|
title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. |
descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001. |
|
FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY!!!
Back-up your data and, when you bike, always wear white. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Affiliate links in green. |
|
|
x
MarkUpDown is the best Markdown editor for professionals on Windows 10. It includes two-pane live preview, in-app uploads to imgur for image hosting, and MultiMarkdown table support. Features you won't find anywhere else include...
You've wasted more than $15 of your time looking for a great Markdown editor. Stop looking. MarkUpDown is the app you're looking for. Learn more or head over to the 'Store now! |
|
| Thursday, February 28, 2002 | |
|
I downloaded Mac OS X 10.1.3 last night and today when I started IE 5, I was surprised just how quickly the app cranked up. If I didn't know better, I'd suspect Apple was optimizing OS X so that X wasn't just faster overall but explicitly optimized so that IE 5 was faster than it'd been before. If I had half a brain, this wouldn't surprise me. Apple's done the same for Photoshop; Photoshop was certainly the first thing to take advantage of dual processors in OS 9, just to name one example. The point I've figured out "all over again for the first time" is just how big an advantage IE has on Windows. Imagine -- not only do the IE programmers have insight into Windows that the people at, say, Mozilla don't have, the people writing Windows are going to do their darnest to work together with the IE programmers to ensure the fastest, most stable, and all around most pleasurable web browsing experience can be attained through the combination of Windows and IE. If Apple's giving Microsoft's products priority in OS X, just imagine the priority Microsoft is able to give itself when it comes to IE. Makes you appreciate the job the people at Mozilla are doing quite a bit more! posted by ruffin at 2/28/2002 02:04:00 PM |
|
| Wednesday, February 27, 2002 | |
|
Remember folks, in C# you're going to have to explicitly declare class variables public if you don't want them to be private [the default]. If you try to have another class mess with: namespace runProject { using System; public class testClass : object { int intSmack = 0; ... } You'll get a good ole: 'runProject.testClass.intSmack' is inaccessible due to its protection level ... error. Use public int intSmack = 0; Wasn't that useful?!! Who says this blog isn't more exciting than learning some randmo gamer is getting ready to buy a $50 video capture card so that you can view Quake on three different extinct consoles? [americans-only -- :^D] posted by ruffin at 2/27/2002 01:45:00 PM |
|
| Monday, February 25, 2002 | |
|
Your "hosts" file in Windows 2000 is in the following folder: C:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc posted by ruffin at 2/25/2002 10:59:00 AM |
|
| Sunday, February 24, 2002 | |
PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE Have you ever run "top" in your Mac OS X Terminal and wondered what the heck "TruBlueEnv" was? It's apparently Classic, and the ref to "blue" seems to be to the age-old notion that Classic was going to be called the "blue box" in the next version of MacOS. Not quite a googlewhack, (though it's easy to make one,if you ignore the fact that since TruBlueEnv isn't in the dictionary yet, it doesn't really count) but not a real commonly known fact yet either, according to Google. posted by ruffin at 2/24/2002 09:52:00 AM |
|
| Saturday, February 23, 2002 | |
|
It's a weblog about scripting and stuff like that -- the graphic at the top looks a little like something drawn by the people at Penny Arcade. In other unrelated news, Penny Arcade apparently is selling twelve freakin' dollar o' cash freakin' money coffee mugs. Sheesh. I meant to say that scripting blog looked somewhat interesting. It's yet another URL stolen from scottandrew.com. In the previous link to sa.com, we see just how focused Joe Andrew is in pushing the limits of the client side from within a browser. Certainly the days of the Java applet have been over for quite some time. Crimminy, yes, I realize that wasn't the point of the blurb on his blog; it was *my* point. For Americans -- :^) (I've seen it written that Americans need the smilies to understand you were making a joke, being sarcastic, or, in this case, sounding a bit harsher than you meant things just for laughs) posted by ruffin at 2/23/2002 06:59:00 PM |
