I was just taking a look through my father in-law’s awesome record collection. Omg. Van Halen, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac… I could go on and on. So much incredible classic rock in one little egg crate.

Jameson took three little baby steps completely on his own today! His balance is great but he really doesn’t understand what he’s doing yet

Heather and I recently had our engagement pictures taken by the lovely ladies at The R2 Studio (heavy flash). They were incredible and made us feel like rock stars. Head over to the blog post and then check out the full set.

Update: Our photos also got featured on Hi-Fi weddings. Sweet!

The syntax for delegate() is simpler than live() and it offers a potential performance boost when you know the context of future objects that will be rendered to the page.

• Primitive types (boolean and numeric) are passed by value
• Objects, arrays, and functions are passed by reference
• Strings are immutable so Javascript handles them internally

Why this matters

Every time you pass an object to a function and change it, the original will also be modified. This is understandable behavior seeing as the object could be quite large and therefore memory-intensive if were to be copied at will. So how can you pass an object by value? Javascript: The Definitive Guide gives us a clue (emphasis added):

A function can use the reference to modify properties of the object or elements of the array. But if the function overwrites the reference with a reference to a new object or array, that modification is not visible outside of the function.

Basically you have to create a new object and copy each of the original properties to it. I have three things to say about this:

1. It’s stupid, why can’t there just be a way to specify by value like any other language?
2. There’s no way around this limitation. It’s built into Javascript on purpose by people much smarter than me.
3. jQuery can help

jQuery to the rescue

jQuery has a nice method that can be used to copy one object to another: jQuery.extend(). Just add this line to the top of your function when you do not intend to modify the original:

var newObj = jQuery.extend({}, oldObj);

Make sure to check out the documentation for more information if you’ve got a complex object. Also, if you’re looking for a non-jQuery solution, How to copy arrays and objects in Javascript provides true object cloning (not copying) which may make it more efficient.

So what was the problem? return false. There was another event bound to the element which had a return false at the end, thus preventing subsequent events from firing. Once I removed it (and replaced it with event.preventDefault) everything worked as expected. Moral of the story is to be judicious when using return false.

For more information read jQuery Events: Stop (Mis)Using Return False. Also, there was a really helpful post/discussion over on StackOverflow regarding when and how to use return properly. Check it out.