Comments for Graceful Exits

Comment on Background HTTP fetching and cacheing in ASP/VBScript by jps

jps — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 12:47:04 +0000

Well, mostly I’m confusing sanitized code with an unmodified snippet to invoke it, as I added the invocation snippet to this post at the last minute. Should all be consistent now.

(I certainly haven’t been able to test the sanitized version, if that’s what you mean: it goes entirely against the grain, certainly; but it’s impossible for various reasons that I’ll tell you about later.)

Comment on Background HTTP fetching and cacheing in ASP/VBScript by David

David — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 12:24:37 +0000

Erm, you declare “strKey” but don’t use it, and assign to strUrlEnd, but appear to be using strUrlKey, have you been searching and replacing without recompiling?

Comment on Belated and potentially unreliable discussion of Google Chrome by jps

jps — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:12:27 +0000

There’s a fair bit in there that needs fixing, that’s true, both in the UI and in the core application. But if a beta of OpenOffice 3.0 came out and it was this slick, then everyone would be applauding; if the first beta of Gmail had been this good then there’d probably have been much fewer sarcastic comments about it being in beta so long…1

Comment on Belated and potentially unreliable discussion of Google Chrome by film fan

film fan — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 11:38:30 +0000

i keep learning about more and more advantages and features with Chrome, with privacy, for example; now if only they would take care of it’s cookie management glitches…

Comment on The TimeToLead.eu technical stack: Django and Flex by jps

jps — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:21:17 +0000

I’m sorry if me expressing an opinion about Flash galls you so much that you have to write impolite rhetorical questions about it on a post that almost entirely talks about other technologies. I had no idea it would touch a nerve.

I appreciate that you’re probably a busy person, and you therefore expect me to provide citations and user studies to back up every single opinion I express, that you might possibly like to quibble with, every time I write something and publish it on the web. But I’m a busy person too, and I’m writing blog posts here, not an encyclopaedia. I have mentioned my opinions on Flash in previous blog posts, but only tangentially, because I don’t care about it as much as you seem to do.

In my limited experience there do exist cross-browser problems, and along with proprietary lockin and binary transmission they’re something that I might discuss at a later date when someone asks me more nicely than you have. In addition, its ubiquity if anything makes software like Adblock harder to implement in a targeted manner.

Oddly, I didn’t actually mind Flash in 2002; I’m starting to dislike it again now. I console myself with the fact that some people are destined to be entirely out of touch with current fashions. You should see my wardrobe.

Comment on The TimeToLead.eu technical stack: Django and Flex by lowdown

lowdown — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:37:24 +0000

>>I’m no particular fan of Flash myself, but it fulfills the remit admirably here.

What’s with the qualification? Is that to maintain some sort of nerd cred? Why are you not a ‘fan of flash’? Hate video that runs nicely? Hate a 96% install base with no cross browser problems? I mean seriously, hating Flash is totally ‘02.

Have you noticed the Adblock (non-Plus version) extension for firefox completely blocks any and all SWFObject loaded SWFs?

Comment on Spliticket running again with BeautifulSoup by jps

jps — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 08:49:32 +0000

(I should add, for anyone thinking: “well, duh!” that I did know about teh soup before now; I just saw the non-monolithic install options and presumed it wouldn’t be installable on shared hosting.)

Comment on Trailing commas and unfeasibly high line numbers by jps

jps — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 18:04:18 +0000

Ah, of course. I tend to forget that Javascript even has dynamic code generation: I almost feel like, why would you bother? It’s such a maintenance headache, and you can almost always avoid it outside of deep-framework calls.

That would also explain why closures provide the perfect alternative to giving e.g. setTimeout a string of text to evaluate.

Comment on Trailing commas and unfeasibly high line numbers by Piers Cawley

Piers Cawley — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 23:39:14 +0000

One of the principles of good library design in Perl was/is that, although Perl allows for dynamic code generation with eval STRING, you do everything in your power to avoid using it. This principle arose as the result of bitter experience.

In a language with closures and dynamic dispatch, it’s amazing what you can achieve before you have to resort to dynamic code generation (about the only place where I’d say it’s legitimate is when a section of code is painfully slow as a result of indirection, can be massively sped up through code generation/compilation and is a ‘hot’ part of the code. I can count the occasions when I’ve needed to do this on the fingers of one hand, if that.)

Javascript has pretty much the same feature set when it comes to avoding code generation, which can only be a good thing.

Comment on Successful musicians write songs that other people like by argle

argle — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:57:57 +0000

I actually got all the way to the end of the article before I realised the title had suckered me into reading something that wasn’t about music in the slightest.