clarketus.net

Clicking the document at a location

2011-05-12T10:28:16+12:00

Can be done simply using JQuery:

$(document.elementFromPoint(x, y)).click();

Or natively in Webkit:

var el = document.elementFromPoint(x, y);
var ev = document.createEvent(“MouseEvents”);
ev.initEvent(“click”,true,true);
el.dispatchEvent(ev);

Why do I need to do this? Ah… iPhone development…

Blast from the past

2010-11-12T06:55:39+13:00

Stumbled across some old code, think it was from a “5k of code challenge” or something similar.

http://files.clarketus.net/fighter/

“Wow safari 3’s Javascript rendering is sooo fast!”. Can’t believe that was 3 years ago.

Friday beers @ wildfire

2010-09-25T13:24:06+12:00

The kegerator is an essential part of any productive office. Just watch out for the difference between european and north american keg taps. We got caught out with this when buying some oktoberfest brews and wasted an hour trying to get the keg inside as the tap was too tall.

At least the beer still tastes good!

I would recommend

2010-09-16T16:59:09+12:00

The OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD

Used it for about 2 months now and its very solid. Its up there with other high end SSD options in terms of speed.

That is all!

Presentation - Liquid Templating Language

2010-05-27T14:37:00+12:00

Last night I did a presentation at the local rails developer meetup in wellington, Wellrailed.

It was on the Liquid Templating Language from shopify, and the ruby tools associated with it. Have been doing a heap of work for Wildfire converting their consumer facing frontend to use liquid, so that third parties can theme the interface.

Here are the slides if you want to check them out! Feel free to come along to the meetup here in wellington if you are keen to meet other local developers.

iPhone ORM Backend

2010-05-17T15:53:00+12:00

While writing the iPhone app for mytours, I have swapped out the backend ORM 3 times. This was due to starting the project just before version 3 of the iPhone SDK was released, so googling for suggestions for a starting out iPhone dev at the time was yielding dated results.

Started with activerecord for objective-c. results: hard to set up, not very flexible. You have to manually set up an sqlite database to match your implementation.

After about 6 months, we moved to sqlitepersistenceobjects. This was a far easier to use library, that was flexible, generated its own sqlite database, and was easy to swap out in place of activerecord. The only problem with this library is that the loading of objects was over the top greedy, resulting in poor performance.

Finally, after finally getting around to addressing the performance, a new look at what the best persistance solution for the iPhone is, found that Apple had included the CoreData framework into version 3 of the iPhone SDK.

CoreData easily replaced sqlitepersistenceobjects, and the results were instantly noticeable. lazy loading of data resulted in the entire app speeding up.

So for anyone starting out, CoreData is the way to go:

Easy setup!
Persistence is 100% handled by the framework (no messing around with sqlite)
choice of persistence (sqlite/xml/implement your own)
performance tuned and heaps of functionality.
Both the previous libraries I mentioned are no longer maintained due to CoreData totally trumping them on everything. Why didn’t apple include CoreData from the start?

First Post

2010-04-06T23:56:00+12:00

Welcome to my new website

Inspiration: Realizing that I no longer had a website.

Interesting website facts:

Uses Rails 3 with Ruby 1.9.1
Running off cassandra
Designed by me! (you can probably tell)
Fonts look totally whack on windows based machines. Solution: Install OSX

Subscribe for interesting articles