DavidCutter

// November 23rd, 2011 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

What a year!

In July 2010, I started work at Yahoo! Sports and have loved it! You can see some of my work at http://sports.yahoo.com or http://www.rivals.com. The role has been exceptionally challenging as I have learned to work with the people, processes and technology at such a large and well-known company.

Otherwise I have been learning how to sail! If all goes well I should be certified (Coastal Sailing 101) by the start of 2012 and what a hobby! There is nothing more fun than being on a boat learning the ropes.

On the travel front, I’ve just returned from a trip to Australia and will also be there in November of 2012 for the total Solar Eclipse! I’m scrapping plans to be in London for the Olympics in favor of a trip to Mexico next August or September to celebrate a friend’s 30th.

Otherwise the reading continues, just without written reviews. Right now I’m in the middle of an excellent book called “The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris” by my favorite history author and biographer David McCullough. I hope to get back on track with written reviews, but we’ll see what time allows.

Thats all the news thats fit to print. Lets hope the next time I post its about some sweet skiing I did this winter, hells yeah!

Ranch Town is Live on Facebook!

// April 16th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

After only 5 weeks of very hard work, Ranch Town is live on Facebook!

I’m very impressed with all of my co-workers at Meteor Games who managed to create such an amazing, stable, and FAST game in such a short amount of time!

I’m looking forward to reactions from Facebook users, and evolving this great “clicker” of a game over the next few months.

Oh home on the range… make your own Ranch in Ranch Town!

Learning: Javascript Highs and Lows

// April 1st, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

The Javascript Highs:
Yesterday evening I was able to create a very cool “lazy loader” for all the gallery images on my portfolio, reducing initial page load by 85%! In most browsers’ default behavior, images, even hidden ones (display:none;) are all loaded with the page when the page is drawn, meaning if you have a lot of hidden images waiting for a user to click something to be visible, they all load anyway. This creates a lot of initial load for sites like my portfolio that have many images!

So to fix this, I now write the image tag like this, using the backwards compatible HTML-5 domStringMap spec:
<img data-src=”/image/path/” src=”loading.gif”/>

This way the image does not load at page-load, and when it IS finally called by the user, the loading image is shown immediately while my 3 lines of jQuery javascript move the data-src attribute value to the src attribute value, and the real image is loaded.

$(“img”).each(function() {
var imgSrc = $(this).attr(“data-src”);
$(this).attr(“src”,imgSrc);
});

It looks like, and acts like Ajax, but it’s way simpler and produces much more semantic markup!

The Javascript Lows:
While at Meteor yesterday, I was assigned the task of refreshing an ad iframe on our site. After an hour of trial and error I still had two frustrating bugs: I couldn’t get a javascript function to be defined and called from within another function, and I couldn’t tell the iframe to document.reload (or window.reload) due to cross-domain security issues.

And then our systems Architect came over and fixed it all in under 2 minutes.

Immediately I understand the value of learning a language from the bottom up over the more common on-the-job learning most of us web-developers have. Academic knowledge of language scope, closures, and language objects (like how everything in javascript is a map object) help make your practical work much, much faster.
Solutions:
For the function call: instead of calling setInterval(“functionName()”,1000); I can call setInterval(functionName,1000); when that functionName is defined INSIDE the parent function, because everything in javascript is an object.
For the Cross Domain refresh: Thinking outside the box here, since we cant tell the iframe to reload, it having content from another domain, we just remove it and redraw it. Didn’t even think of that!

Overall, it was just a “well I feel stupid” moment. But hey, I learn! Now to try and grind my way through this article on closures tonight. =)

Leet Street Boys

// March 24th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

I’ve just finished design and code work on a new design for LeetStreetBoys.com! Go take a look … this was my first custom wordpress theme and I’m very happy with the results. The project took ~2 weeks, involved design, html, javascript and wordpress PHP, and was based on the ComicPress 2.5 theme.

Overall, I’ve learned a great deal about the inner-workings of wordpress and look forward to more WP projects. Matt and Geoffrey were great to work with and very communicative and helpful during the whole process.

Coincidentally, I’ve been introduced to the world of Anime lately, and have already finished Rurouni Kenshin, Trigun and Last Exile… now I’m into Cowboy Bebop. =)

—

PS: After two weeks, I have “Guitar Hero Hero” SOOO stuck in my head. =)

Book review: Shutter Island

// July 28th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Shutter Island was a thrilling read of a psychological mystery. While some might say the twist at the end was almost ‘too convenient’ I think its an original twist and a powerful illustration of the book’s subtle message: these days the potent drugs that can do anything to the mind or body may seem the panacea of mental health. (Is there nothing we cannot chemically conquer as we decipher the humane genome?) But these drugs are so powerful and so controlling as to be just as evil as the horrible surgeries that preceded them in the long, sordid history of mental health care.

At the end of the day though, Shutter Island is not a book to be taken as preachy, by any means, it is a fantastic dark thriller of the mind and environment. I can’t say much without revealing spoilers, but every character is as dark as they are real, and the dialogue was as sharp as a scalpel. In fact it was the dialogue I liked the most. It breathed as much life into the characters as a Stephen King novel, being very natural for the characters. It will be a quick fulfilling read and you will be drawn into the intense claustrophobic story of the disappearance of a beautiful young woman from her confines in secret mental institution for the criminally insane off the coast of Boston during a hurricane. We follow the marshals assigned to find here (and more). There is no where to go. As the weather rages, so does the story and I promise you a good mind bender on Shutter Island.

I was particularly struck by the deep sadness of some of the scenes. You will not find much colorful joy in this book, but a lot of gallows humor and a lot of gruff assessment to move the characters through their dark world of intrigue and manipulation the only way they know how, in the best tradition of detective novels of the past.

Book Review: Aquariums of Pyongyang

// July 20th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Just posted this to my Goodreads.com account…

“This is the memoir of Kang Chol-Hwan: a short narrative description of his young life in the North Korean Gulag mixed with his views on North-Korean politics. There is a new preface that continues where the original epilogue leaves off, discussing th…more This is the memoir of Kang Chol-Hwan: a short narrative description of his young life in the North Korean Gulag mixed with his views on North-Korean politics. There is a new preface that continues where the original epilogue leaves off, discussing the plight of the modern North-Korean in an increasingly more interested world.

It was a difficult read at times. Kang Chol-Hwan’s story is a brutal one, especially as he was a child, growing up in Pyongyang, and then taken with his family to the prison camp at Yodok. What happened to him and his relatives there is brutal, and seemingly commonplace in North Korea. The worst part is that this story is not ended when I close the book. Even now Yodok and many camps like it are still open and atrocities against humanity continue daily.

It reminded me of an account of the Russian Gulag in “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”. But at least then I could say that was years ago. Chol-Wan has written a powerful memoir that exposes many of the lies and horrid cruelties of North Korea, and it seems aimed at the ambivalent South Koreans he has met in his new life.

Who would have known that now in the first years of the 21st century there is a place where children are beaten, humiliated daily, observe executions, bury corpses, stripped of all their freedoms and individual thought, forced to become part of a working machine and doomed to this fate for the rest of their lives due to corruption in government and the blind idealism and hypnotism of the Kim Jong-Il cult of personality and despicably corrupt and isolated communist DPRK.

If you are unfamiliar with the current situation in North Korea then I urge you to read this short book and start opening the window to that world.”