Archive for June, 2007

Call For Papers

Posted June 28, 2007 * Comments(0)

Those of you who have been around for a while know that in September of last year I published the first issue of the Visual jQuery Magazine. In October, the magazine was also released in French.

The mag had interviews with important jQuery community members (like creator John Resig, plugin editor Dave Cardwell, etc.), articles on jQuery features and implementations, and even a piece or two on alternate Javascript libraries, complete with quality graphics and original art.

The positive response was incredible, and people really seemed to like it. Unfortunately, though I’d initially planned on making the magazine a monthly publication, things fell to the wayside as my schedule got progressively more hectic. Since Issue 1 I’ve found a new job (new then; about eight or nine months old now), moved across the country (NY to CA), and gotten a huge chunk of the way through writing my first book (stay tuned for details!). Clearly, things have been busy.

The lack of Issue 2 has been bugging me since Issue 1, and I’ve decided it’s time to make it happen (this, I admit, is also largely in part to my good friend Rey Bango’s recently renewed effort to push jQuery forward). Thankfully, the magazine’s lead designer and the team of French developers/translators have all expressed an interest in helping make Issue 2 happen, which makes this goal a lot more tangible.

Issue 1 was an experiment, and it went really well. Since it was a first though, it was very much “the Yehuda show.” I’d like Issue 2 to be more of a collaboration of contributors; there are a lot of jQuery topics to explore, and a lot of team member and users with fascinating tales to tell.

As such, I’m putting the word out there. I’m looking for contributions for Issue 2 of Visual jQuery Magazine. Articles can vary in length extensively, from brief three paragraph shorts, to three page features. They can be tutorials, feature articles, interviews and lots of other things I’m sure you’ll all think of. Just a few brief (and somewhat flexible) guidelines:

  • The article must be in magazine or newspaper format (if, in fact, your submission is a piece of writing — illustrations will also be considered). I’m extremely lax on this, but it should be something you could see being in a magazine.
  • The article must be about a topic that is timely and pertinent to the jQuery community, with broad appeal.
  • The article must not be an advertisement (but it may, obviously, feature a plugin you have written if it has broad appeal).
  • The article must be factually correct.
  • The magazine staff will edit your article for grammar, space, and style. You will receive an edited copy prior to publication for approval.
  • The magazine staff will add graphics and other visual elements as appropriate.

    • Please email a proposal or brief description of your submission before spending a chunk of time working on it; that way we can avoid running out of space and ensure that everything print-worthy gets in. Email submissions and letters to the editor to editor AT visualjquery DOT com.

    As I said from the beginning of this project, I think that the magazine has real potential to open up the jQuery world to new users, and hope that by pushing the envelope of community-produced content, we can keep jQuery moving forward in it’s current positive direction. I, for one, I’m really excited about it.

    ParseTree in Cygwin

    Posted June 16, 2007 * Comments(1)

    So I had a recent need to get parse_tree (which requires RubyInline and thus a compiler) working in Windows. I was told that I could get it working by using some compiler for Windows, but I figured it might be easier to get it working in Cygwin.

    That turned out to be only sort of true.

    First up, I installed Cygwin with Ruby. I attempted to use irb, and got ‘cannot find ubygems.’ Googling around led to me to the following solution:

    unset RUBYOPT

    I then needed to install rubygems from scratch, so I grabbed it into my home directory:

    wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/20989/rubygems-0.9.4.tgz

    Unpacked it:

    tar -xvf rubygems-0.9.4.tgz

    Got into the directory, and installed rubygems:

    cd rubygems-0.9.4
    ruby setup.rb

    I then installed parsetree:

    gem install parsetree -y

    It installed a bunch of dependencies, including RubyInline. So far so good.

    When I attempted to load parse_tree from IRB, I got an error about permissions. After a bunch of searching around, I found the answer: make sure the /cygdrive/c directory is not group or world-writable. The easiest solution is:

    chmod 700 /cygdrive/c

    If you have special needs, you might need to tweak up the chmod command, but you need to keep it from being group or world writable.

    And that was it. I loaded IRB and parse_tree worked great!