No work today, so why did I write code?

[lokheed]

Today was a holiday for work, compensating for New Year's Day falling on the weekend.  Naturally I spent a chunk of time continuing to work on the code for enabling client-side callbacks.  The good news:  It works now.  The bad news:  there are some unexpected side effects that happen when you change the properties of a server-side control with DHTML on the client side.  They are not insurmountable, but I haven't decided whether or not to check in this code yet.  I think I am going to open it up for discussion among QA and the Dev team to see what they think.

Kris went to work this morning, and then was promptly sent home by her boss because she was just too sick to be there.  She wound up sleeping most of the morning and into the afternoon, which did her a world of good.  Well, that and the cough medicine.  By late afternoon she was looking and sounding much better.  We spent some time taking down Christmas decorations, so that's just about all packed away now.  I am thinking tomorrow evening we will probably hang some more pictures.

One of the things that Kris got me for Christmas was seasons 1 and 2 of Babylon 5 on DVD.  I already had the pilot on DVD, and we watched that tonight.  She had never seen the series at all, and she really seemed to like the pilot.  That's a good sign, since compared to the rest of the series the pilot is pretty wretched.  She is pretty excited to start watching it.  I have to work to keep my mouth shut, because I keep finding myself saying things like, "What Kosh just said was 'Entil-zha Valen'..."  Then of course Kris asks me what that means, and I have to sit on my hands and say that, um, it's kind of important...  later...  So with any luck I will be able to shut up some and just let her discover all the plot threads.

I took my mom out shopping today, and also did a blood draw.  I'm a tiny bit worried, since her PT level has dropped from 4.5 to 2.4 in the last week.  She definitely seemed a little off.  If she can't get the PT level back up a little then we are going to wind up in the hospital emergency room in the next few days with another headache.  Hopefully that won't happen.  I also expect that we will be hearing from Social Security before too much longer regarding her disability hearing.  I need to call the lawyer tomorrow to check in.  This thing has been dragging on for years now, and according to the lawyer Social Security has completely boxed themselves in.  I just want to see it done and see her qualify for medicare.  Overall she seems to be doing very well down here, this is the last little bit of stress to deal with.

I'm off to bed now.  Read a little more of "Ring", then maybe have nightmares about scary dead Japanese chicks.  Whee!

Comments

[wingedelf.livejournal.com]

Well, clue me on the changes, and we'll get 'em worked through.

[damashita.livejournal.com]

This thing has been dragging on for years now, and according to the lawyer Social Security has completely boxed themselves in.

In what way?

[lokheed.livejournal.com]

The changes are non-damaging to the current framework. In fact, I specifically placed them all inside one large region block in default.aspx.cs so that upon transition to ASP.NET 2.0 that entire block can simply be removed again. The code to implement a callback is identical to how it works in 2.0, it's just that in 2.0 all the heavy lifting comes for free. So basically if you have a page that is going to use a callback, you implement the IClientCallbackEventHandler interface, wire up the control that will fire the callback inside the page load event, wire up the method in the page that will process a callback, and then write two javascript functions (one to process the return data from the callback, and one to handle an error). All of that is well and good.

Where the twitchiness comes in is when you are working with a drop-down list. If you use a callback to repopulate a list (say the user chooses a publication from one dropdown, and you perform a callback to drive the contents of the Issue dropdown), it works beautifully. Instead of a 5-6 second turnaround for a full postback, the callback repopulates the dropdown virtually instantaneously. The problem happens if you have a postback following a callback. If the dropdown has viewstate enabled, then all the new option texts are retained but their values are lost and the selected index is lost. So I am thinking that tossing in a hidden field to store the value is workable, with another javascript to re-select that option when the page reloads. It's a lot of gymnastics, but the performance gains in the end user experience seem worth it to me.

I have no idea if there are problems with other types of controls. Dropdowns just seem to be odd ducks - you can't just replace their .innerHTML property, you have to remove all the existing options and then add the new ones. Near as I can tell that's a limitation of the DHTML, I did some research and found other people hitting the same problem.

[lokheed.livejournal.com]

In their last denial, they denied her claim saying that while she is unable to go back to work in her most recent job, she would be physically able to go back to work as an alcohol counselor. Given that the state regulations have changed dramatically since she last worked in the field, for her to go back to counseling would require four years of school plus new state certifications. The lawyer said they couldn't require anything like that, they might as well say she is physically able to be a brain surgeon. So basically SS agreed that she was disabled for every other job she has ever had, and the one they say she could still do she really can't anymore for regulatory reasons (I.E. - she can't just send out a resume and start interviewing for that position).

So I am mostly confident that the final hearing will go her way, and that she will get her settlement. But even if she doesn't, it's not the end of the world. She would never be able to pay back Jerry for the rent, or pay back Inez for the loan to get the blood testing device, but honestly she is getting (barely) enough money to survive on now.