|
|
From this morning's email: * The plasma Java benchmark -- even if you don't like Java, it's neat to gawk. * From an article examining if it's worth upgrading to VS.NET:
With the enhancements of VS.NET, it makes actual coding almost obsolete and this was shown at Bill Gate's keynote at VSLive. "The best way to avoid coding errors is to not code at all" This opens it up to beginners and lazy programmers who want hundreds of lines of code done for them. Although I might fall into the category of lazy programmer, I would still learn the language so I can code with my trusty notepad before stepping up to VS.NET. I wish more people felt that way, as I've been saying for months now. Microsoft could do many of us a real favor by keeping people who can't code out of the coding business. Unfortunately VB sells, and as long as the people who can't code have dollars... I think the best point of the article was the following (though I wonder why this guy who's obviously been programming at least a little while hasn't yet discovered vim; notepad is no fun): Apart from the drag and drop, free code and the features that come with it (ie. VSS, Visio etc.) there aren't any coding functions [that you can accomplish in VS.NET] that you can't do with Notepad. This wasn't the case with applications like VB6 where you had to have VB6 to create VB applications, in .NET you can use use the command-line compiler (although, creating a Windows Form application in notepad wouldn't be my preference). I'll probably expand on that later when I have more time. This really is the bottom line showing why .NET is a major step up from MS's past "closed" practices, and one of the fruits of this new tack is that C# IDE SharpDevelop, I like, at least in theory (admittedly not used it much yet). As long as the cmd line compilers are freely available for .NET, I really can't fault Microsoft's stronger push into the server side of life. One of the ideals I've heard more than one Linux user express was that anyone with a computer could learn to program -- and make "The Next Great [Software] Thing" -- for Linux for the price of a library card. With .NET anyone with a computer that can find access to a copy of Windows, give or take, should be able to do the same thing for Windows users. Long rant; sorry. posted by ruffin at 2/23/2002 02:33:00 PM |
|
| Friday, February 22, 2002 | |
|
Why doesn't Collection extend Cloneable and Serializable? [snip] For example, what does it mean to clone a Collection that's backed by a terabyte SQL database? Should the method call cause the company to requisition a new disk farm? ... Got a kick outta that. posted by ruffin at 2/22/2002 05:34:00 PM |
|
|
COMMENTARY--The idea expressed in many articles--that GNU/Linux is good for servers but not for the desktop--is a joke. The fact is, Linux will prevail. by some wacko what follows is heavily edited: GNGsNotGNU: I wonder if I agree with that. I think I do. The bottom line is that Linux is evolving, the need for the "latest and greatest" is gone in the PC world, and that eventually it'll catch up with the desktop just as it has with the server-side; an admittedly easier task, imo. randmo AIMer1: you really should try kde2 or gnome 1.4+ someday. they've gotten over several big humps i think -- fairly stable api(s) for doing apps quickly, fairly usable replacements for word, excel, and ie, and a large enough community of helpers to keep it going for a while, at least GNGsNotGNU: Sure, but obviously not on par with Windows. Once your proverbial mother can remove the "fairly" from that qualified statement, then we have a winner [and eventually this will happen]. GNGsNotGNU: "No one would buy a car with a welded-shut hood," GNGsNotGNU: I'm so tired of that analogy. randmo AIMer1: no one would buy a banana with a welded shut peel. so much better... posted by ruffin at 2/22/2002 01:48:00 PM |
|
|
What's an example of a Web Control, you ask? if you're still waiting for an answer, click the link already! posted by ruffin at 2/22/2002 10:49:00 AM |
|
| Thursday, February 21, 2002 | |
|
