John Lindal’s Blog

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

When The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was released, it sounded fun, but not worth the price of a movie ticket, especially with our busy schedule. But last night, FX showed it in what they claimed was the world broadcast premier, so I watched it.

For those who like a good adventure with a gang of superheroes, it’s well worth watching. Of course, it doesn’t have much to do with what is in the original comic by Alan Moore, but I do think they captured the spirit of “Let’s throw together a bunch of Classic Heroes™ and other not-so-heroic, but still famous, characters and ask them to save the world by fighting both a Master Villain® wielding Superior Technology™ and treachery within their ranks.”

Pink Panther

I never care much for remakes, since the ancients knew how to make much better movies, but I do appreciate the side effect that causes the originals to be re-released cheaply.

In this case, I picked up both A Shot in the Dark, by far the best, but probably the least well known in the movie series, and Adventures in the Pink, Volume 2, which contains 27 of the original cartoon shorts — for only $10 each.

Obviously, I’m now on the hunt for Adventures in the Pink, Volumes 1 and 3

Update: Volume 1 is called Pranks in the Pink, and Volume 3 is called Frolics in the Pink.

JavaScript Survival Guide

I’ve been suffering with JavaScript for a while now, and I think I’ve finally come up with a system for keeping it manageable:

NPS.XML.Util =
{
    /**
     * findChild
     *
     * Find a child node in an XML tree.
     */

    findChild: function(
        /* DOM node */ element,
        /* string */   child_name)
    {
        ...
    }
};

The namespace avoids collisions with all the unpredictable stuff that the browser declares. The comments both explain what is going on and space everything out to make it readable. I use the underscore naming convention for variables to keep them visually separate from functions and classes, which use the Java naming convention.

This, coupled with the higher quality libraries that are becoming available, is making JavaScripting at least bearable

I have started building a library of useful JavaScript functions at http://www.newplanetsoftware.com/js/. You are welcome to copy these and use them for whatever you wish. Do not link directly to the files because they are subject to change without notice, and I often make changes that break existing code.

Kudos to Honda

On Tuesday, I scraped up and banged loose the left corner of the front bumper of our Honda CR-V in The Parking Lot from Hell™. Since the body shop that fixed our Corolla had moved to the high desert, I called my old VW mechanic for a recommendation. When I found out that he had retired, I spent the rest of the week not looking forward to interviewing body shops on Saturday.

I wasn’t going to give up without a fight, but as it turned out, there were more important issues to deal with Saturday morning, so I didn’t get to take a closer look at the damage until the afternoon. To my pleasant surprise, I discovered that most of the fasteners for the two panels that were loose were unbroken, so all that was needed was to take out one screw, push everything back in place, and put the screw back in! A bit of touch-up paint finished the job, so now there are only some minor scratches on the plastic bumper to show that anything happened.

Kudos to Honda for designing the latest version of their CR-V with flexible plastic panels in all the right places!