Infrequently Noted

So I'm going to try to avoid the obligitory "wasn't SxSW fun!?" post and just breifly mention that Ping has a new blog on usable security.

I can't say how incredibly happy I am to see this kind of work being opened up to a more general audience.

After months of work, I'm happy to announce the first releaes of a Dojo package. This package contains ONLY what is necessaray to support our XMLHTTP wrapper and it's generic bind() API.

The package is available at:

http://dojotoolkit.org/dojo_browserio.tar.gz

Jennifer has a new blog! w00t!

I'm somewhere just south of Burlingame as I write this, on my way to work just as fast as CalTrain will take me. Now, it's not unusual for me to be working or blogging or hacking on projects on the train, but it IS unusual for me to have network access at the same time. Thanks to bluetooth, a small hack for my new Treo and an all-you-can-eat data plan from Sprint, I think it's going to be less unusual.

When Sprint first rolled out their CDMA 1xRTT service ("vision" in sprintspeek), I bought a Samsung A620 phone and accompanying data cable to take full advantage of the then-new service. My mobile life was pretty good given that I tunnel everything over a personal VPN connection to avoid Sprint's lame http proxy. Then I moved to California and, somehow, mysteriously, my 1xRTT just stopped working. Not only could I not make a handset call to "#777" and receive a modem connection string, I couldn't even get the darn thing to work over the cable.

Grumble.

Eventually, I got used to being disconnected on the train, and it is one of my most productive times of the day, but that doesn't mean that I don't want my mobile computing nirvana back. So I took the plunge on a Treo650. Sprint (and, it seems, Cingular) have dissabled the DUN profile in the bluetooth configuration menus of their Treo650s, but some enterprising person provided a hack to re-enable the feature. The DUN profile allows you to use your Treo as a modem for your laptop over bluetooth, and when combined with the 1xRTT data service, a connection that doesn't use my phone minutes or require another ISP. The upshot is that now, in addition to being able to sync my treo wirelessly, I can use it as a data connection wirelessly too. It's SOOOO geeky, and yet it gives me that warm fuzzy "I can check code in from anywhere" feeling.

Horray for technology, even if it does arrive 5-10 years later than we expected it would.

The back button is one of those things that until recently I've considered an unfortunate casualty of the move from web pages to DHTML/CADEX applications. location.replace() and the history-less behavior of XMLHTTP have elicited foot-shuffling, eye-averting mumbling from people building responsive UIs when asked "what about the back button?". That the back button nukes all of a user's progress through an application has been a small point of collective shame. Wouldn't it be great if there were some way to cause the back-button to fire off some sort of callback within the UI instead of obliterating it?

Lo-and-behold, we have a solution! ()

Before I get into the nitty gritty of how this all works, let me provide a demonstration of the way you'd invoke this capability in Dojo. A normal call to get some data in Dojo often looks like:

dojo.io.bind({
  url: "sampleData.txt",
  load: function(type, data, evt){ alert(data); },
  error: function(type, errObj){ alert(errObj.message); }
});

dojo.io.bind({
  url: "sampleData.txt",
  load: function(type, data, evt){ alert(data); },
  error: function(type, errObj){ alert(errObj.message); },
  backButton: function(){ alert('the back button was intercepted, the document should not unload'); }
});