Friday, December 26, 2008

LG VX8300 USB driver download

LG VX8300 usb drivers are hard to find on the internets for some reason...

download them here: LGUSBModemDriver_4.6_WHQL.zip

also, the unofficial user guide is a good thing to have

edit: wow this post is popular, please click on my ads to help me pay for the bandwidth that hosting these files for you is costing me. Thanks.

edit: fixed links

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

jQuery: responsiveness plugin for fast UI

for demo go here

Problem:
I was working on a dropdown widget where the user could scroll down using the arrow keys, and while he was scrolling, two things needed to happen:
  1. UI need to be updated, showing his new selection, and removing his old selection.
  2. Some costly DOM operations had to happen in the background to set the selected item in the widget.
I noticed that the scrolling was slow in IE6 on a P3-1000. Mind you, scrolling 1 item was fast, but holding down the arrow key and scrolling 50 items was painfully slow, because the DOM operations had to happen for every item scrolled.
I also knew that i only really needed to do the DOM operations for the last item selected, that is the one the user really wanted.


Solution:
Javascript is single threaded, but there is a timer function that makes faking multi-threaded execution possible.
What i needed to do was to split up the scroll function into two components, first call the UI update every time the arrow was pressed, and second, queue up the expensive DOM operations to happen in the future, but dont execute them until no new DOM operations have been queued for some interval of time. This would give the user the visual feedback of "something is happening" while not executing the costly operation that would make everything feel slow and unresponsive.

The plugin i came up with lets you specify the interval that you will wait for further requests until you execute the last request, and the number of times you will wait that interval.


One thing to be aware of is that this plugin does not implement any queing internally, so if you should only use one instance of it per function. make a new instance if you want to improve the performance of a different function.

For more info such as:
  • A simple typing demo
  • A crappy implementation of hoverIntent plugin
  • API
go here

Friday, December 12, 2008

jQuery: Conflict free events

Problem:
I had to validate an input, both onBlur and when the user pressed enter. If there was an error, in both cases, an alert would pop up. The problem was that when the user clicked 'ok' on the alert, the field would lose focus and cause the blur event to fire, and thus cause another alert to pop up. I only wanted one alert per error, so i made this little plugin to solve this problem.

Solution:
To use this plugin, you can pass in a hash with 2 keys: {blur: function(){}, enter: function(){}}, or a single function that you want run both onBlur and onEnter.



Example usage: