My box.net Account....Now Active

I finally got around to get my box.net account active after leaving it dormant for quite a while.

I first got wind of box.net on a blog somewhere and later when i saw the sharing widget integrated on yet another blog, my interest was piqued.

So now i have some of my files already uploaded and also have the sharing widget on this blog; you can't miss it, it is on the right side just below the 'About Me' section, right on top of the 'Links' section. Right now, you will only see a Jpeg file available to be shared. Its a design i did for a friend on her birthday.

With this i would now be able to share some of my interesting stuffs...Guess i can now even start thinking of doing some graphics designing tutorials too and make them available via the widget right here on geekabyte.

Just hearing about box.net and wondering what it is? here are some interesting reads for you:
technologyevangelist
Siliconbeat
Seattletimes
Mashable
WordPress

Technology. Entertainment. Design...TED

O.k. it’s true. There are some sites you discover that makes you wonder out loud: “where the heck have I being all this while? How come I’m only just finding out?”

Ted.com is such a website that, funny enough, I just got to know about some couple of weeks back.

Now what is TED? Ted is an annual conference that used to take place only in Monterey California but now is held in other cities around the world.

It features a bunch of smart and innovative folks (also of remarkable reputation) talking about the cool stuffs that they are working on, that one day, would change the world or already is changing the world. It’s simply an event where ideas are exchanged.

To get a feel of the quality of the lectures, check out the caliber of folks that have featured on TED; people like Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, larry & Sergey, Malcom Gladwell, Bono, Jeff Bezos, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Jeff Hawkins, Rick Warren and the list goes on.

And at Ted.com you get to watch or download these lectures.

If you have quite an amount of bandwidth to play with, you can sit back and watch the lecture right there on line. But if you are like me, then you just download to watch.

My thanks to Neo for letting me on this site and for spending time ripping the videos off the sites. How much again did you say you have now Neo? Over 100?

Ditching Mootools For Jquery

Having arrived at the conclusion that I might have to start using a JavaScript Framework to speed up my coding time and at the same time to be more productive, the next thing was to decide which one to choose, out of the plethora of frameworks out there?

Since all I wanted was a tool kit that will make creating a web user interface a lot easier I decided to settle for something lightweight. Something not too bloated with features I will end up not using but a toolkit that makes manipulating the DOM possible with as little code as possible.

The contenders for my attention were jquery and mootools. But now, having played around with the two frameworks, it is jquery that has emerged the framework of choice.

Why I settled for Jquery? Well…

Syntax:

I personally prefer jquery’s syntax over mootools. I think it is more intuitive and leaner. The chain-ability feature of the syntax is also cool. You will easily get accustom to it if you have spent time with object oriented programming.

Selectors:

I wanted to have the DOM at my fingertips. I wanted to be able to get a hold on a node, without having to be too verbose. And this is what Jquery offers. Compared to mootools, Jquery’s Selectors makes accessing the Dom such a breeze. Borrowing syntax from CSS and Xpath you can burrow all the way down or climb all the way up the DOM with a succinct amount of code.

Community

Jquery boast of a much more vibrant community. This is evident in the abundance of plugins that has been written to extend its core functionality. The same thing can’t be said of mootools.

Adoption

Wordpress recently announced that it will be switching over to jquery. A whole lot of other people have already adopted it. So I figured out that if it is good enough for these guys then it would be good enough for me. Really adoption says a lot about a product. I can safely assume that great adoption = great product. Check out those already on Jquery.


I’m right now an advocate of Jquery. And I won’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone.

You can download it and see for yourself.

Yet Another Talking gig @ MindScape Resource Seminar

By 9.00am prompt on Saturday, 9 June, 2007, Mr. Peter Alabi the CEO of Mindscape Consulting mounted the podium at the Law Lecture Theater to give a talk on Strategy and its importance; both for personal development and also as a business tool.

Right after that, I came up and spoke about the web as a business platform: talking about the different business models that can be built on it. I talked about startups. Gave examples of successful startups and discussed some of the factors that accounts for the success of a startup. In the talk I briefly highlighted the difference in a business model built for the web and the models built for a brick and mortar enterprise.

Mr Peter Alabi came up again and concluded the seminar with a discussion on EQ ‘Emotional Intelligence Quotient’.

After that, I had exchange of pleasantries, chitchat and phone numbers with some of the attendees.

It was fun.

Microsoft's Suing Threat

If Microsoft is facing unfavorable market trends, guess what they need do is to put on their creative hat and innovate instead of litigate as they are planning to do with their threat to "take on" free software based on uncertified allegations of patent infringement.