Don't, for a minute, think that you can get away with asking anybody to imagine how cool this would be. Don't think that they're looking at the functionality. They're not. They want to see pretty pixels. Steve Jobs understands this. Oh boy does he understand this. Engineers at Apple have learned to do things that make for great screen shots, like the gorgeous new 1024x1024 icons in the dock, even if they waste valuable real estate. And the Linux desktop crowd goes crazy about semitransparent xterms, which make for good screenshots but are usually annoying to use. Every time Gnome or KDE announces a new release I go straight to the screenshots and say, "oh, they changed the planet from Jupiter to Saturn. Cool." Never mind what they really did. from Joel on Software. This guy is right more than he's not. posted by ruffin at 2/21/2002 07:02:00 PM |
|
|
Now's the worst time to buy a Mac. How do I know? Because I can't take OS 9 off of my .5 GHz iBook. Apple's new OS X is and has been out. Apple's even comfortable enough that OS X is the default OS on new Macintoshes. This is the transition period, but we're still going in, not yet coming out. I've got an older 350 MHz G4 at work, and OS X is pitifully slow. It's like running underwater. Even on the 500 MHz iBook, things take long enough to happen you have time to notice. I should never be four words ahead typing than what I can see on the screen. What does this have to do with Mac OS 9? Wow, 9's speedy on both of the above Macs -- even my 240 G3 upgraded StarMax runs like a champ compared to OS X with 500 Mhz. I'm tempted to forgo all the advantages of OS X to get back to a place where my browser flies, Appleworks keeps up with typing, and all the software I want or need to use has already been written and well tested. My OS 9 performance for the same general tasks -- browsing, typing, iTuning, and even coding Java (VB on the Mac doesn't run very quickly at all :^D) -- are probably 5 times speedier, at least (subjectively) than OS X. When I'm not going to be coding for Java 2 or above, I tend to go right back to reboot-prone "Classic" Mac OS 9. If you want iDVD2 and you want it now, grab a new iMac. Otherwise grab a copy of yellow dog linux or, better yet, Darwin to get all that "new free software" (GNU Free software?) & a newer Java virtual machine and get back to work in OS 9 -- before you too are performing underwater aerobics with the bluehai, ur, early adopters. Or, um, buy AMD compatible hardware and skip the issue entirely. posted by ruffin at 2/21/2002 03:01:00 PM |
|
| Wednesday, February 20, 2002 | |
|
For all the slammin' I did of Joe VC++ and his ASP.NET treeview, the VB6 version of the treeview really is awfully useful when you know you need to have a Windows Explorer type interface. It never ceases to amaze me how many stock controls you take for granted in Windows when/if you use it, and just how easy it is to grab most every one from VB. I'm tempted to write a Gnutella client in VB with the fewest lines possible just to show what VB's good for, especially now that Limewire apparently feeds you ads. Glad I stopped updating at 1.6d. Anyhow, if only there were a hacker lang like VB (scripting lang < hacker lang < programming lang) that had the xplat nature of Java... And if only RealBasic were free. posted by ruffin at 2/20/2002 09:34:00 PM |
|
| Tuesday, February 19, 2002 | |
|
As if reading my mind... ZD Net News has an article today called The convergence of .NET and Java which points out some of the way .NET is creeping into areas where Java's had the upper hand in the past. There are also links from the article to two projects that take this potential convergence to their extremes. Util to take CLR bytecodes to plain Java VM bytecodes, if I read it correctly, and... Util to make native Java code compile to CLR like Visual J# but for Java code beyond 1.1.4, I imagine. One quote near the end of the ZD Net article suggests the author hasn't quite "got it" yet: You can expect IT budgets to develop for two predominant platforms: J2EE, and .NET I somewhat think and hope not. .NET has made not only convergent evolution an easier task but also "outbreeding" (between species, in this case, which, natch, makes the metaphor fall apart a bit). Legacy Java code -- and long-time Java software houses -- can be made to work with new .NET systems. Legacy VB/VC++ code can now be made to talk SOAP, etc to today's new Java apps. My original point from earlier today was that MS's "in" with the client and the extra "VB-esque" shortcuts programmers can take (eg, web controls *shudder*) if they assume MS and only MS clients will take the phenom of convergence on the server side to dominance by virtue of the simple business truth of "If I can program two systems that reach 97% of my clients in the same time that I could program one system that reaches 99.9%, well, I'm selling out to Bill". Get it? :^) posted by ruffin at 2/19/2002 12:25:00 PM |
