Rixius' Blurbs

Autumn Are you drawing again? (yes): Ch-Ch-Check it out! Art giveaway

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 22:28:10 -0500

Autumn Are you drawing again? (yes): Ch-Ch-Check it out! Art giveaway:

I am doing a tumblr giveaway!

What I am giving away:

A poster print of your choice, two little prints and a little personal message/doodle also of your choice!

Here are your poster choices:

And the little prints:

How to play:

No need to follow me, I’m…

This is some awesome art, that anyone should check out ._.

Pirates vs. Ninjas is a common Programmer Debate, so let’s...

Sun, 28 Nov 2010 06:20:24 -0600

Pirates vs. Ninjas is a common Programmer Debate, so let’s bring in Video Games to settle the dispute.

My absence.

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 14:35:20 -0500

I have been neglecting to post here as I told myself I would; yet I lost the muse that led me to make this blog.

Chris Williams has a “State of the Union” address for the JS community from JSconf.eu that has re-invigorated me. He said “We are not JavaScripters, not pythonistas, not rubyists - we are programmers. We need to improve ourselves in as many programming languages as we can get our minds around, because every language forces you to view the world in a slightly different way. ” I need to look at the other programming languages not as how I’d rather be in JS, but the good benefits they have in themselves.

That being said, I am not going to be posting only about JS, but I will still be posting the intermediate tricks I’ve found in whatever language I’m looking at.

I am also going to be starting my one Server to host a couple of comic sites, and will post about that progress periodically. The project includes finding a “outdated” tower that is claimed to be useless and repurpose it into a nginx-PHP-node server for serving well-built sites.

Please stick with me, as Rixi.us will only become better and better.

Typecasting, and making sure you get what you want.

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 18:00:00 -0500

Typecasting is something pervalent in PHP and other languages, it allows you to pressure a variable into the type you want.

//Typecasting 101:: // .toString() 406+''; //"406" [100,42,"hello Dolly",86]+''; //"100,42,hello Dolly,86" // parseInt(str, 10) "406"*1; //406 "604"-0; //604 "1313"/1; //1313 // Math.floor** ~~1.59678; //1 ~~6.954899; //6 ~~-2.649875; //-2** // Boolean() !!0; //false !![]; //true !!""; //false !!34; //true /** **:the only difference between ~~ and Math.floor is negative numbers, Math.floor drops everything to the lowest interger side while ~~ pulls to the closest to 0. */

Short-Circuting, shortening your code

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 19:20:00 -0500

When I’m writing, I like to shorten things as much as I can. One thing I use are short-circuts. A short circut relies on how && and || evaluate. A && operation evaluates the left side, and only evaluates the right side if the left side returns “truthy”(anything but false,0,”,null,undefined, and NaN). || is the oppisite, if the left is false, the right is evaluated. You can also use || to establish defaults in a function. examples::

var foo = "true"; foo; //outputs "true" (true) && (foo = "I'm done!!"); foo; //outputs "I'm done!!" (true) || (foo = "fooBar"); foo; //outputs "I'm done!!" //function defaults:: function fooBar(aab, baa){ aab = aab || "foo"; baa = baa || "Bar"; return aab + baa; }

Object.create, straight from ES5.

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 18:30:00 -0500

In ECMAscript version 5, ratified as the standard last December, a handfull of properties were standerdized onto the Object constructer. I’m going to cover the Object.create method; This is not cross browser compatible yet, as only webkit and gecko support it(so just about everything but IE). However, it is fully compatible with server side Javascript engines, such as Node JS.
Here’s the syntax and a use example:

//syntax Object.create(Object prototype, Object objectDescriptors); //Property descriptors { value: '', //value to be set initially, any type writable: true, //whether or not it may be modified //or get: function(){}, //return value is what will be returned when accessed set: function(inp){}, //function called when property is set. enumerable: true, //shows up on a for ... in loop if true configurable: true //if false, is set to read-only(property is unwritable, and cannot be deleted, and this cannot be modified) } //use var asd = Object.create(Object.prototype, { 'foo': { value: "Bar", writable: true, enumerable: false }, 'rix': { get: function(){ return this.foo+this.foo; }, set: function(inp){ this.foo = inp; }, enumerable: true, configurable: false } }); asd.foo; //outputs "Bar", asd.rix; //outputs "BarBar", asd.rix = "Baz"; asd.foo; //outputs "Baz", asd.rix; //outputs "BazBaz", for (var i in asd){ console.log(i); } //outputs only "rix", does not go over "foo"

__GET and changing page content based on GET variables, without a server

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 18:19:00 -0500

I actually began my programming career from PHP, and slowly migrated into finding Javascript so attractive. That said, I earned a particular attractment to $_GET[] and the ease it made for fetching and displaying specifically what’s wanted. If you’re in a situation where server-side programming is unavailable, such as an adobe air application, it would be advantagous to have a simple manner to take advantage of this neat feature. Cue Javascript:

(function(loc){ var _get = (function reload(){ //If theres no GET Key Values, just return an empty Object; if (!loc.search){ return {}; } //remove the '?' var list = loc.search.substr(1), //Make an array of ['Key=Value',] keyVals = keyvals.split('&'), //build the hash object baz = (function(){ var x=-1, y=keyVals.length, oput = {}, key; //loop through each KeyValue while(++x

advanced $().append()

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 12:01:00 -0500

I’m a huge jQuery fan, and most of my projects will use it, if theres any need for a library.

One of the great feature of Javascript I found while learning advanced techniques are self-executing functions combining that with jQuery chaining has some really cool effects, here’s an example I’ve used:

$.get('url', function(data){ //data is a JSON Array ['0','1','2'] var end = $('

'); end.append('

') //add the

and traverse into it .children(':last') .append( //make the anonymous function (function(){ var x = -1, //data is accessible due to functional scoping y=data.length, // make a jquery

just to hold the appended Objects oput=$('

'); while(++x'+data[x]+'') .children(':last') .method1().method2(); } //return everything under the outputcontainer return oput.children(); }()) )//continue chaining; },'json');

The deeper your chaining the more useful this pattern starts to feel, as you don’t have to break out of your chain to do a more in-depth append(). This patter can definantly be used for more than just .append().

Hello World Post

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 11:19:00 -0500

Starting this mini-blog. My name is Stephen “Rixius” Middleton, on Twitter as @Rixius I am an avid lover of ECMA-script and pretty much anything related. I will be documenting interesting things I find, specifically pertaining to Javascript(ECMA v5), jQuery, and Node-js.