and always found it pretty sorely lacking. It looks like things have improved immensely. It now includes the ability to have different backgrounds for each desktop, as well as supporting easy hotkey switching between them. The other big new thing is that it will now only display applications for that desktop on the taskbar. No more fighting to figure out which app is on which desktop and accidentally moving them. Hooray!

20139 - PE 113 Int Swim  - MW 	10-11
20142 - PE 114 Adv Swim  - TR 	10-11
21643 - CS 311 w/ Hearne - MWRF 11-12
21334 - MA 341 Stats	 - MTRF 01-02

I still need at least one more class…