Web Stuff

A rather obscure quirk of PHP is the use keyword - not for namespace importing, but as a way to selectively import variables from the defining location into anonymous functions. If that doesn't mean much to you, check out this post. Go on, I'll wait.

Good, now that you got that, I would like to continue with a little note of my own: basically, it's (also) a way to curry in variables that you don't want to have to specify when calling the function, but still want available, much like currying in Javascript et al.

I've been beta-testing the desktop version of the Mailbox iPhone app for the last couple of days, and been pleasantly surprised.

To create a USB bootable DOS drive from a Mac, download one of the images from http://chtaube.eu/computers/freedos/bootable-usb/

Follow the process at http://www.pyrosoft.co.uk/blog/2013/01/09/creating-a-bootable-usb-stick-from-osx/ to format with the USB drive with the right MBR settings.

Refactors your CSS and generates a new stylesheet for your site.

Using Mongo? Using Node? Using longs? Read on...

Attended my first hackathon yesterday organized by Copenhagen Node.js and kindly hosted by Shape.  An interesting experience - lots of friendly likeminded people getting together and hacking at their own or each other's projects while exchanging opinions & information.

I came to work on a combination of familiar and unfamiliar territories - a Node.js Express app that through Socket.io and React.js allowed users to dip their toes into the Twitter Search stream and shows new tweets as they come by. The end result is functional though by no means production ready - but it was an excellent study and I'm pleased to have gotten to a working version in 1 day. Those interested in the result can check out this TwitterStreamWatcher repo on Github.

From the department of "Let's see what's in the JS pipeline", I decided to spend some time looking at ES6's generators, especially what it means from a Node.js perspective. Stuff like this is available since node v0.11.2; not production ready, but not that far off, either.

Now, while generators (with yield and stuff) are easy enough to understand, the combination of generators and promises is rather mind expanding... Alex Maccaw's "how yield will transform Node.js" and James Longster's "A Study on Solving Callbacks with JavaScript Generators" helped, here, to get a handle, but this is definitely material to meditate about...

So, I discovered Handlebars partials can work not only as globals, but also be defined at template run time, like such:

var html = myTemplate({ firstname: 'John' }, {partials: {myPartial: Handlebars.compile('Hello {{firstname}}') } } );