clivemurray.com

For anyone who finds themselves regularly stressed at their work desk, and who doesn’t have to worry too much about children or pets interfering with their desk furniture, I wholly recommend getting yourself a miniature zen garden, and a water feature.

I now have both on my desk here at Profero, and they have already helped me to de-stress my environment considerably. Raking the sand in my zen garden and contemplating the waterfall is really very relaxing, and helps me to focus my mind on a particular fine-grained problem by allowing my mind to de-clench the problem it has been going over too closely.

Work smarter, not harder.

–c.
PS. Do check out my Flickr group for snapshots of your desk! It’s open to all – so take a snap and upload it to Desksnaps!

My place of work is recruiting – we need web designers of all levels (good design, typography and flash skills required), and there are also a couple of graduate (no experience required) positions in the Media and Account Management teams going.

Anyone interested drop me a mail on stuff at clivemurray dot com and I’ll hook you up.

–c.

So people at Profero are asking who has a blog.

I do. Here it is.

Some people from Profero will probably come here and have a look at it. If that’s you, hello. I’m sorry about the sweepstake, what can I say. Friday 13th is a lucky day for me.

I post stuff here. Photos, rants, funny stuff from the web… usual blog fare, really. Yeah.

That’s about it really. As you were.
–c.

You know it’s one of those days at work when you have Miles Davis’ “Kind Of Blue” on repeat just so you can concentrate.

God bless you, Miles.

–c.

Say what?

It’s more JQuery stuff, so if you care not a jot, then hie thee hence.

OK, so there are a million ways of generating zebra-striped tables. If you don’t know what a zebra-striped table is, then you probably don’t need to. But if you do, then you may be familiar with methods like this and this. That’s all good.

(By the way, I realise that an even better way to do this is to generate the stripes by writing the alternate classes out on the server-side, but for the purposes of this post I’m assuming that can’t be done. Imagine the table’s being retrieved by AJAX or something, so client-side code has to be the way.)

With the awesomeness of jQuery, this is how you do it:

<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function(){
$("table.stripeThis tr:even").addClass("striped");
});
</script>

See that? One check to see if the DOM’s loaded, then one line of code. And that would apply to all tables on the page with the CSS class “stripeThis”.

Nifty.
–c.

UPDATE: Here’s a sample page. View the source. See?

I’ve had reason to look into javascript libraries recently at work, initially in the building of the Profero Tacheback site (which I urge you to visit and perhaps sponsor/donate – it’s all for charidee mate), and more recently in a general R&D capacity.

And even though it wasn’t used on that site, and I’ve actually not used it on a project yet, jQuery has leapt out at me as being awesomely powerful without being too much of a sledgehammer for my nuts.

What I loved was that it has built-in syntax for selecting everything in the document that matches a CSS selector (for example) and also has built-in AJAX handling methods and has some pre-built visual effects that are easy to use, yet it’s not a hulking behemoth like Dojo or an inflexible pre-packaged box-of-tricks like Scriptaculous.

These are by no means fully explored opinions – this is my reaction after toying around with the libraries in question with a particular task at hand – and I’m fully with the “each to his own” idea, so I’m definitely not saying that jQuery is the one and all others are heathens. I’m just saying it lit my lights, it spun my wheels, it rang my particular bell.

YMM, as ever, V.
–c.

It was my first day at my new job today. It was very nice. I got a new computer and two monitors and a welcome pack and an induck-tion and a free lunch and some Guinness and a tour and a pad and some pens and a key and some sweets.

Yes, really. The second drawer of my pedestal is full of [[popup:04-09-06_1713_copy.jpg:sweets:sweets:0:inline]].

And there is an office gecko. No, really. A leopard gecko, to be precise. His(?) name is [[popup:04-09-06_1715.jpg:Kaluha:Kaluha:0:inline]] and he(?) is very spotty.

I think I might like it here.

–c.

My mate Adrian filmed his journey to work the other day, set it to music, and made a video of it.

I could watch that again and again. Top stuff!

–c.