fractalnavel

checking out another pizza place that has come online for ordering.  this one is more than just pizza - check it out:

graeter's ice cream - delivered !  cheese cake !  and you can get sides of chocolate sauce !

far more full-service than your average pizza joint.  too bad their website & sign-up process is so stupid:  all-flash site in a pop-up that pegged my cpu; a sign-up process that took a couple hours / days to validate that i was who i said i was (so much for impulse purchases - i didn't get back to them for weeks);  cumbersome editing of an order;  and when i hit their "close" button when i was done, it locked up the original browser window that the pop-up was launched from.

but that desert menu makes it all worthwhile ;-)

now - where's the beer ??

• Timing and Synchronization in JavaScript - Opera Developer Community
  very clear article on what it says.
  (tags: ajax javascript web development concurrency web2.0)

outstanding items from 2008.01.30:

• mozilla xsl handling does not support the disable-output-escaping attribute

  i had forgotten about the "ontransformcomplete" event that i fire from my transform behavior.  i hooked up a bit of post-processing to this to unescape some characters.  all good now.

• ff started to regularly lock up

  ff / mozilla turns out to behave badly when too many asynchronous processes are kicked off, so i made non-ie browsers load all that xml / xsl on my home page synchronously.

• "refresh" link ... in ff it's reloading the entire page

  ie-only code: " ... window.event.returnValue=false;"; all-browser code: " ... return false;".

so the front page of the website now looks just about the way it's intended to look.  except for that "magportal" stuff; they have an error in their script that ff doesn't like.  i really don't want to add my own fix, which is ugly (tell a server-side proxy to get the script, add the missing stuff to the script string (it attempts to set/reference a global variable without declaring it anywhere), return fixed script to client).

newly completed:

• links -> reading: modified for ff
• polls: all modified for ie7 / ff

yet to do:

• local -> tv schedule: the important stuff ;-)  of course, i'm hoping to abandon such things altogether come 2009.02.17.
• books -> filterable list: i've been ignoring an amazon web services change for over a year now, and now i've run out of time.  this would be a good time to account for that and the cross-browser stuff.
• resume: the whole sub-site needs fixes.  should mostly be just upgrading to the changes i've made elsewhere.  the content itself needs updating badly, especially the resume itself.
• pictures: i should probably move all of this somewhere else.  now that the various free public galleries are mature (?), i should use one of those instead of my own gallery, either custom or in community server.

  makes me wonder if community server will drop its gallery.  it lags the industry badly.  then again, its forums need a bit of help too.  the weblog engine is the keeper.  but there's supposed to be a lot of cool stuff coming up this year.  we'll see.  then maybe they should do one major revision cycle for refactoring and improving existing features.

that's come a long way folks.  for all you firefox whiners out there, here's an expression of my sympathies:

:-p