Dream Theater's "Black Clouds & Silver Linings" releasing on June 23rd!
This is a few days old, but I just stumbled across it. Dream Theater's 10th studio album, Black Clouds & Silver Linings, is being released June 23, 2009. I really loved Systematic Chaos (although the title song was my least favorite on the album) and I've get recently gotten back into Train of Thought.
The album only consists of 6 songs, but I suspect it's a good 80 minutes of music:
- A Nightmare to Remember
- A Rite of Passage
- Wither
- The Shattered Fortress
- The Best of Times
- The Count of Tuscany
The album is being released on vinyl as well as a 3-disc Special Edition that will contain extra CDs—one, an instrumental remix of the album and two, a six song cover CD.
Managing JavaScript events/functions using "debouncing"
Yesterday I came across a very timely post by John Hann on Debouncing Javascript Methods. I say timing, because this was a problem I was just getting ready to solve again for umpteenth time—managing rapidly fired events in JavaScript.
I was working on some live search functionality for a page where I was searching DOM elements and populating a list of matching elements. Since this was a "live" search, I'm doing the update as the user types. The trick to this issue is that you don't really want to fire off the process each time the user presses a key, but instead you want to really fire it off when there's been a delay/pause to their typing. If you actually do the processing on each character, many of the calls you're making become quickly invalidating as the input changes so quickly that you end up making unnecessary calls. You'll also see a noticeable slow down in performance if your process is CPU intensive.
You can run into the same issue when dealing with AJAX operations. If you're just updating some portion of the screen based upon some user interaction, you really only want to fire off the AJAX call when the user is done interacting with the element.
This is where John's debounce solution comes into play.