You can also find this plugin on the jQuery Plugins site.

Download this release.

If you use the plugin, please donate or ask your boss to make a donation!

Eleven people contributed code to this release. A big thank you to: Bogdan Litescu, Burkhard Reffeling, DexterPark, Erik van Konijnenburg, James Thompson, Nick Schonning, Niklas Nilsson, Paul Cichonski, Robbert Wethmar, g1smd and jcbowman. Also thank you to everyone who reported issues on GitHub or commented on them.

The full changelog:

• Revert to also converting parameters of range method to numbers. Closes gh-702
• Replace most usage of PHP with mockjax handlers. Do some demo cleanup as well, update to newer masked-input plugin. Keep captcha demo in PHP. Fixes #662
• Remove inline code highlighting from milk demo. View source works fine.
• Fix dynamic-totals demo by trimming whitespace from template content before passing to jQuery constructor
• Fix min/max validation. Closes gh-666. Fixes #648
• Fixed ‘messages’ coming up as a rule and causing an exception after being updated through rules(“add”). Closes gh-670, fixes #624
• Add Korean (ko) localization. Closes gh-671
• Improved the UK postcode method to filter out more invalid postcodes. Closes #682
• Update messages_sv.js. Closes #683
• Change grunt link to the project website. Closes #684
• Move remote method down the list to run last, after all other methods applied to a field. Fixes #679
• Update plugin.json description, should include the word ‘validate’
• Fix typos
• Fix jQuery loader to use path of itself. Fixes nested demos.
• Update grunt-contrib-qunit to make use of PhantomJS 1.8, when installed through node module ‘phantomjs’
• Make valid() return a boolean instead of 0 or 1. Fixes #109 – valid() does not return boolean value

• Please post questions to the official Using jQuery Plugins Forum, tagging your question with (at least) “validate”. Keep your question short and succinct and provide code; a testpage makes it much more likely that you get an useful answer in no time.
• Please post bug reports and other contributions (enhancements, features, eg. new validation methods) to the GitHub issue tracker

But then there’s endless platforms with informal reputation systems, where there is no explicit number or even rules to increase or decrease your reputation. Yet reputation has a lot of influence on those other platforms as well. Consider web standard processes. If you know anything about them, you’ll recognize the name Hixie. But if you’re new, Hixie is just another name. When you’re new and post to a standards mailing list the first time and no one recognizes your name, you’re much more likely to get ignored.

I wonder if there’s any platform that’s used daily that doesn’t have some form of reputation system. Is there any where reputation really doesn’t matter?

Also, is there a way to convert informal reputation systems like those around web standards into formal ones? Could we build a service that lists people involved in web standards and gives them points for good deeds?

To start, a classic, two iPhone apps screaming at each other:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-7mQhSZRgM

Up next, goats that sound like humans:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIbQCnPBBgk

And finally, true facts about the Mantis:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aSCPmabRpM

Have a good week!

To start with: What about taxes?

Taxes

In short: You only pay income tax in Germany. You don’t add Umsatzsteuer, like you would for german clients, and you don’t pay any taxes in the US.

The legal base for that is an agreement between Germany and the US fromavoid double taxing. The german law that puts the agreement into practice is called “Abkommen vom 29. AugustDeutschland und den Vereinigzur Vermeidung der Doppelbesteuerung und zur Verhinderung der Steuerverkürzung auf dem Gebiet der Steuern vom Einkommen und vom Vermögen und einiger anderer Steuern”. I’ve looked up the page that has the full text of the agreement, the law text and a few change document (patches!) for you. The relevant article of the agreement itself is article 7, “Business Profits”.

As for why you don’t have to charge and pay Umsatzsteuer for US clients: I can’t tell you where exactly that’s regulated. Though there’s a multi-language ph, established by a cooperation between  Germany, Netherlands and Belgium. You can find free local phcountry on their page here. I called there back instarting my freelance career and called there again today to check if the service is still up and running. You’re likely to talk to somefirst (they speak german, too), but you can leave a number for a german colleague to call you back. I got the information about the Doppelbesteuerungsabkommen (DBA) from there, while my german tax consultant had no clue.

How to get paid

Before you start your first project with a client from the US, you need to agree on how to get paid. There are : What currency are you getting paid in? How will you get your money?

