Darren Hobbs

Ruby is so, like, web 2.0. More than two graduating classes have, er, graduated since Ruby became the next big thing. That makes it nearly your grandad’s social networking application programming language, in these ‘internet speed’ times we live in. This would be the same community that has just realised that network connections that survive beyond a single request are actually quite useful. But that’s my XMPP / HTTP rant, not this one.

I’ve been of the opinion that Javascript is a much underrated and very powerful language that was only missing a key ingredient to become a ‘real’ language and escape the browser.  The ingredient being the backing of a big enough commercial entity. Popular programming languages generally have one of two things: either a charismatic and beneficent despot or a powerful company behind them.  Examples? Naturally.

• Perl: Larry Wall
• Python: Guido van Rossum
• Ruby: Yukihiro Matsumoto

• Java: Sun
• .Net: Microsoft

And now…

• Javascript: Google

Google are (at the time of writing) on the cusp of releasing their web browser, Chrome. While Chrome has many interesting and cool features, the most interesting is that they’ve written their own Javascript virtual machine, called V8. And the people they’ve got writing it are not short of experience in the realm of VM’s. Lars Bak has worked on Self, Strongtalk and the Hotspot Java VM and was (last I heard) working on a Smalltalk VM for embedded devices called OOVM before the company got bought by Esmertec.

Javascript (strictly speaking ECMAscript 4th edition) also seems to pass Steve’s NBL test and now it has a VM with large commercial organisation backing it, which was the thing it most obviously needed, in my view, to get traction beyond the browser.

Final piece of evidence? This year JAOO has a Javascript track. It’s time.

Don’t use Double.NaN when you meant to say zero. Zero is, amazingly, a number.

Otherwise you might be buttumed to be buttociated with the consbreastution of the united states of buttinine.

Try the following Google searches:

buttociate

buttinine

buttume

And, my personal favourite: consbreastution

Haven’t laughed so hard all day. But then I’m easily breastillated.

Update: and there’s more! Wouldn’t want to be a buttembly language developer, or worse, get buttbuttinated.

Funny? Laughed my burte off.

Source: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Clbuttic-Mistake-.aspx

The process of migrating from movable type involved a bit of skimming over old posts. I was certainly, er, ‘younger’ back then. The me of 2002 certainly wrote a lot of crap nonsense.

Not sure the me of 2008 has significantly improved on that score, except whereby writing less at least reduces the number of opportunities to open my mouth and put my foot in it.

Plunge taken. Comments enabled on new posts. Come on spammers, I’m ready for you.  Or preferably, don’t.

All I need now is a bit of good old fashioned controversy to kickoff some heated ranting.

Huge endorsement to johncompanies hosting for the same day actioning of my request to switch off an old redhat version onto a shiny fresh Ubuntu install. On a sunday. After I decided this morning to impulsively eject movable type and switch to wordpress, and change distro’s while I was at it. Couple of polite emails confirming I’d backed up everything I needed and blam, old server gone, new server running.

There’ll be broken permalinks all over the place, but who uses links to find stuff anymore? Its all about the search. I’ve maintained the main RSS feed at least, using a bit of mod_rewrite magic.

Just got to get my head around WP now and sort out a theme other than the default.

Update: So it seems that the mod_rewrite rules I used have also ‘preserved’ some of the MT style archive links but due to all the posts getting renumbered on import they all comedically point to different places than they used to.  I like that. I think I’ll leave it.

Brand new server, brand new blog tool. Bear with me for a little while.

Today felt like the first day I discovered the world wide web. Pure awesome:

• Hotforwords
• James@War
• Ronald Jenkees
• DJ Doc Rok’s R&B Track (couldn’t find any other link so lifted it from hotforwords’ music page)
• Dr Horrible’s sing-along blog, also available in fullscreen from hulu
• The Box.net widget

Before today I had never even heard of any of these artifacts of amazing. What a couple of idle hours will find. Okay, five. Or so. Roughly. Maybe seven. Anyway.

PS. If it’s not too late to mention, hotforwords might be a bit NSFW. A little. More embarrassing than, you know, dodgy. Maybe shrink the window a bit before clicking. And look over your shoulder. Check for reflections in windows behind you. Its fine really, just, perhaps, hard to explain if you’re not prepared. She’s got 2 degrees in philology you know. Just explain you only watch it for the etymologies. That excuse always works.

One of the most common causes of sporadic bugs in swing applications is doing things on the wrong thread. Most common of these is when a thread that is not the Event Dispatch Thread does something that updates the gui. Its very easy to do accidentally as seemingly innocent operations done on a background thread can fire off event listeners and end up inside code it shouldn’t as a result.

CheckThreadViolationRepaintManager from the SwingHelper project is a very useful class that can be easily plumbed into a Swing application to report any wayward threads getting into gui code.

Also from the same stable is the EventDispatchThreadHangMonitor which can report when the Event Dispatch Thread spends too long outside its main loop (which will result in a sluggish and unresponsive gui).

So I was all fired up about migrating to wordpress, due to the rot this blog has suffered over time. (The category links have been broken for nearly 2 years now I think). I got as far as the following line in the (ahem) 5 minute install guide:

Create a database for WordPress on your web server, as well as a MySQL user who has all privileges for accessing and modifying it.

And now it all seems like way too much effort. I’m incredibly lazy when it comes to blog tools. Gone are the days when I would happily spend half a day tinkering with the tool prior to writing a 10 minute post. And I’m sick of blasted relational databases. A blog is just a bunch of text snippets with a few bits of metadata around the edges. Why not use a perfectly good filesystem for storing what is so easily represented as a bunch of files? It might even stand a chance of holding my attention long enough for me to finish installing it.

I really want to blog more, but I need the feedback of comments to help keep me going. Every time I’ve tried tinkering with movable type comments to allow me to turn them back on its been buried in spam within seconds, and I can’t be bothered figuring out which magic combination of plugins, captchas, blacklists and runic inscriptions I need to make it work.

I’m off to find some incredibly tedious housework to do that might make farting about with MySql seem like a reward and a treat.