Blogging at a new place

Not sure if I'll be maintaining this blog much longer. This blog was more of a trial run for me. I've never been one that likes to hear myself talk, so I wasn't really sure that blogging would stick for me. I'm still not sure, but the exercise of setting up a blog and thinking through topics and such has been enjoyable for me. So, I'm going to give it a go, but at a new location. I'll be putting stuff over on http://jdarren.wordpress.com. Peace.

:)

Read 'em and weep my brotha

:hover in IE7.... sucks....

I had some interesting findings while trying to figure out why mouse-event-based hover behaviors were so slow in IE7 for a DHTML web application on a major website that uses mouseover/mouseout events to change the background color of a table row. All other browsers (including IE6) did this lightning fast, even with very large tables. However, IE7 sucked major ass, even when tables were only 20 to 30 rows. (also note that for optimal performance in IE do this by changing the inline style backgroundColor property explicitly vs. swapping out style classes. That was another lesson learned on another day) ...anyway...

So one of the first things I tried was to remove all javascript and CSS payload from the page (stripped down to bare markup), and added just enough javascript back in to handle the row highlighting on mouseover/mouseout. When I did this suddenly the row highlighting was rocket fast again! So I added the CSS back into the payload. Slow. Aha!! Frak!! Now what? Then I started a process of pulling the CSS back-in in bite-size chunks to see what CSS might be causing the slow down. This took several hours as the site has a very large CSS payload, but once I figured out the pattern this started to go much faster. Turns out any selectors in the payload that had ":hover" psuedo-classes that weren't specifically targeting anchor tags, slowed down mouse events for IE7 (in standards mode only). This was even for selectors that would end up not selecting anything in the DOM because they were scoped in such a way as to only be pertinent to non-IE browsers. And it only took 1 selector to slow down the page. Every single one had to be removed before it sped back up to normal performance.

So in summary, when pushing alot of CSS payload into a document, and you see sucky performance in IE7 mouseover/mouseout event speed, make sure your CSS payload
is GOOD, and not BAD . . .

BAD BAD BAD (not explicitly targeted to anchor)

• :hover { . . . }
• .foo:hover { . . . }
• #foo:hover { . . . }
• div.foo:hover { . . . }

GOOD (explicitly targeted to anchor)

• A:hover { . . . }
  
• A.foo:hover { . . . }
• A#foo:hover { . . . }

Good luck, hope this helps someone. God I hate IE.

One Week Until The Election

Just over a week until election time. The last couple of months has created plenty of buzz around the water cooler, but I'm fairly ready for the election to be behind us. Our nation's next leader will inherit more than his fair share of problems. My personal feeling is that Obama's leadership skills, temperament and intelligence makes him best suited to be our next leader. What do you think?

Farbtube Time Kill

While reading the Ajaxian this week, I ran across something called farbtube. It's more or less an infinite graffiti app. It uses google's GWT toolkit.

This Web 2.0 / GWT example allows to draw on an infinite canvas and to see others changes immediately. It works like Google Maps: Use the “Move” cursor to walk around the canvas

It's a cute little time kill.

My biggest complaints are

• the lack of an undo.
• zoom in/out is a bit slow
• there's no indication of what zoom level you're at.

enjoy.

Hiking The Bay Area

The Bay Area has a ton of wonderful hikes. I took one over July 4th weekend up in the city. We started at Baker's Beach area and hiked through all the coastal batteries to the golden gate bridge. We were still feeling good, so we decided to walk the golden gate and back. We then kept going down to Fort Point which I never even knew existed. We then circled back the way we came. The trip over was completely foggy. In fact we got right to the golden gate bridge before we actually saw it. The fog burned off about 1:30pm (about the time we started to head back). So the hike back had a totally different vibe to it. Bright and sunny, and you could see the golden gate for miles. Got some great pictures as well...

This first picture at the top shows bakers beach and the seacliff area in the fog when we started our hike. The picture below is a picture of the same area taken when we got back. Not sure how
many miles total the hike ended up being. We took our time because we had 2 young hikers with us that had to stop and run through all the old military posts that we passed along the way. Overall it's a fairly easy hike and one that kids really enjoy.

Fort Point












You can see all the public pictures from the hike on my flickr set Baker's Beach Hike

Long Overdue -- Started Exercising

I started walking on the treadmill this week. Tonight was my 4th night in a row. Here's my progress thus far.

1. 1st time, 2 miles
2. 2nd time, 2 1/4 miles
3. 3rd time, 2 3/4 miles
4. 4th time, 3 1/4 miles.

I put the treadmill on 3.5 mph, so tonight i walked a little over 50 minutes.
Can't tell that I've lost any weight, but I do feel better.