For the currency you can agree on a hourly rate (or whatever you do) in USD. In this case, whenever the exchange rate between USD and EUR changes, you end up with more or less money then you originally planned with. This can be both good and bad. You risk getting paid less, with the chance of getting paid more. The alternative is to get paid in EUR. That moves the exchange rate gamble to your client, since there’s no way to completely avoid it. On newer projects I recently tend to ask to get paid in EUR, so far no client had a problem with that.

Either way, next up is figuring out how to actually get your money. While PayPal works for small amounts, their percentage-based fee gets really expensive when invoicing a full month of work. Even at a pretty low rate of 50€ per hour you’d invoice 8000€ for a full month of work, which means several hundred Euros in PayPal fees. In that case, wire transfers through old school banks are a lot cheaper. They will also charge you, usually on both ends, but at least in my experience so far, they only charge a fixed price based on fixed thresholds. For example, anything below 5000€ costs you 20€, anything below 20.000€ costs you 50€, or something like that. In practice, there’s still a lot of variations: On , I would invoice in USD and eventually an amount of EUR would land on my business bank account. Inbetween, both banks charged fees and converted from USD to EUR. On another project, I invoiced in EUR and got exactly the amount I invoiced. I’m not sure how exactly that worked and how much my client ended up paying on top, or if they just used a less greedy bank, but it worked pretty well for me.

So much for the money aspects. I have

Timezones

Timezones are annoying. Timez, calendars are annoying, but there’s no way around them. And the idea to adopt UTC time everywhere isn’t very likely to go anywhere, considering that we can’t even drop stupid daylight saving time (DST). Speaking of which, twice per year there’s this fun period between a few days and a few weeks where Germany is still on DST, while the US isn’t anymore. Or the other way round. In practice, the time difference between you and your client shifts for , for a while. So every single meeting is at a different time.

For that and for keeping your sanity in general, use a calendar application that allows you to specify the timez. Google Calendar does that, it even allows you to display your calendar with multiple timezones at once. In my case that meant setting all the timezones of meetings related to the jQuery project to east coast time (ET). That way, the meeting time would adjust on my calendar for those periods of the year.

Different timezones also mean different work hours. Unless you’re already sleeping during the day and working at night, you should find clients that are on the east coast and get up pretty early. If you get up late, your work hours might still not fully overlap, but at least you share several hours during each day and you can still have some non-work activities in your evenings. Working with people on the west coast and their is really exhausting, since your day is dthey get up.

Closing Notes

There’s probably a lot more I could write about this topic, for example about visting the US in person. Or about the tools that help work and meet remote colleagues. If there’s something you’d like to know about, tell me! In the comments below, send an email or mention me on Twitter. If you have corrections or suggestions to anything, please also let me know and I’ll update the post accordingly.

It has been a few weeks since I bought a brand new Apple MacBook Air Mid 2012. As far as I tested it is a very solid piece of hardware. Nevertheless, there is one annoying point I want to show up within this post.

All began when I noticed a gray gradient starting in the lower region of the display close to where it ends. This gradient is well visible if the display is dimmed to around 4 points in the brightness settings and if you are looking at a white area in fullscreen mode. It is around 3-4mm thick. After I compared it with the MacBook Air 2010 of Jörn we found out that it only affects the MacBook Air 2012. So I called Apple Care and they told me that it shouldn’t be like this but to be sure I should go to an Apple Store.

So I went to the closest Apple Store and explained my concern. After the sales guy agreed, we compared it with the other MacBook Air 2012 in the store and found out that each of them has this issue. So I did some research investigation and as far as I cantell based on my personal experience and from what I found on the web, the quality of the panels in the MacBook Air of the current 2012 generation decreased compared to the MacBook Airs built in 2010.

There are three manufacturers supplying panels for the MacBook Air 2012. Here is a short break down of the facts:

Samsung: Best white and black levels, best contrast, best color gamut
LG: Best color accuracy but the colors appears to be washed out. This can be handled by the color settings
AUO: Used in the 11″ MacBook Air, but I couldn’t find any information about this panel.

To find out which panel you have type this into the terminal

ioreg -lw0 | grep IODisplayEDID | sed "/[^<]*</s///" | xxd -p -r | strings -6

The first to letters are relevant:

LP = LG
LT = Samsung
B = AUO

Unfortunately, all of those panels have the issue I described above – some more and some less visible (even the replacements). If you can’t life with it, don’t buy a MacBook Air 2012.

Some references:

• http://www.anandtech.com/show/6063/macbook-air-13inch-mid-2012-review/3
• https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4131248?start=0&tstart=0
• http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-1195183.html
• https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2772728?start=0&tstart=0

Backwards compatibility is still going strong: The plugin should work with anything from jQuery 1.4.x to 1.9.x.

