Ian Michell @ianmichell-blog - Tumblr Blog

Sometimes the NHS make me giggle, Thomas gets new ears next week!

We've been going through the process for getting cochlear implants for my son Thomas... Last we heard was that we had a yes from Great Ormond Street Hospital and were expecting a wait of at least 30 days for that to come through and surgery probably about a month afterwards...

My wife Sadie got the call yesterday telling asking if they can operate on Thomas next Wednesday!

Some say that the NHS is slow, but blimey, after months of assessments the date for surgery came quickly...

Thank you Great Ormond Street :)

Back at ProcServe

First day back at ProcServe. Few new people to meet, lots of friends to enjoy.

Good to be back!

Remote handlebars templates with jQuery

I recently discovered handlebars, a javascript template framework. If you take a look at the tutorials on the website itself you will notice that all of the tutorials focus on declaring your templates in <script> tags.

The project itself does not support remote templates, unless you have them precompiled...

This very brief guide is to illustrate to you how you would automatically load and compile remote templates using jQuery.

First create a template called post.handlebars (or whatever else you decide) and insert the following code:

<div class="entry"> <h1>{{title}}</h1> <div class="body"> {{body}} </div> </div>

Next add the following line into your main html file (e.g. index.html):

Next add the following javascript to your markup (or separate javascript file). Remember it's usually better to add the markup at the bottom of your body.

var handleBarsTemplates = {};

$(function($) {

$("link[type='application/x-handlebars-template']").each(function() {

var url = $(this).attr("href");

var templateName = $(this).data('template');

$.get(url, function(data) {

var template = Handlebars.compile(data);

handleBarsTemplates[templateName] = template;

});

You can access the templates by using the following javascript:

handleBarsTemplates.post({title: "Easy Handlebars", body: "This was really simple wans't it"});

See! Very easy, any questions? I will do my best to help.

#javascript #ujs #jquery #handlebars #handlebarsjs #node #user interfaces #ui #html

I think it's great the Apple are embracing Open Street Map. I've been using the data a lot in some of my personal projects and it's a really good effort.

crudcomic

From the Department of Redundancy Department

This is a comic about redundancy. It’s also redundant since it’s a redone version of my second comic. The difference is, this shall appear in my upcoming book, Seven Databases in Seven Weeks.

Something you need to understand about replication: it exists to improve read yield, uptime, and recovery. That’s about it. What it won’t do is is increase write availability or allow you to scale horizontally like you can with sharded data. I just wanted to make this clear. It seems a common misunderstanding about replication that, since it is “distributed”, that equals “scalable”.

There are largely two strategies in the task of horizontally scaling data: replication and sharding (sharding existing to stretch resources by dividing computation across several machines or, in weird cases, CPUs). This is why I hate the word distributed… it’s too vague to be useful.

Mongo supports both and manages them in quite deliberately. Contrast this to something like Riak which shards and replicates by default, and you must be very deliberate to turn one off. I won’t venture to say which is better, because it’s largely driven by use-case. But what I will venture to say is that one is much easier to manage operationally. Then again, Riak doesn’t have a company to manage it for you.

ianmichell-blog

What a great post!

Disqus

Finally got round to adding disqus, which means you the general public can finally comment on what I write about. This at least means that if I post a tutorial you can ask the silly questions!

mongodb

Groovy and Grails’ speed and simplicity are a perfect match to the flexibility and power of MongoDB. Dozens of plugins and libraries connect these two together, making it a breeze to get Grooving with MongoDB.

Using Grails with MongoDB

For the purpose of this post, let’s pretend we’re writing a...

Wrote some actual C for the first time in ages...

For the first time in about 6 years, I'm finding myself writing pure C code in anger... Long gone are the terrible days of Makefiles, segmentation faults and bad memory leaks...

The project I am writing in C is actually an access restriction module for apache! Although fun, I have found myself actually spending more time reading code from the mod_rewrite module in apache, due to the absolute horrendous documentation.

