My brother (the world’s biggest Star Wars fan) just let me know that in August of this year George Lucas will be releasing a new Star Wars film.

Seriously.

No joke.

Wanna see the trailer?

It is all computer animated and follows a similar style to the animated series “mini movies” they had on Cartoon Network. It looks really, really, really cool. What is even better is, as far as I can tell…no Jar Jar. Sign me up.

The only thing I don’t get is that in the movie (and the television show that follows it) Anakin has a padawan. That seems a bit weird. At the end of Episode 2 Anakin is 18 and in the beginning of Episode 3 he is 21. That means Lucas has about 3 years to play with before “little annie” becomes “crazy big man in a helmet”. Not really enough time to go from Padawan to Jedi Knight to Jedi Knight with a Padawan himself.

I dunno…but really, do I care? Nah. Maybe he took the advanced course at ITT or something…its got lightsabers, so I am good.

Recently I was working with a client who wanted to display a product catalog with an accordion. I have worked with accordions on several other projects in the past so I said “No problem!”. Once I got to work I noticed that there was a big difference between the accordions I had worked with before and this beast…this one was going to be dynamic. Worse yet…each level of the accordion depended on the one above it (known as hierarchical data). Yuck.

Early on I was still optimistic about the whole thing, but as the hours rolled on and my solution still didn’t work, I began to get frustrated. What started as a tale of woe ends on a happy note because I did get it all working. In order to spare you the pain I will explain how I got it working with a pretty easy solution.

Off we go. Read the rest of this entry »