This is the first release to make it to the new jQuery Plugins site.

Download this release.

If you use the plugin, please donate or ask your boss to make a donation!

The full changelog:

• Remove clearing as numbers of `min`, `max` and `range` rules. Fixes #455. Closes gh-528.
• Update pre-existing labels – fixes #430 closes gh-436
• Fix $.validator.format to avoid group interpolation, where at least IE8/9 replaces -bash with the match. Fixes #614
• Fix mimetype regex
• Add plugin manifest and update headers to just MIT license, drop unnecessary dual-licensing (like jQuery).
• Hebrew messages: Removed dots at end of sentences – Fixes gh-568
• French translation for require_from_group validation. Fixes gh-573.
• Allow groups to be an array or a string – Fixes #479
• Removed spaces with multiple MIME types
• Fix some date validations, JS syntax errors.
• Remove support for metadata plugin, replace with data-rule- and data-msg- (added in 907467e8) properties.
• Added sftp as a valid url-pattern
• Add Malay (my) localization
• Update localization/messages_hu.js
• Remove focusin/focusout polyfill. Fixes #542 – Inclusion of jquery.validate interfers with focusin and focusout events in IE9
• Localization: Fixed typo in finnish translation
• Fix RTM demo to show invalid icon when going from valid back to invalid
• Fixed premature return in remote function which prevented ajax call from being made in case an input was entered too quickly. Ensures remote validation always validates the newest value.
• Undo fix for #244. Fixes #521 – E-mail validation fires immediately when text is in the field.

• Please post questions to the official Using jQuery Plugins Forum, tagging your question with (at least) “validate”. Keep your question short and succinct and provide code; a testpage makes it much more likely that you get an useful answer in no time.
• Please post bug reports and other contributions (enhancements, features, eg. new validation methods) to the GitHub issue tracker

Enjoy!

For the second time this year, we arranged a sponsored speaker to come to our event and speak there, with a local company paying the travel expenses (big thanks to Railslove and Denkwerk). We had Felix Geisendörfer come from Berlin to talk about NodeCopter. He told us how the idea came together, how it went from a singular event to a whole series with more planned for the summer next year. He live demoed his nodejs based library to program the drone, then went on to even write a custom firmware to execute directly on the drone itself. It was a lot of fun, mixed with learning about binary encodings to write a drone firmware.

As a kind of warm-up, Sebastian Golasch, by now a regular at our event, talked about what he dubbed Dirty Little Helper. Walking us through various hardware-browser setups, including his MakeyMakey based Simon-Says clone, he eventually presented his custom home automation setup. Remotely turn off lights and use your laptop camera to check on things, all DIY-style with cheap and simple components. I’m ordering a MakeyMakey!

The third talk, with which the evening started, was by Jan-Christoph Borchardt talking about Unhosted and Remote Storage. His colleague and founder of Unhosted told me about the ideas behind Unhosted last year at a beer.js event in Berlin, so it was quite interesting to me how far they came along. The remoteStorage specification, along with a reference implementation, can be used today to build applications where you control where your data is stored, instead of having to buy-in to editors attached to storage like Google Docs forces you to. Its unclear how much mainstream traction this will be able to achieve, but its an important idea worth spreading.

Those were the three talks that we advertised with. We ended up with a record number of visitors of 50! A lot of people also followed our beer.js invitation and stayed around after the talks, forcing Bumi to refill the beer fridge, since also a record number of drinks were consumed. Thanks to 5apps for sponsoring that.

I’m excited about next year. We’ve got one talk lined up for January already, but are, as usual, looking for more. If you want to present something, let us know (Twitter, email).

Anyway, the jQuery validation plugin 1.10.0 is here! While the very recently launched Pledige.org campaign is just at the start, I hope this release helps convince you that the project isn’t dead. On the contrary, this release brings you all the improvements that were built during those 11 months. A big chunk was contributed by Max Lynch, kudos to him!

What changed? One cool new feature is the ability to specify messages with data- attributes. The next release should bring more html5y support like that, but for now you can put data-msg="Please please fill out this field!" into your markup, or specify one message per method: data-msg-required="Really need this" data-msg-minlength="Moar characters please" (please don’t use these messages in your application…).

Apart from that we’ve got a ton of updates on the outskirts: Localized messages now use their correct ISO codes, a lot of language files got added or improved. Additional methods got a few new citizens and updates to existing methods.

