A Path Less Taken

I don’t post random topics often, but when I saw this video on Matt Mullenweg’s blog I decided to watch it. It was very interesting. You can also see the video at the 10/GUI official site. For my part I sent an email to 10/GUI that said they should consider a chord board type approach to entering data. I’m sure they thought of it, but it was not in the video so I figured what the heck. Please let me know what you think.

If you are an open source developer and you have not been living under a rock for years (yes, I know, many have) then you have probably heard of git. Billing itself as “the fast version control system“, git is the distributed version control management system that has become the darling of the hour. It allows developers to work on-line and off-line, to host repositories locally or on the now popular github, to perform merges as the rule rather than the exception. In short, git is to version control what WordPress is to blogging. The eight hundred pound gorilla in a small room.

I like the idea of open source software. I even want to contribute to the cause when I can find an effort that I can connect with and where I can make a difference. The big problem I run into is what can I do with open source? There seem to be a few licenses out there that are in common use and they are not all created equal. I’m all about giving, but sometimes a fellow has to eat too. How do you figure out what you can and cannot do under an open source license? I decided to give the research a shot and see what I can come up with. I figured I would look at big open source projects, see what licenses they use and then research those licenses. Simple, right? We will see.

qTip is an excellent jQuery plugin created by Craig Thompson. It is built on top of the jQuery Javascript library and allows web developers to build flexible, well formatted and easy to use tool tips. I decided to use qTip for my latest web app and was able to get up and running pretty quickly. I did run into one issue that I thought was worth pointing out to help you avoid the same sticking point that I encountered with my approach.

I was looking for a useful confirmation dialog using jQuery and I found this link. With help from the post author and from the comments I was able to create my own very slightly modified approach that works pretty well and allows for inline generation of the confirmation message in your HTML. Here is what I did.