There are possibly a million tutorials out there about jQuery and menus, but there weren’t a million and one… until now! ;) I recently had cause to make a sliding drop-down menu for a project at work and thought I would write up how I did it. First off, check out the demo. The commented source code is below.

Last summer I worked on a project where I needed a search engine that supported simple Boolean queries and key-value parameters. This was to be used on a Python site, so I wanted to write the query parser in Python too. At the time, Lepl seemed like a good choice. I figured out the grammar necessary to support the search query language I wanted, and all was good. I went to check out Lepl just now and I see it has been discontinued, which is a little disheartening. Regardless, I figured better late than never to post this since it still works and Lepl did the job.

I wanted to try Backbone.js, having never used a JavaScript MVC framework before, so I started a project a few days ago to create a web app version of the Grandfather’s Clock variant of solitaire. I figured it would be an easy game to implement, and since I pretty much have it all working, it turned out to be pretty easy after all. You can check out my code on Github, and here is what it looks like:

Back in the day, I created a group called Dachshund Lovers on Facebook. It was open just to people at my university, and it gathered a few members but wasn’t anything big. Then later, when I was able to open it up beyond my university, I made it a public group so anyone could join. Things were fine, people joined and I didn’t have to do anything about it. Just anyone who wanted in could join and there was no approval process.

I’ve picked up on my slow cooker cooking recently, trying out a couple new recipes and re-using some old recipes. I’m working entirely out of Fix-It And Forget-It Big Cookbook: 1400 Best Slow Cooker Recipes, a book I really recommend. Liz had it first and I decided to get it after looking through her copy, then I convinced my cousin to buy it as well. It’s been nice because of the variety of ingredients and recipes.

I’ve recently had some annoying experiences with Google’s apps on my iPad and iPhone. I was having a conversation on Google+ the other day with a friend of mine, and I wanted to share some photos in the conversation thread.  I had photos on my iPhone that I wanted to somehow get online and link to them in a reply on Google+.  I wanted to put them in a Google Picasa album, but Google doesn’t have a Picasa app for the iPad.  I’ve seen Picasa apps put out by third parties, but that always makes me nervous, giving some outside source access to my photos.  Why should I have to, anyway?  Google makes plenty of iOS apps, why not provide one for Picasa?  Picasa is something users can spend money on, too, which should be an incentive to make it convenient to use, regardless of your device.  I spend $20 a year to get extra storage space, but the best way to upload photos is still on my desktop computer.  This sucks because I don’t take the photos on my computer, hell I don’t even take photos on a camera anymore.  I take photos on my phone, and half the time I never sync the things to any other device.  I need to be able to share my photos on a dedicated photo-sharing site, uploading them directly from my phone.