Community Member Profile

A little bit about me...

I'm currently working as a contractor at the US Small Business Administration. Now that I've said that, I also have to say this:

I don't speak for the SBA. The Agency doesn't endorse any particular products. The Agency's use of particular products is not an implicit endorsement of those products. Your mileage may vary. Any opinions I express, especially those that contain profanity, are my own. And when I see "we", I'm referring to myself and other peons who also don't speak for the Agency.

That said, the SBA's a great place to work for exploring new technologies. There's a political party who resents our very existence and is always looking for any excuse to get rid of us. (See previous paragraph.) So we always have to exhibit success with everything they throw at us. We've really pioneered a lot of the Federal Government's entry into Service Oriented Architecture, E-Authentication, etc, and ongoing stuff (CF, CSS, HTML 5, jQuery, etc), and even the web itself. When we got into putting applications onto the web, only NOAA's NWS (to my knowledge) beat us to it. When other agencies need to see a prototype of success in a new congressional mandate, we're often it. Challenging and fun like you wouldn't believe.

So you see why I like Ben's blog.

Recent Blog Comments By WebManWalking

• Printing To The Primary Output Stream From Within A ColdFusion CFThread Tag

  Posted on Feb 8, 2012 at 9:03 PM

  @Ben, Soon I'll be implementing my bad guy scenario, doing (cfcontent reset="true") without saving the content first. In the process, I've discovered something pretty interesting (and dangerous) about calling cfcontent inside a custom tag: It's as if the (cfcontent reset=&q... read more »

• Building Executable Scripts For The Mac OSX Command Line

  Posted on Jan 11, 2012 at 6:06 PM

  @Eapen, You're right. About the only amazingly cool thing that Terminal has going for it is drag-and-drop of files and folders into the terminal window for command line completion. Another cool terminal app for Mac is X11 from Apple (/Applications/Utilities/X11.app), which convenient... read more »

• Building Executable Scripts For The Mac OSX Command Line

  Posted on Jan 9, 2012 at 6:59 PM

  ... assuming the 2>/dev/null occurred in the script too that is. (Sheesh, mixing shells can get confusing.)... read more »

• Building Executable Scripts For The Mac OSX Command Line

  Posted on Jan 9, 2012 at 6:57 PM

  P.S.: That's how you specify shell outside the script. If I had specified it in the script, the bash -c would've been unnecessary.... read more »

• Building Executable Scripts For The Mac OSX Command Line

  Posted on Jan 9, 2012 at 6:53 PM

  @Ben, You're right. bash is indeed the default shell for the most recent 2 or 3 versions of Mac OS X. Snow Leopard and Lion for sure. Not too sure about Leopard. Pretty sure Tiger and all preceding big cats defaulted to tcsh ("tee cee shell"). tcsh is very similar bash but Apple w... read more »

• Disabling Auto-Correct And Auto-Capitalize Features On iPhone Inputs

  Posted on Jan 5, 2012 at 4:37 PM

  @Ben, I hate that bad-guessing autocorrect so much, I disable it on all my iDevices. But it STILL sometimes highlights a word [in pink] to suggest an alternative from time to time. If I don't notice it instantly, before I type the very next character, it throws away everything it highlighte... read more »

• A Book Apart: Mobile First By Luke Wroblewski

  Posted on Jan 4, 2012 at 8:26 PM

  @Ben, Just found the simplest scrollbars solution (because we already have jQuery Mobile here): http://jquerymobile.com/test/docs/pages/touchoverflow.html For non-jQuery-Mobi... read more »

• A Book Apart: Mobile First By Luke Wroblewski

  Posted on Jan 4, 2012 at 1:51 PM

  @Ben, There seems to be some chatter on Twitter lately about roll-your-own scrollbars. I'll let you know if anything seems promising. We have 15 years' worth of web pages with scrollable divs or iframes, too many to refactor anytime soon. So I'm thinking of adding a special warning a... read more »

