that’s great…

I love NY…

OK, so it had been maybe three years since I last visited NY. Just came back from a six day visit of that great state. You may not know, but I was raised in the Bronx. The Bronx happens to be the best borough of the five that make up the excelsior place we know as NYC. A bit much on the superlatives, I know.

Anyway, it’s great how thing change, and yet they stay the same. Driving in the city hasn’t changed: you can (and are expected) to drive like a mad man. I like that. The fine for driving while holding your cell phone (instead of using a hands-free set) is $150. I didn’t like that. The only way I learned that without actually getting a ticket was because an officer told me. Here’s some more background: all the people taking funds at the bridge tolls have been replaced by NYC police officers. I don’t know why, but I assume Mayor Bloomberg had a good reason. I think he’s a quality Mayor.

It was another whirlwind tour of friends and family. In six days, I saw about seven different groups. I went from Rockland County to Long Island, and various places in between. It was time well spent. The family and friends I saw included people that had been asking when I would be back in NY. My response was usually, “No idea”. After 2 years, that gets old, and these loved ones begin to plot your eminent beating. So I went primarily for love, and a little bit of fear.

I even got in a football game (actually three). I sprained my ankle in the first game. This rendered me fairly useless as a lineman in the following games. Also, at my size, when I say I have good hands or that I can QB, most people either silently (or audibly) laugh at my statement, and then move on with their lives. As usual, after gimping my way through 2 games as a fairly useless D-lineman, I called for the QB position. We were down, 3 to 1. I quickly made it a more respectable score of 4 to 3, them. Two separate guys dropped passes that would have tied it up. Regardless, it was a great day.

I’m am tired, and in a bit of pain. But it was definitely worth it. Oh yeah, although I grew up in the city, I never knew how serious Long Island was about seafood. Man, I love NY.

webwork2 and unchecked checkboxes…

your average Web-MVC framework does many things. It may simplify your life with some basic type-conversion. It may allow you to directly map an object’s method as a Web Action. However, even the best may gloss over an issue… at least for a while. For me that framework is WebWork2, and that issue was unchecked checkboxes.

In accordance with the W3C spec, when a form is submitted, its unchecked checkboxes, and other unsuccessful controls are simply ignored. So, you need some form of trickery to get that false set on your Action. A fairly simple (rubbish) hack for this is to search by name for the desired control in a given request, and set it to false when you can’t find the name/value pair.

Well, thanks to some innovation by Konstantin Pribluda, this horrible (OK, slight nuisance) unchecked checkboxes issue is now a thing of the past. For those of you who can’t wait for release of WebWork-2.2.7, there’s a download just for you (Thanks Toby). Guys, keep up the good work!