We know vista isn’t doing superb. We know that the desktop isn’t the gold spot it used to be; the internet is and the value resides there now. And we know that Microsoft is fighting tooth and nail plus everything else to get a share of this sumptuous market (Microsoft’s biggest acquisition ever: aQuantive, attest to this).

But putting up a fight and acting threatening is not the way to go, in fact it is a bad idea.

Microsoft needs to understand that the monopolistic era is over and acting like a bully who single-handedly snuffed Netscape out of the market won't be of much help in recent times. The landscape has changed.

Cue should be taken from a company like sun. A company that was faced with unfavorable market trends some couple of years back with the core solaris operating system. Instead of putting up a fight, threatening, fuming and bluffing (like the Redmond behemoth seems to be doing); they reevaluated their business model and reconsidered their source of value. They recreated part of their business model. In other words, they were creative.

They are now better for it today. The community behind openSolaris is growing, ODF is gaining greater adoption and Java is finding its way into almost everywhere (learnt javaONE is today’s world's largest open source developer conference).


Microsoft might just find itself dying off with this entire attitude that is pro-monopolistic and ‘anti open source’ in nature because in today’s world, the community (which open source initiative enjoys) is a major propagator of value.

Microsoft needs to take this into serious consideration.

Toggling tinyMCE

Downloaded tinyMCE (V.2.0.8) and went straight to the docs to see if or better still how I can initiate the editor instance such that it toggles on and off with the clicking of a button or another event for that matter.

After going through the docs that came with the download, learnt that the editor instance is initiated with the following codes:

tinyMCE.init({
mode : "textareas"
})

And the mode determines the method I have for calling the editor instance. So I looked further to see the different options/modes that I have. According to the docs I have just three options which are:

• textarea: which converts all textarea elements to editors when the page loads.


• specific_textareas: Converts all textarea elements with the ‘textarea_trigger’ attribute set to "true".


• Exact: Converts only explicit elements, these are listed in the elements option. These elements can be any kind for example textareas or divs.

Which, apparently does not include any option for what I want to achieve; a toggle-able text editor instance. After further ransacking through the docs I realized that there was no provision for what I wanted, I decided I was left with one option; which is to tweak the codes to get what I wanted.

So I looked at the initiating code and since it’s just Javascript, I thought if I wrap it in a function and attach the function to an ‘onclick’ event then I will have achieved my aim. I was so wrong. Instead of it working I got myself a blank and frozen page each time I clicked the button.

Since this post is to show how to toggle tinyMCE with a click, and not to lament about my travails, I will save you all the unpleasant details of what I went through trying to tweak the initiation and just go straight to the point.

So how do you do it?

After my futile attempts I decided to ask around for a solution. This is when I found out that there is a fourth 'mode option' apart from the three specified in the docs. This is:

tinyMCE.init({
mode : "none"
})

It is my finding of this mode option and two other methods that solved the problem.

This is how to use the two methods in creating a toggle-able editor:

First method adds the editor instance.

tinyMCE.addMCEControl(element to be toggled, id given to the editor instance);

Where element to be toggled is the element that will be converted to the tinyMCE instance and the other parameter is the id to be given to the editor instance. This parameter is useful because it will be used in getting a handle on the editor when it is to be removed.

Second method removes the editor instance

tinyMCE.removeMCEControl(id of the editor)

Where id of the editor is used in determining the editor instance to remove and it can be returned by this method: tinyMCE.getEditorId(EditorsID) where EditorsID is the second parameter that was specified for the tinyMCE.addMCEControl() method. I.e. it is the id given to the editor.

Having seen the two methods, here is how the final offering will look like:


var tinyMCEmode = false;

function toggle(editorsId)
{
//check if there is already an instance of the editor
if (tinyMCEmode)
{
//if yes then remove it
tinyMCE.removeMCEControl(tinyMCE.getEditorId(editorsId));
//indicate that editor has been removed
tinyMCEmode = false;
}
else
{
//add the editor instance
tinyMCE.addMCEControl(document.getElementById('geekabyte'), editorsId);
//indicate that editor has been added
tinyMCEmode = true;
}
}

Where ‘geekabyte’ is the id given to the html element that will take on the editor instance. The HTML attached to the following script may look like this:

<body>
<div id='geekabyte'>
</div>
<form>
<input type='button' value='toggle' onclick='toggle("newgeekabyte")'/>
</form>
</body>

Breezing Away With Miles Davis

For the past couple of days now, I have found myself listening to Miles Davis back to back. The dude so soulfully, jazzy and smooth. I have been silently wishing for more tracks of his; and well, you know what they say about the universe responding to your wishes? I just found out my new neighbor is also a big fan of Miles, and he just happily shared with me a trailer load of tracks: more like a discography!

Well, when music so soulful, you will always want more!

And for you folks who don't know who Miles Davis was, you can read up on him here