• A Book Apart: Mobile First By Luke Wroblewski

  Posted on Jan 3, 2012 at 8:51 PM

  P.S.: I have my own solution for tooltips: http://www.webmanwalking.org/examples/accessibility/dsp_tooltips_on_ipad.cfm My solution requires a special-purpose ser... read more »

• A Book Apart: Mobile First By Luke Wroblewski

  Posted on Jan 3, 2012 at 8:46 PM

  @Ben, This approach (most difficult situation first) reminds me of Designing with Progressive Enhancement by the Filament Group. (They're the accessibility specialists behind jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile.) That book talks about the "x-ray perspective", which means seeing t... read more »

• How Client-Side Validation Is Changing The Shape Of Server-Side Validation

  Posted on Dec 29, 2011 at 5:44 PM

  @Gary, @Cutter and @Martijn are right. But it's not all screen readers. The group that used to turn off JavaScript more than any other was users of the JAWS screen reader. At one point in time, JAWS just couldn't handle JavaScript. That's changed a lot. Have a look at read more »

• Preventing Links In Standalone iPhone Applications From Opening In Mobile Safari

  Posted on Dec 28, 2011 at 3:03 PM

  @Doug, jQuery.post() can do an HTTP post request, so you can code an onsubmit that does that, then returns false. I'm such a creature of habit. I originally ended the previous paragraph with a semicolon.... read more »

• Scalable And Modular Architecture For CSS (SMACSS) By Jon Snook

  Posted on Dec 12, 2011 at 9:32 PM

  @Ben, Notational comment: You can "AND" pseudo classes the same way as you AND classes (@Daniel's examples): selector:pseudo_class_one:pseudo_class_two That said, watch out for "::something". It looks like it contains some sort of null pseudo class, but actu... read more »

• Printing To The Primary Output Stream From Within A ColdFusion CFThread Tag

  Posted on Nov 18, 2011 at 7:25 PM

  @Ben, I'm really having a problem with this very thing (the output stream that's been generated so far), because of getting ready for MSIE 10. The problem is, MSIE 10 won't support conditional comments, and conditional comments are how I dealt with all the problems of quirks mode. Wh... read more »

• The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die By John Izzo

  Posted on Nov 10, 2011 at 2:00 PM

  Okay, now that things have settled out a bit: Thinking of nothing is harder than thinking of any particular something. It's bodybuilding for the mind, and the heaviest weight available for the bar. But the skills of mind-clearing you develop will help you in every other aspect of your life... read more »

• Using java.util.Collections To Shuffle A ColdFusion Query Column Corrupts Column Values

  Posted on Nov 8, 2011 at 11:33 AM

  @Ben, Randomization is a sort, of sorts. And database vendors spend millions of dollars every year on optimizing sorts. So why not let the database do it? Make one of the columns of a select a randomization formula, preferably using a built-in function seeded by time of day, and sort... read more »

• Using RequireJS For Asynchronous Script Loading And JavaScript Dependency Management

  Posted on Nov 3, 2011 at 7:36 PM

  @Ben, A few hours ago, jQuery 1.7 was officially released, and with it, the first official mention of AMD support: http://blog.jquery.com/#post-1642 Also in the release announcement, we get to see th... read more »

• Global Events vs. Entity-Bound Events In JavaScript Application Architecture

  Posted on Nov 3, 2011 at 1:21 PM

  Cocoa Frameworks:Ali Ozer... read more »

• Global Events vs. Entity-Bound Events In JavaScript Application Architecture

  Posted on Nov 3, 2011 at 1:19 PM

  @Ben, > Someone / something had to say, > *this* data coming out of this > widget had to be piped into > *that* widget. That was the drag-and-drop. That step was no coding at all. Of course, the receiving data element had to be right -- slider controls a... read more »

• Global Events vs. Entity-Bound Events In JavaScript Application Architecture

  Posted on Nov 2, 2011 at 5:09 PM

  @Ben, What opened my eyes about pub/sub and reusable parts was Ali Ozer's talk "Fundamentals of Cocoa" from waaay back in 2004. It was a WWDC talk, only 1:13 long. In that short period of time, he hand coded a surprisingly flexible "Dot App" in Objective C. It initially... read more »