Phine Solutions web work notes

So all of sudden my wireless connection stopped working and I couldn’t “repair” it no matter what I tried. So I hit the reset button and guess what, Vista wouldn’t start. It just froze in the midway. I tried to repair the OS with the installation CD but it couldn’t fix it either. No errors reported, just stuck.

Luckily safe mode did work so I was able to back up all my files and made decision to re-install the OS.

I do have some decisions to make.

1. Re-install Vista. No way after this.

2. “Upgrade” to WIndows 7 RC. I don’t think I can trust this OS yet since it is just out of the oven.

3. How about Ubuntu? I do like it. However, I don’t want to have to load a “Windows” inside it so I can use some Windows Apps that I use every day.

So in the end I chose the good old XP.

It turned out I probably have a broken wireless adapter. It is a Buffalo WLI2-PCI-G54S card. In XP, when I tried to install the driver the system froze again and the installation screen shows “copying cbg54.sys”. Hard reboot is the only way to bypass this, but at least XP starts.

So the story pretty much ends here. It was probably a hardware issue and I don’t know if Microsoft is the one to blame here. Nevertheless it doesn’t seem Windows OS is handling this in a graceful way, or anyway at all. An OS with a good kernel should at lease prevent this kind of issues from making the whole system useless.

Oh by the way, I can’t believe I would say this, after a few monthes use of Vista, XP feels so clean and easy. I wouldn’t go back to Vista again even all the issues and concerns are addressed.

Being a half-baked JavaScript developer for a long time it wasn’t easy for me to grasp the concept like “selectors”, “traversing” and “utilities” in JQuery, and every time I started to write something using JavaScript it was always a series of events of Googling for sample code, checking the API, and Googling again for the right syntax if it doesn’t.

Recently I found this book “JQuery In Action” from Amazon and I was quite pleased after reading it. The information in the book is well organized and illustrated. And the authors explain the concept before digging into syntax and examples, so you not only know how to do code in JQuery, but most importantly, why to do it in this way.

My favorite subjects in this book are “understanding browser event models” (chapter 4) and “JavaScript that you need to know but might now”, the later is actually an appendix. They fill the gaps in my JavaScript knowledge and brought some new but important perspective on how it really works.

The lab code is great and it will probably help me quite a bit for my future projects.

So if you want to get serious about JavaScript programming, get this book. It’s definitely worth the read.