Backwards compatibility is still going strong: The plugin should work with anything from jQuery 1.3.x to 1.8.x.

Download this release.

Don’t forget to donate and spread the word!

The full changelog:

• Corrected French strings for nowhitespace, phoneUS, phoneUK and mobileUK based upon community feedback.
• rename files for language_REGION according to the standard ISO_3166-1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1), for Taiwan tha language is Chinese (zh) and the region is Taiwan (TW)
• Optimise RegEx patterns, especially for UK phone numbers.
• Add Language Name for each file, rename the language code according to the standard ISO 639 for Estonian, Georgian, Ukrainian and Chinese (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes)
• Added croatian (HR) localization
• Existing French translations were edited and French translations for the additional methods were added.
• Merged in changes for specifying custom error messages in data attributes
• Updated UK Mobile phone number regex for new numbers. Fixes #154
• Add element to success call with test. Fixes #60
• Fixed regex for time additional method. Fixes #131
• resetForm now clears old previousValue on form elements. Fixes #312
• Added checkbox test to require_from_group and changed require_from_group to use elementValue. Fixes #359
• Fixed dataFilter response issues in jQuery 1.5.2+. Fixes #405
• Added jQuery Mobile demo. Fixes #249
• Deoptimize findByName for correctness. Fixes #82 – $.validator.prototype.findByName breaks in IE7
• Added US zip code support and test. Fixes #90
• Changed lastElement to lastActive in keyup, skip validation on tab or empty element. Fixes #244
• Removed number stripping from stripHtml. Fixes #2
• Fixed invalid count on invalid to valid remote validation. Fixes #286
• Add link to file_input to demo index
• Moved old accept method to extension additional-method, added new accept method to handle standard browser mimetype filtering. Fixes #287 and supersedes #369
• Disables blur event when onfocusout is set to false. Test added.
• Fixed value issue for radio buttons and checkboxes. Fixes #363
• Added test for rangeWords and fixed regex and bounds in method. Fixes #308
• Fixed TinyMCE Demo and added link on demo page. Fixes #382
• Changed localization message for min/max. Fixes #273
• Added pseudo selector for text input types to fix issue with default empty type attribute. Added tests and some test markup. Fixes #217
• Fixed delegate bug for dynamic-totals demo. Fixes #51
• Fix incorrect message for alphanumeric validator
• Removed incorrect false check on required attribute
• required attribute fix for non-html5 browsers. Fixes #301
• Added methods “require_from_group” and “skip_or_fill_minimum”
• Use correct iso code for swedish
• Updated demo HTML files to use HTML5 doctype
• Fixed regex issue for decimals without leading zeroes. Added new methods test. Fixes #41
• Introduce a elementValue method that normalizes only string values (don’t touch array value of multi-select). Fixes #116
• Support for dynamically added submit buttons, and updated test case. Uses validateDelegate. Code from PR #9
• Fix bad double quote in test fixtures
• Fix maxWords method to include the upper bound, not exclude it. Fixes #284
• Fixed grammar error in german range validator message. Fixes #315
• Fixed handling of multiple class names for errorClass option. Test by Max Lynch. Fixes #280
• Fix jQuery.format usage, should be $.validator.format. Fixes #329
• Methods for ‘all’ UK phone numbers + UK postcodes
• Pattern method: Convert string param to RegExp. Fixes issue #223
• grammar error in german localization file
• Added Estonian localization for messages
• Improve tooltip handling on themerollered demo
• Add type=”text” to input fields without type attribute to please qSA
• Update themerollered demo to use tooltip to show errors as overlay.
• Update themerollered demo to use latest jQuery UI (along with newer jQuery version). Move code around to speed up page load.
• Fixed min error message broken in Japanese.
• Update form plugin to latest version. Enhance the ajaxSubmit demo.
• Drop dateDE and numberDE methods from classRuleSettings, leftover from moving those to localized methods
• Passing submit event to submitHandler callback
• Fixed #219 – Fix valid() on elements with dependency-callback or dependency-expression.
• Improve build to remove dist dir to ensure only the current release gets zipped up
• Bumping version to 2.0.0pre

• Please post questions to the official Using jQuery Plugins Forum, tagging your question with (at least) “validate”. Keep your question short and succinct and provide code; a testpage makes it much more likely that you get an useful answer in no time.
• Please post bug reports and other contributions (enhancements, features, eg. new validation methods) to the GitHub issue tracker

Enjoy!

