November 16, 2007 J. Max Wilson

IE JavaScript Bugs: Overriding Internet Explorer’s document.getElementById() To Be W3C Compliant Exposes An Additional Bug In getAttributes()

It’s time for another technical article. Those of my readers who aren’t interested in this sort of thing can safely disregard this particular post.

The next time someone asks you why web programmers prefer Firefox to Internet Explorer, send them a link to this post. (Even if they don’t understand it!)

The increasing popularity of Ajax technologies for web application development has increased the use of JavaScript. When I first released my first open source project, xajax, back in May of 2005, the term Ajax was only a few months old. Programming in JavaScript has since become a major part of my everyday work, and increasingly a growing number of bugs found in our applications are related to inconsistencies in JavaScript implementations in different web browsers.

Most programmers who work extensively in JavaScript have been stung, often more than once, by Microsoft’s shoddy, non-standard implementation of manipulating the HTML DOM using JavaScript. IE7 has been an improvement, but it still has some bugs that make programmers want to rip out their hair.

One of the cornerstone functions for JavaScript DOM manipulation is the document.getElementById() method which allows the program to get any element in the HTML by its id attribute, which is supposed to uniquely identify that element. Continue reading →

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November 12, 2007 J. Max Wilson

Teachings of the Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith PDF now available at LDS.org

As you probably already know, the new Relief Society/Priesthood manual for next year in the Teachings of the Presidents of the Church series is Joseph Smith.

It is already available online for free in PDF format for anyone interested:

Teachings of the Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith (6.34 MB)

At 610 pages, it is the longest volume in the series so far, surpassing the Brigham Young book (385 pages) and the Joseph F. Smith book (481 pages) by over a hundred pages. However, the 610 pages are divided among 47 lessons, which is actually one lesson fewer than the other two manuals (as if it weren’t already difficult enough to cover the lesson material in a single class period!). It will be the curriculum for the the next two years.

Continue reading →

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November 10, 2007 J. Max Wilson

Will Facebook Settle the “Are Mormons Christians” Question?

Even though I admire how much they have grown and I laud their innovative open development platform from a technology standpoint, I have avoided becoming a Facebook user for some time. It just seems so trendy.

However, I recently succumbed when a good friend, who now lives quite far away, invited me to join a Facebook group for former residents of BYU’s Foreign Language Student Resident program. The next thing I knew I was getting Facebook friend requests from all kinds of people I hadn’t heard from in years, many of whom I had met in the FLSR.

As I was setting up my Facebook profile, I noticed that one of the profile options is for “Religious Views.” As I started typing in my religious affiliation, Facebook began to suggest matching religious groups. The suggested match was “Christian – Latter-day Saints.” So I selected the suggested affiliation and saved my profile without thinking too much about it.

However, with all of the recent media attention, in relation to the presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney, to the question of whether or not Latter-day Saints qualify as Christians, it occurred to me that the ongoing debate between Latter-day Saints and other Christian groups on the subject may ultimately be decided not by sophisticated theological arguments, but by Facebook.

Continue reading →

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November 9, 2007 J. Max Wilson

Music Video: “We Will Go On” by The Lowe Family

While I am not particularly musical, I have always been fortunate to be in the company of wonderfully musical people. In addition to my own immediate family, growing up I was close friends with the second generation of The Osmond Brothers. The 5 Browns are my first cousins.

Also among my closest friends is the hyper-talented Lowe Family. This past September, we traveled to Branson Missouri where they have been performing for some years now. They treated us like royalty and we had a great time.

The Lowe Family has self-produced a music video for their original song “We Will Go On,” written by my friend Doug Lowe.

Earlier this year they performed with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir during the broadcast of ‘Music and the Spoken Word.”

My favorite is their arrangement with the choir of “Hurry Home” by Jon Anderson (vocalist of the progressive rock band “Yes”):

Go watch the higher quality version of the music video as well as selections from the video of their performance with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and highlights from their live show on their website at:

http://www.thelowefamily.com/video.html

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October 17, 2007 J. Max Wilson

Now Available: Official LDS General Conference Podcast Feeds

The LDS Church is now offering official audio and video Podcasts of general conference! Now you can receive individual talks in your feedreader, iTunes, or podcatcher (I use Google Reader).

Official Audio Feed
Official Video Feed

During recent sessions of conference I have been linking to the Podcast available through KSL.com. The KSL podcast is great because the sessions become available very quickly, usually before the subsequent session has started. However, the feed from KSL is very poorly managed. This last conference it worked fine for the Saturday sessions, but none of the Sunday sessions ever were posted. It makes me wonder if the feed is being generated by hand and someone forgot to update it.

In any case, extrapolating from the naming of the mp3 files for Saturday sessions, I was able to guess the names of the Sunday session mp3 files, which did in fact exist shortly after each session, and link to them from my blog.

The advantage of the official feeds from lds.org is that they will likely be better maintained, and that they offer individual mp3s of each talk rather than semi-sessional mp3s like the KSL feed.

I wonder if the new official feeds will update as quickly as the KSL feed? It would be great if the mp3 for each talk posted shortly after the talk completed.

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