Monthly Archives: October 2008

InsureMe: A waste of money for life agents

If you’ve made a career out of providing solid financial service to your clients, InsureMe isn’t for you. Quote seekers drawn to the site are

Non-exclusive leads
Un-serious buyers
Leads focus on price to the exclusion of all
Leads received based in part on your account’s age

In other words, they’re more suitable for a vending machine.
The initially free [...]

Werker 12V 12AH AGM is a piece of shit

I bought a pair of Wanker, er, Werker AGM batteries for my APC Back UPS Pro 1100 (really a 1000, but sold at Sam’s Club and with a different designation) last July. Surprise, not even 18 months later, one or both is completely dead. The original batteries from APC lasted for nearly 3 [...]

Ext JS Factory pattern for HttpProxy

An immediately application of the Factory pattern involves Ext.data.HttpProxy. Since initial configuration is all that is likely necessary, not extension, a Factory is perfect. For example, Ruby on Rails needs the Accept header to be set to ‘application/javascript’ for its magic to work when rendering a reply.

Ext.ns(’liaison.util’);
 
liaison.util.HttpProxyWithOptions = function(config) {
return new Ext.data.HttpProxy(Ext.apply({
headers:{’Accept’:'application/javascript’}
}, config));
};
 
var [...]

What can you do with Ext JS?

Ext JS is a full Web application platform. As such, it offers a daunghting quantity of components for building rich application interfaces. If you’ve never built an application interface before, it’s useful to have some idea what is possible to accomplish.

The Ext JS examples are a good place to start
Saki’s Extensions includes a [...]

braid Shell error: could not fetch

If you’ve recently migrated from Subversion to Git and you used a users alias file for your import, you might encounter the following:

jasonb@jasonb-laptop:~$ braid add -p http://rugb.rubyforge.org/svn/ext_scaffold \
–type svn
Adding svn mirror of ‘http://rugb.rubyforge.org/svn/ext_scaffold’.
Mirror ‘vendor/plugins/ext_scaffold/’ already has a remote. Skipping.
Resetting to ‘47d44fa’.
Shell error: could not fetch

Of course, what git is really saying, but it’s [...]

A mootools class: updateableSelect

For a vanilla CRM solution I’m building, frequently I need to update SELECT element option lists. For ages, I’ve simply been pasting the methods I used, borrowed heavily from mredkj.com’s select list tutorial, into my various classes.
Finally tiring of that, I wrote a small class that simply lets you add all new options [...]

Rails 2.1 JSON and mootools 1.2 Request.JSON

The short answer is no. Fortunately, the lengthy answer involves a compatibility library for mootools and a few additional options to legacy Json.Remote from mootools 1.11.
First, you’ll need to obtain the mootools 1.2 compatibility library, which includes an implementation of Json.Request that behaves in a manner conducive for sending JSON to an application server.
Next, [...]

Fuck the Senate Version of the Bailout, too!

Leave it to the U.S. Senate to load the bill up with bullshit to get enough votes for it to pass. The Senate version is even more bullshit than the House version.
Michael Moore lays out a proper solution. In short, these fuckers can pay for their own god damn bailout. Real incomes [...]