At time you'd want to store data, related to a DOM element.

storing it directly into the element (either by elm.someArbitraryName = value, or with setAttribute) is wacky. Some browsers might not like you using non standard attributes, so you start using things like 'alt' and 'rel'. Then again, these things has meaning, and storing arbitrary data is ... well, uncool to say the least.

jQuery.data() to the rescue. As jQuery objects are wrappers that HasA DOM elements, and not the DOM elements themselves (as in prototype), storing data on them is like storing data on POJSO (Plain Old JavaScript Objects), and the data() functions allows for an easy way of doing that.

Read on that (and of a few other jQuery tips) at http://marcgrabanski.com/article/5-tips-for-better-jquery-code

Took me a little while to set my mind on it, but after doing remote contracting for a year and a half I've had enough of pyjama-driven work, and I started looking for brilliant teams to become part of.

In the past I always worked at places where I was, in technical terms at least, *the* leader. At most, I shared that position with Oren Ellenbogen at SQLink for a while, but at the end of the day I always had the ability to veto on technological issues, and people were following my advice on seniority basis.

While contracting, I worked with this amazing start-up company in the UK. They have very experienced and smart people on boards, and it was the first time I found that I really need to fight to get my voice heard. It would be an understatement to say that the satisfaction from knowing this kind of team has accepted my proposals at times is enormous. That's because I was challenged, and needed to lead a change in a place I'm not the CTO/Team-leader of. When at later point we did things according to my suggested (and accepted) design, and was happy to work with it as it was easier and more fun, I was very proud of my work.

One more aspect of my past employment is that it was always in small to small-ish teams. at most I was a part of about 10 people R&D department.

So what I was looking for now was a company with a large(r) R&D team, with great people with whom I can learn together. A place that is being managed well, that is fun to work for, and that will challenge my skills and push me to learn and evolve.

Being the software geek that I am for so many years, and also active in the development community, I am blessed with friends who are holding various positions in R&D departments around the country. This gave me the opportunity to come in to amazing companies, and go through very interesting interviews (that goes *way* beyond abstract-class-vs-interface, testing my design, coding and testing skills, my knowledge in software architecture and problem-solving skills).

At the end I picked up www.delver.com. It's a cool startup company with embarrassingly smart people and I'm honoured to be in their ranks.

Oh, and they are also using AspView in production from day one ... ;)

To new beginnings,

Ken the devler

Today I opened a GoGrid account, as I'm looking for quite some time to upgrade my hosted environment.

Setting up the account was a breeze, and in a few minutes from starting the process I had a running instance of vs2008 64bit, with IIS and MSSql2005 express.

First impressions:

Good:

• Quick, easy to use control panel, pricing seem reasonable
• The image contains .net 3.0, and lack some updates so 3.5 was not installing until I allowed all of the windows update stuff to do the magic first.
• Online chat is helpful and very responsive. I did not need any actual tech help yet though.

Bad:

• They charge for offline machines, so you can't just turn on and off the machines, but you have to delete machines that are not in use, and in case you want to re-add them you have to recreate a new machine from their image, then running updates, installs, DB setup etc from scratch

That's it for now

I'm attending Google Developer Day 2008 in Israel today. It's my first large non-Microsoft event I'm being at.

I'm gonna look into the App Engine track, continuing my interest in the new Microsoft Azure platform. Computing in the cloud is something I consider very important for business applications, and plays nicely with doing SaaS solutions, which is one of my interests lately.