Thursday, August 20, 2009

New Waste of Time

I bought a new book yesterday. So, I'm going to work on yet another huge waste of time -- learning to write add-ons for World of Warcraft. I say it's a waste of time because I barely play the game anyway. In fact, I rarely enjoy it when I do. But I have friends and family there, and sometimes it's a good way to escape for an hour or two.

My dream add-on, and my initial impetus for wanting to learn to write add-ons in the first place, is Moron Filter. If I could just avoid seeing the chat from people who type in all-caps, type "lol" and its evil family members, and other pet peeves (numbers instead of words), I'd enjoy the experience a lot more.

This blog post is the first in a series which will eventually include my code as it takes shape. For now, I'll leave you with the interesting fact that Lua, the language used to script the game's UI, has been ported to the Lego Mindstorms NXT platform.

jQuery UI and Internet Explorer 6 Bug

It will come as no shock to any Web developer that IE6 chokes on its own vomit given the slightest provocation, even with a well-tested, cross-browser library such as jQuery UI.

I post this here hoping that someone else who has this problem will find it; I was able to find nothing useful about this by searching Google and the jQuery UI mailing list. The solution was discovered by my friend Dave, by arbitrarily removing bits of HTML and JavaScript until IE stopped doing its best weeping angel impression.

In this case, it was setting the 'modal' property of the jQuery UI dialog to 'true.' Commenting out that line made everything all better. That's all for now. Watch for other random bits of tech and other gibberish from me in the near future.