Change ID of a Component in ExtJS

ExtJS: The Component manager instance’s all collection does not let you change an ID of a component.

Let’s say… you wanted to, anyway. Add this:

Ext.ComponentMgr.all.changeKey = function(oldkey, newkey) {
    var comp = this.map[oldkey];
    var index = this.indexOfKey(oldkey);
    this.keys[index] = newkey;
    this.map[newkey] = comp;
    delete this.map[oldkey];
};

Is there anything really wrong with this approach?

Jeri Ellsworth: tech heroine




Jeri Ellsworth

Originally uploaded by Jason "Textfiles" Scott

At the Forsk we talked a bit about our women tech heroes. Jeri Ellsworth, see picture, is clearly in my pantheon of heroes.

Taught herself everything. Had a DIY racecar career. Then she got into custom-built electronics, and designing chips. Well, she got very good at it. She built a simulated Commodore 64. And tells her lifestory in this longer video talk.

Here’s a nice photo gallery of Jeri’s home etching setup.

The Fatman and Circuit Girl is her video podcast. Slogan: Too smart to be cool, too cool to be a nerd. Welcome scientists!

Do you have women heroes in technology or science, give me a tip in the comments section.

7th Öresund JavaScript Meetup (and the next)

So that was the 7th meetup about JavaScript. We learnt stuff about extending Chrome, that WebKit browser. Mark Wubben taught us.

Thanks, Mark! You provided much more than a glorified walkthrough of the extant documentation, you gave us insight into how the workflow feels, and how a finished product can look.

That went well.

When one participant muttered “Anyone interested in… pizza?” we trudged throught the snow to Drottningtorget, around ten Open Source enthusiasts had gathered for the bi-weekly MOSIG social event. Yep, that’s short for Malmö Open Source Interest Group. Affectionately known as “Linux pizza”.

Next meetup date, in Copenhagen, is at 23’s headquarters in Vesterbro.

2009: Swedish Gov’t to help solar energy

Here is me, trying some auto-tran, to bring you some last-year’s news.

Regulation (2009:689) on state aid for solar cells

To contribute to the transformation of the energy and industrial development in the energy sector, the government decided in June to introduce a state support for the installation of all types of grid-connected photovoltaic systems. The support may be up to 60 percent of costs for project costs, labor and certain materials. For large enterprises, aid cover more than 55 percent of the cost. It is the investing in solar systems that can be supported and the application review by the provincial government in the county in which the system will be installed.

The regulation came into force on 1 July 2009.

Peter Stuge of coreboot now blogs

Recently, the word “hacker” has created turmoil where I live. A friend who develops amazing things has written a bit about it. I want to frame his story by this back-and-forth between us:

Me: “The Web has enormous reach.”

Peter Stuge: “Yes, unfortunately.”

In an unthinkable turn of events, this man took up blogging in English at peter.stuge.se. Peter’s a non-webby electronicist and hardware man, so this step’s huge.

Read his moving story.

Special interest

“Special interest” is a misnomer. Every interest is special. And you can become of a geek of anything. “Soccer is the only broad shared cultural expression.” (said by a Frenchman, explaining why hackerspaces are not “marginal” or “narrow” culture; everything is narrow compared to European soccer.)

Met a guy tonight that wanted to hear biographical anecdotes about Townes Van Zandt before he could listen to his music. He knew everything there was to know about Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys fame. Since we were at a loud club, he was unable to tell me anything about Wilson’s music. He mentioned an inaudible Beach Boys record title, with the gnomic description:

They were trying to pick up (inaudible, “pieces”?). And they sound so bad. But it comes out very good. Sincerity.

I retorted by gushing a little about Van Zandt. Recently, me and Luisa went to see Steve Earle who looks precisely like he does in The Wire. It turned out that the concert was part of a tour for a recently recorded album of Townes songs. With Earle’s telling yarns between singing great songs, it all swept us up into the New Country legend.

Meredith L. Patterson has an anagram for a URL. Envy poisons my fingers as I type this. Meredith is a defender of learning skills yourself. (See Autodidacticism for more poetry on this.) She defends rights to educate oneself. She kicks anyone’s ass that says she university’s the only place to learn biology. Ergo, she is my heroine.

But what I wanted to point to was this special interest item, from the CNC world.

TUBE is a bi-annual conference about tubes, held in Düsseldorf. I saw it mentioned in a very old news item from Nissin, makers of this:

And, at the music event tonight, I came to realize that I’m becoming more entrenched here in Malmö. I have friends here. I was dragged to dancing by my friend the illustrator, and my college buddy the moviemaker reinvited me to his opening night tomorrow. A Forskningsavdelningen biologist stepped up and asked if I knew her, I had to introduce myself. Again. She unmasked herself (this was Halloween, and a folk theme was in full swing, around us you could find Herne the Hunter, the Green Man, and other weird wooden masks). We talked science, quit the club, and had Middle Eastern fast-food (At “Jalla Jalla”, whose slogan is “Best falafel”), and then it was time to report all this. Oh, the biologist will equip herself with skills at the Royal Holloway in London. She can tell it all to me in a few years.

Bonus link: GPL3-licensed chemistry tools.