|
|
I'm thinking .NET's common lang runtime (CLR) or whatever it's called now is an attempt to out-Java Java. Think about it -- what does Java do arguably better than anyone? GUIfide'd apps like limewire.org or server middleware that tends to spit its output to html or jsp files or faceless console apps (System.out.println)? Why isn't Microsoft making plans to port Windows Forms (for you Java programmers, let's say it's the "native" (though that's not quite right - native to .NET?) set of GUI widgets that parallels Swing -- but is horribly more intuitive) to BSD? They don't need to. They only have to get programmers to make the faceless middleware on their current server hardware. The clients that best access this jive will be Windows clients, and after programmers get used to these shortcuts (aka VB.NET) can the servers be far behind? Another ramblin' vomit from your friendly neighborhood blogger. posted by ruffin at 2/19/2002 09:01:00 AM |
|
|
As much so that I remember this as anyone else, O'Reilly has a four part series on running Apache on your OS X box. posted by ruffin at 2/19/2002 08:56:00 AM |
|
| Monday, February 18, 2002 | |
|
A while back I incoherently rambled about my fears that .NET would make for even lazier web programmers that those we're faced with today. Today, in an article with high quality quotes like, And as if the DataGrid wasn't enough, I then found the IE Web Controls. Finally, my beloved TreeView Control could take its place of prominence on my web pages. Like a lost, forgotten lover, my affair with this new technology was ablaze. ... I've begun to see these fears manifest. Luckily the author was basically admitting his misuse of .NET in this article, bringing, in this case, C++ and MFC biases and familiarities to bear on web programming in ways that they didn't really fit. This is much like my original rant in that I'd been afraid people would use .NET to shield themselves from learning to program for the web, but here it's from a fellow who wasn't a wacky VB programmer but a wacky VC++ one. Unfortunately, this guy sees that he didn't deliver the goods in a useful way but doesn't [yet] understand why his whole approach is wrong. Looks like .NET bringing VB programmers to the web is bad; bringing VC++ programmers might be even worse. As randmo AIMer1 says, "to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail". Do the people who publish these articles not notice that this [unmodified, double-clicked onto the project control] isn't useful??!!. Scary. In other news, I've started making a conscious effort to get used to vim for asp programming. Toss the mouse in the drink! posted by ruffin at 2/18/2002 12:15:00 PM |
|
| Saturday, February 16, 2002 | |
|
I keep forgetting the link, so I thought I'd blog SharpDevelop, "The Open Source Development Environment for .NET". Looks like it could be interesting as soon as they add code completion (aka, in MS (c) code, "Intellisense"). It also strikes me as odd everytime I see this C# IDE that's licensed under GPL. Talkin' about strange bedfellows. And remember, GNG (GNG's Not GNU) hates the GPL and loves the LGPL. :^) posted by ruffin at 2/16/2002 01:12:00 PM |
|
| Thursday, February 07, 2002 | |
|
From the VS.NET notes about upgrading an application that was previously written in VB 6.0: User Controls User controls created with Visual Basic 6.0 can be used in Visual Basic .NET, however there is no design-time support; user control projects can't be upgraded. Modifications to user controls should be done in Visual Basic 6.0. And believe me, they mean no design-time support. Forms can't access controls within a user control, nuttin'. In a recent VB6 app, we've got the majority of our functionality in user controls to make things easy to see -- sorta using the uc's like a CardLayout in Java. In VB.NET, I'm sunk. Lots of 'UPGRADE_WARNING: Couldn't resolve default property of object ucTemp.Left. Looks like this project is going to live its entire life as a VB6 app. This is not to say there's no such thing as a user control in VB.NET. Oh, there are user controls. Just for some reason MS won't translate 'em for you. Time to remake the GUIs and reinsert the logic. Half of it is just c&p; not sure how they can translate forms and not user controls. Anyhow, end vent. posted by ruffin at 2/07/2002 04:03:00 PM |
