Month: June 2013

Character Encoding Bug of the Day

 

Today I had one of those bugs that starts out looking simple and keeps going deeper and deeper. Video service Kaltura has a plugin for Moodle, that just stopped working one day (no changes on the server).

  • It’s throwing an exception because an expected element isn’t in the page.
  • Oh, the element’s supposed to be delivered by XHR from the plugin.
  • But the plugin’s code is generating correct markup…
  • Why is Moodle’s function to serialize an array into a JS function call returning null for that markup?
  • json_encode is converting the markup string to null?
  • Because json_encode is choking on invalid UTF-8.
  • Because the markup has a right single quotation encoded in Windows-1252 :(
  • And that string is coming from the Kaltura API.

So over 2 years ago someone named a video player Jim’s Test Player and over the weekend Kaltura’s API started returning that single quote in Windows-1252. We removed the quote from the name and the problem disappeared.

Simpler Masonry + Sortable Working Together

 

Since jQuery Masonry repositions elements purely by positioning, it does not play well with UI Sortable. People have posted complex solutions to this problem, but this simpler solution worked for me:

  1. Refresh masonry layout on Sortable’s start, change, and stop events
  2. While dragging, remove from the dragged item the class used to indicate it’s a masonry item
var $c = $('#my_container');
$c.masonry({
    itemSelector: '.masonry-item'
});
$c.sortable({
    start: function (e, ui) {
        ui.item.removeClass('masonry-item');
        $c.masonry('reload');
    },
    change: function (e, ui) {
        $c.masonry('reload');
    },
    stop: function (e, ui) {
        ui.item.addClass('masonry-item');
        $c.masonry('reload');
    }
});