I have had an iCarKits in my automobile(s) for at least 3 years now, but it has not been cheap, easy and as of right now neither of them are working. iCarKit’s support team could not care less.

I used to be one of their biggest fans, iCarKits.com makes plug and play like add-ons for factory radios that allows you to connect your iPod/iPhone to your car. It requires you to pull apart your dashboard and access the back of your factory radio. Then when their hardware fails, you need to do it again, and again. Hopefully if someone is looking for reviews of the iCarKit they will stumble upon this cautionary tale of woe.

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While working on a large eCommerce project, we ran across a little issue.

The client chose ATG as their CMS platform and by default ATG chose the DOJO framework for thier base implimentations.

I am a personal fan of jQuery unobtrusive and standards compliant way of creating function documents albeit I have not played with DOJO a ton, but it just does not seem completely unobtrusive with its specific tagging system.

I wrote a few pages which had specific AJAX functionality which it needed to call upon data from ATG and the requests were getting mis-handled by the form handler on the ATG side.

We took a working DOJO prototype and compared the headers. It seems like the jQuery serialize() function was ignoring the inputs which had a type of submit, this is something the ATG form handler was looking for.

I quickly re-prototyped the serialize function to include the submit buttons and wallah.

In case you want to see the new serialize function I have included it below. Hope this helps someone else out as it took me a few days to figure this one out.

Cheers and Happy Holidays to all.

$.fn.serializeArray = function() {
return this.map(function(){
return jQuery.nodeName(this, "form") ?
jQuery.makeArray(this.elements) : this;
})
.filter(function(){
return this.name && !this.disabled &&
(this.checked || /select|textarea/i.test(this.nodeName) ||
/text|hidden|submit|password/i.test(this.type));
})
.map(function(i, elem){
var val = jQuery(this).val();
return val == null ? null :
val.constructor == Array ?
jQuery.map( val, function(val, i){
return {name: elem.name, value: val};
}) :
{name: elem.name, value: val};
}).get();
}

So for a few projects recently I needed to make use of Javascript Date functionality. At first glance it seems like this archaic system of creating and managing dates but after some tinkering I am realizing yet again that tools created in the computer dawn of time are unbelievably robust.

One of the issues I keep running into is when taking a date which you are working with and trying to make a copy of a date object, when you modify the date of the clone the original is affected. That’s because it’s a reference and not a clone. Watch out for this as I was bit a few times.

var date1 = new Date(“07/05/08”) var myDate = date1; //this creates a reference to the original myDate.setDate(“15”); date1.getDate(); //equals 15

Some other cool things that you can do with the date object is that you can very easily add days to a date, and it will calculate if months change, leap years etc.

myDate.setDate(myDate.getDate() + 10) // adds 10 days.

You can also subtract two dates from each other.

christmas = new Date(“12/25/08”); today – new Date(); secondsToChristmas = christmas – today; //time to christmas in milliseconds daysToChristmas = secondsToChristmas /(1000*60*60*24); //yey math is fun!

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