|
|
If you thought C# wasn't Java, you're only partly right. Showing how close the two really are, Microsoft has released the Microsoft Java Language Conversion Assistant Beta 1. Basically this thing takes Java 1.1.4 compliant code (note that's the very old 1.1.4, not 1.4, which, if I believe all my emails, just had its official release today (Update: It's true, and a little coincidental?)) and converts it directly to C# code, down to AWT (though AWT isn't fully supported in this release). Makes me wonder what MS could have done if Sun hadn't've stopped them at 1.1.4. C# plus the MS JLCA could == a better gcj on Windows. posted by ruffin at 2/07/2002 10:41:00 AM |
|
| Tuesday, February 05, 2002 | |
|
Got .NET? Got Perl programmers? The MS take on supporting alternative prog langs (and where to go to get .NET compilers) A 3rd party, $295 Perl.NET compiler posted by ruffin at 2/05/2002 01:14:00 PM |
|
| Saturday, February 02, 2002 | |
|
If you're thinking about putting out some shareware and you believe all you read, this article might greatly change your opinion on what to release. In brief, it's a study from around 94 that seems to suggest people are 5 times more likely to register crippled software than software with nag screens only. I believe it. posted by ruffin at 2/02/2002 11:58:00 AM |
|
| Friday, February 01, 2002 | |
|
Thanks to Matt, the human Internet search engine, we have an answer for why the doctype defn in yesterday's "excercise" blew things up: We notice that the doctype had "The public identifier "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN", with a system identifier." This puts Mozilla into "strict" mode, which causes bugs to happen with stuff like that described here: If your bug is with the layout of a particular web page, and the problem is caused by either: The page using proprietary HTML, such as the LAYER tag The page using proprietary DOM extensions, such as document.all The page being rendered in quirks mode (as described above) Sure enough, the second one, in bold, is what the page was using, so document.all was out the window and, with it, the menu. posted by ruffin at 2/01/2002 11:34:00 AM |
|
|
Just got an email pointing towards the "Ultimate client-side JavaScript client sniff. Version 3.03". This is certainly the be-all, end-all of detecting which client is taking a look at your web page, but has much too much overhead for me to ever think about using. It's been around for a while, but I thought I'd blog it. Here's an example of what I mean. There's a check for Javascript version and also for what kind of OS the client's using. Here's part of the OS check: var is_aix = (agt.indexOf("aix") !=-1); // IBM var is_aix1 = (agt.indexOf("aix 1") !=-1); var is_aix2 = (agt.indexOf("aix 2") !=-1); var is_aix3 = (agt.indexOf("aix 3") !=-1); var is_aix4 = (agt.indexOf("aix 4") !=-1); That is to say, if we're interested in seeing "uplevel content", we're probably using Mozilla. I don't need five checks for OS when it has no bearing on what I'm going to do with my html -- I'm not going to write a different page for AIX. I just don't care what OS we've got (on a practical level). What am I going to do with these vars? You might say "hack them out", which is exactly what I do, but with these bytes, not a subset of their 14k of bytes (incl whitespace): if (document.layers) { // NS 4
A little from my ye ole email reply: Regardless of this falling into "CLASSIC MISTAKE #2 IN CLIENT DETECTION: CONFUSING OBJECT DETECTION WITH CLIENT DETECTION", it's quite a bit smaller than the 14k crap this bit has. I'm also, for better or worse, not worried about WebTV users or HotJava or Opera. They get whatever's in the "else", which is what lynx users get too, or they get whatever they pretend to be (eg Opera has partial DOM1 -- if their impl stinks, that's their job, I think.) posted by ruffin at 2/01/2002 09:50:00 AM |
|
|
| |
|
|
All posts can be accessed here: Just the last year o' posts: |
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|