What Joey Learned Today

Problem: I needed to dynamically change the height/width of a div, but I didn't want to write another few lines of  javaScript. Is there a way I can find a pure css solution? you bet! Solution: Thanks to CSS3, we can now do this easily using the calc() function!         #myDiv {             width: calc(100% - 100px);             height: calc(100% - 100px);             margin: auto;             border: solid 1px #000000;         } More good news:  It works on all browsers :) Onward! References: http://www.w3schools.com/CSSref/func_calc.asp http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1192783/css-how-to-set-div-height-100-minus-npx

Problem :  I needed to create a node application that would ping a list of servers and return their status (if are they up or down).  All seemed easy enough until I needed to create asynchronous calls within a “for loop”.  The async method’s callback contained logic to simply build and return another object with the result data. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get ANY data back. Research :  After poking around some blogs and chatting with a coworker, I learned about node’s infamous “queue” of processes which fires AFTER my code finishes execution.  That is, when my “for loop” makes the async calls (let’s say, 5 times), the callback doesn’t fire until the end of my code is reached. Here’s what I initially coded: “returnObj” was serialized and written to the DOM well before the async callback was executed, writing a big, fat NOTHING to the browser.  This confused me for hours. What I needed to do was somehow write the response to the browser AFTE...

Problem:  I have a line of code that uses Sitecore Fast Query to pull all items + children starting with a site item, like so: Item [] allItems = db.SelectItems( "fast:" + sitecorePath + "//*" ); Unfortunately, I would get a Sitecore parsing error at runtime: ParseException: End of string expected at position... Turns out Sitecore doesn't like hyphens ('-') in any sitecore path when using fast query, which I have a few distributor sites in a folder which contained hyphens. Solution: I create a simple method that resolves a sitecore path to be Sitecore fast query friendly:             string sitecorePath = "" ;             if (siteItem.Paths.FullPath.Contains( "-" ))             {                 String [...

Problem : Some of our redirects in our main web application were acting a little screwey. Turns out our stand-alone URL redirect app didn't play well with URLs with a trailing "/".  I needed to simply trim all trailing "/" from URLs that have them. Solution : Here's the script I created: BEGIN TRANSACTION        SELECT [url] AS ' url  with trailing "/"'        FROM    [URLRedirects] . [dbo] . [Redirects]        WHERE   RIGHT( [ url ] , 1 ) = '/'        UPDATE [Redirects]        SET     [ url ] = CASE RIGHT( [ url ] , 1 )                                          WHEN ...

Problem: I built a custom web app and I wanted to download a log file directly to my downloads folder without a dialog . This app is only used by me and I specifically wanted all downloaded files in this location, no questions asked (by me, i guess) Research: I found many solutions that included a dialog box asking me where I want the file to be downloaded, but I wanted to bypass this process all together .  The key is this line of code: string pathUser = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.UserProfile); I figured that getting the user would be hard to do, but this pretty much takes care of it. Solution: I added this to my dev tools.           protected bool SaveFileToDownloadsFolder(string fullFileName, string renamedFile)         {             string pathUser = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.UserProfile);             stri...

The Problem: In my Android app, I needed to make a simple call to a REST endpoint. I created a separate class extending the AysyncTask class like I am supposed to and as far as I was concerned, my code was clean and compiled just fine. Unfortunately, a runtime error occurred when getInputStream() was executed.  It jumped right to my “finally” block and the process ended suddenly. My Research: I added printStackTrace() to my finally block. When I caught and examined the stack trace, this is what I found: SecurityException: Permission denied (missing INTERNET permission?) The Solution: After extensive googling, I realized I needed to add a setting to my AndroidManifest.xml file:      <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET" /> After running debugger, I finally made a successful htttp request. Here’s my code.      String json = "";          ...

The Problem: The website I work on has a search submit button inherited on all pages.  Some pages have forms with submit buttons.  the result:  Enter-key click event chaos! Currently, when a user fills a form and clicks the enter key to submit it, the search box submit button is triggered rather than the form button. Therefore, user gets pissed. The Solution: I captured the enter key click event on page load and set what button to be triggered when enter-key is pressed.  If a form buttons is visible, click that submit button first.  If not, let the enter key trigger the search box submit button as usual. The Code: $(document).bind('keypress',function(e){ if(e.keyCode === 13) { var buttons = $('.continue-button:visible'); if(buttons.filter('#formSubmit').length > 0) buttons.filter('#formSubmit').click(); else if (buttons.filter('.next').length > 0) buttons.filter('.next').click(...