I would like to mention that I have found Netbeans C/C++ support outstanding and it's code completion and API Documentation parsing (for those that don't know what that is: /** or /// as comments above a method declaration).

All fun I guess for the remainder of my notice period here. Hopefully it will be a long time before I have to write pure C again... I think I will stick to OO languages like Java / Objective-C as I am much happier with them!

Thomas at great ormond street after ct scan.

Quick and dirty UJS with Grails

One of the things I love about rails 3.x is it's support for unobtrusive javascript (UJS). If you've been living under a rock for the past few years; UJS is about wiring javascript into your markup using HTML 5 data attributes (most common method anyway).

One of the things I hate about AJAX frameworks is the lack of proper support for accessible devices and most traditional ways of enriching your markup with javascript are binding events to elements directly using the on* attributes (I could keep this up all day).

Down to business.

The simplest way I found to enrich my grails application with javascript was to make use of RoR's jquery-ujs.js script found: https://github.com/rails/jquery-ujs.

Simply add it to the js folder in your web-app (<project>/grails-app/conf/ApplicationResources.groovy) folder in your grails application and then add it to your application resources file:

modules = {

...

ujs {

resource url: 'js/jquery-ujs.js'

}

Then include it in your GSP files with:

<g:javascript library="ujs" />

Once you've done that you simply add:

data-remote="true"

To your forms, buttons or links (check the rails documentation on this subject for more information, or simply read the script itself.

You're probably thinking, "great... But nothing happens to my page. I can see the data posting to the server, but nothing comes back."

Well in order to make something actually happen, you need to hook in a bit of javascript:

(function($, undefined) {

$('*[data-remote]').live('ajax:success', function(e, data, status, xhr) {

...

}

});

And you can process the response by using what's returned in the data variable.

(function($, undefined) {

$('*[data-remote]').live('ajax:success', function(e, data, status, xhr) {

var update = '#' + $(this).data('update');

if (update !== undefined) {

$(document).find(update).replaceWith(data);

}

});

As you can see above, I have simply made use of another data attribute data-update="updateElementId" to identify the element I wish to update. I then put the following code in my controller to send back a fragment of html:

if (request.xhr) {

render template: 'myFragment', model: [myModel: someFormModel]

} else {

[myModel: someFormModel]

}

The code above means that you will have to use GSP fragments to send back HTML to your javascript code asynchronously. However by doing this, it means that if your users don't have javascript enabled (and they should be shot), you will simply end up with the whole lot (i.e, your browser will process the form / link request as expected).

There is no reason you can't set everything up to json either! Simply add data-type="json" to your form / link element:

<g:form name="myForm" action="myAction" data-remote="true" data-update="elementToUpdate" data-type="json">

There we go! Wasn't so hard to do was it? You will now have graceful rich applications, that fall back to being fairly basic should your users not support HTML 5 or javascript.

I'm willing to create a plugin if there is demand for it. Right now just using the above tutorial suits my needs.

#grails #rails #ujs #jquery #javascript #groovy #java #html5 #html #unobtrusive javascript #ria

Cochlear implants round 1...

Had our first appointment with the good doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital. It was interesting taking Thomas through his hearing test (as it was the first time I had done one like this with him).

Had a good deal of information given to us by the consultant and now we get to move on to the next round; starting with a CT scan and a few more tests.

Looks like he will get bilateral implants and if done quickly (which we want) means he may be able to go to a mainstream school! The only downside is he will probably never get to experience rugby!

The implant I am most interested in for him is one by advanced bionics, as they have a waterproof version called neptune that will allow him to hear us at bath time and whilst swimming!

Finally got round to releasing my wife's website. A fairly basic wordpress based website that does the job for her pretty well. Not bad for a few hours or work... I'll probably redo it at some point!

Had the car washed today.. Looks brand new!

kimjongildroppingthebass-blog

boss droppin’

ianmichell-blog

This has got to be the most awesome picture evar!!

Enjoying a lovely dinner out with my wife on our anniversary! I do have a feeling I am getting fatter by the second...

kimjongildroppingthebass-blog

kim droppin’ with david guetta

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