Passing arguments to javascript’s setTimeout() method using closures

klejnieks — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 18:07:34 +0000

Yesterday I ended up having to hack around FCKEditor a bit to “fine tune” it for a project im involved in. The problem was that the html text we needed from the editor was getting back to our app, I didnt touch the code at all except to add a console log (window.console.log()) and tada… it works now. Well it was aparent that the fckeditor was not getting to where i needed to get to fast enough.

Javascript has a method setTimeout, which if you google this, youll find a bunch of related topics on setTimeout, setInterval, and clearTimeout etc… So I went with a setTimeout to simply call the next function i needed 1 millisecond later.

...
setTimeout( doAlert(), 1 );
...
 
function doAlert()
{
	alert();
}

Great! that works… but wait, I need to pass it a few variables. No problem i figured i could just add them inline right?

...
var msg = "Hello World";
setTimeout( doAlert(msg), 1 );
...
 
function doAlert(msg)
{
	alert(msg);
}

Wrong. this wont work in IE which sadly enough we have to support, and my argument that everyone should use firefox or safari just doesnt ever seem to hold water in a big corporation.

So I googled around and came across a post on evolt showing how to add in parameters using closures. Now im not advocating the usage of closures, but I figure in this case it would have to do. So in the end my routine looked a little something like this

...
var msg = "Hello World";
var delay = function() { doAlert(msg); };
setTimeout(delay, 1);
...
 
function doAlert(msg)
{
	alert(msg);
}

this works like a champ on mac and windows in IE, FF, and safari.

Dreamhost 4 days down and running…

klejnieks — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 02:11:50 +0000

The short of of the long is this, I switched my server last week to dreamhost after hearing so many good things about their services. I have a few colleagues who are on their systems who raved about them, and well, i was drawn into it. So… made my payment, switched my dns, let it all propagate through, woke up next morning to find out that dreamhosts main file server has been down for over 1 week and because of this my website, email, and ftp were now all down too.

I understand downed systems are somewhat common place in this industry and inevitable, and I have been down this path many of times before. What surprises me, though, is that I ended up getting sold a service which was already down… They sold me a server that was crashed, down, broken, ruined. Ok, well again these things happen… so fix it, right?

Well thats where this all becomes a much more infuriating issue. It has been 1 week, the service is still down, and i have not heard back from anyone at Google nor Dreamhost, no refund, no support, no response, no service.

you can watch the events unfold here

For those of you looking to move to dreamhost I strongly suggest against it.

lejnieks » Rants

Passing arguments to javascript’s setTimeout() method using closures

Dreamhost 4 days down and running…