This has been the, a tad silly, tag line for the jQuery Validation Plugin for a few years now. Back in 2006, when Jörn Zaefferer started that plugin, he was still employed as a Java developer, contributing to jQuery mostly in his free time. Of the half-dozens plugins he started then, the Validation Plugin became the most succesful and is still quite popular today (builtwith.com knows about more than 300.000 websites using the plugin).

Since late 2010, when Jörn went freelance to focus on just JavaScript projects (no more Java!), maintenance of the plugin didn’t go as well as planned. Early 2012, appendTo was generous to support the project, namely with Max Lynch work through dozens of pull requests and issues, landing a total of 28 commits. Since Max went on to create his own startup, the project went rather quiet again.

This is going to change! And you can be a part of that!

Jörn is looking for donations to spend quality time on the project. The roadmap below outlines a lot of work, probably a lot more than than can be covered by the 4000€ he’s currently asking for.

But that also depends on how much people will contribute in other ways. One part of this effort is to build a community around the plugin.

How can you help?

There’s a few things you can do:

• You can directly donate to the campaign, any amount helps.
• You ask your friends, coworkers, boss, spouse and whoever else, to help. If you’re part of a local JavaScript meetup, ask people there.
• You can also help with the project itself: Look at the roadmap below and see if there’s something you can help with directly or indirectly. Know a good designer who could help with logo and website design? See if you can get them in touch with me. Know a technical writer who could help with website copy and documentation? Also very welcome!

The campaign also provides a detailed roadmap for what I’m planning to do with the plugin.

Spread the word

Help us get enough donations to get this project the attention it deserves. Share it on Twitter, Facebook, G+, Orkut, in your office, local newspaper, train station, airport, parliament! Call your senator!

This eerily reminds me of Shadowrun – not in a good way:

“The new texts reveal that TPP negotiators are considering a dispute resolution process that would grant transnational corporations special authority to challenge countries’ laws, regulations and court decisions in international tribunals that circumvent domestic judicial systems.”

In other words, corporations would get the ability to bypass national courts. Its not at all surprising that this trade agreement is negotiated behind closed doors, where 100% transparency would be in order.

Speaking of making laws, here’s a nice german example where more transparency would also help the matter. Also I like the cynical formulation here:

“Die Verbände von Zeitungs– und Zeitschriftenverlegern, BDZV und VDZ, gaben nur eine dürre gemeinsame Erklärung heraus, die sich liest, als seien ihre Sprecher mit Waffengewalt dazu gezwungen worden, sie zu formulieren, und hätten den Zugang zum Presseverteiler nur im Tausch gegen mehrere Konjunktive herausgerückt.”

Found in an article about the german “Leistungsschutzrecht”.

The Melting North

Back to more global discussions: Don’t you also agree that the melting artic is an awesome opportunity? No? Well, that’s what Shell thinks. And they’ve set up a big-ass campaign to convince others. With headlines like this:

For hundreds of years, explorers have battled the Arctic.
Today, we’re finally winning.

One activist group figured they could to something about that, and produced this fake PR fail video. Its pretty well done, but still a fake, as this making-of also shows.

Those PR and counter-PR campaigns are rather useless if you actually want to get to know what’s going on in the Artic. More by chance I found a special about that exact topic in The Economist (read it on the plane to SF). The full special can be read online, starting with “The Melting North”. There’s seven more articles in that series – the links are somewhat hidden in a popup menu above the main header (look for “Special report: The Arctic”).

Keep in mind that The Economist, let’s say, isn’t sceptic of capitalism. In this case I think that’s actually a healthy perspective, as you’d want to understand the perspective of companies like Shell.

Closing Videos

If you’ve came this far, you’ve deserved something kick back and watch. To start, someone explains how to use an Abacus. Its in german though. In particular the division, close to the end, is really interesting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwabVzlobZI

Watch Dogs Gameplay Trailer

And one more video, a gameplay trailer for “Watch Dogs”. This is pretty much the most impressive video game trailer I’ve seen in a long time. And not just because it shows actual gameplay (instead of pointless prerendered scenes). The game seems to be an open world game with plenty of gameplay options, in a setting that looks like a bit like a mixture of Neuromancer (aka pure Cyberpunk, not the Shadowrun fantasy mashup) and Daniel Suarez’ Daemon/Freedom duology (which I can’t recommend enough). Especially the last scene, where other agents are “activated” to help the main character, seems to be heavily inspired by the Darknet.