Random February Thoughts

In an effort to inspire me to write something else, I am throwing a few thoughts out from the last month.

My orchestra, The Columbia Orchestra, is playing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for our next concert. The orchestra is trying to make at least a small cultural event out of it. There is a website (embracingthemillions.com) a flickr discussion group (flickr.com/groups/embracingthemillions), and a number of artists (not just musicians) participating in the event. Since I threw together the website (no comments please, I’ve been very busy), I know the statistics of people visiting it. And there are quite a few people visiting. What I can’t figure out is with 30 or so people visiting per-day, why hasn’t anyone a) commented, b) written something on the discussion board? I made a post in the discussion group. It took me a few minutes at best. No one else has posted. Are people’s lives really so busy that they can’t be bothered? I’m confused by this. Technology aside, I am delighted to be playing Beethoven, he was simply a genius.

I went to see the Ingmar Bergman film, The Magician the other day at the AFI Silver Theater. I liked the quirky nature of the film, and found it to be totally engaging (I’ve yet to see one of his films that isn’t). I regret not being able to see more movies from the first part of the Bergman Retrospective they are doing now, as I have been ridiculously busy of late. However, I do own most of them on DVD (I don’t own the Magician). I look forward to the next few parts of this retrospective, as I don’t know as many of his later works.

I have been working extremely hard on the next version of My NCBI, the preferences section of the NCBI website. This is where you can set preferences for PubMed, Blast, and all of the rest of the NCBI sites/databases. It is hard, writing everything in a internally-created language, which is slightly buggy and tends to make easy things easy, but hard things very hard, with XSLTs completing the system. I haven’t had to write a ton of recursive XSLT functions or anything, (mostly because of the inclusion of EXSLT extensions), but development time is still very slow. It also seems that with every step I take forward, I discover 4 new things I have to do. Throw in the fact I made time estimates without knowing the language, and the NCBI announcement that the budget fell flat (and actually decreased) this year and people were dismissed, and that makes my life particularly fun. I knew what I was getting into when I signed up, and I wanted to do a LOT of work, but that doesn’t mean I feel that way every second of every day.

I was going to write tonight…

but I got distracted uploading a boat-load of photos. Look at them instead.

DC

Writing Scheme in Javascript I

This is an interesting little function that I ran across in Kent Dybvig’s The Scheme Programming Language. I thought I would give it a go in javascript. I wrote it out, and ran into two problems. First, I wasn’t returning anything from the anonymous-self-executing function, so it was being garbage collected, and the call to tell() would give an undefined (secret didn’t exist anymore). The second was that I initially declared secret without the var which gave it global scope. Took me a little while to figure these out, but since I haven’t looked at any javascript in months, I don’t feel so bad.
``

/* the original function from The Scheme Programming Language
(define shhh #f)
(define tell #f)

(let ((secret 0))
  (set! shhh
    (lambda (message)
      (set! secret message)))
  (set! tell
    (lambda ()
      secret)))

(shhh "sally likes harry")
(tell) <graphic> "sally likes harry"
secret <graphic> Error: variable secret is not bound
*/
</graphic></graphic>

<graphic><graphic>//the Javascript version of the same function
</graphic></graphic>

<graphic><graphic>var shhh = false;
var tell = (function(){
 var secret = 0;
 shhh = function(message) { secret = message; }
 return function() { console.info(secret); }
})();

shhh("harry likes sally");
console.info("tell: " + tell() );</graphic></graphic>

The IE8 doctype meta waiting game

The first time I played Yahtzee was… only about a month ago. I won 3 of my first 4 games. It was a fun game. I wonder how that game would be if I played against… oh, let’s say… Microsoft. Probably… not so much.

Jeremy Keith, my favorite famous-web-developer-that-I-watch-from-afar-via-his-blog (sorry, didn’t have a better term for that… he seems like a fun guy) has written a follow up post about the IE8 doctype meta mess. As I’ve come to expect, he has eloquently suggested a rational and positive approach to the proposal. As I mentioned in my last post, the meta isn’t really that terrible, while the default behavior is. Jeremy, along with others, suggest we need to politely and intelligently urge Microsoft, hoping they re-consider. This of course, is the correct course of action. Insults, and things of that nature are just a waste… life’s too short.

The problem, is that life is short. The list of things that we’re waiting on from Microsoft is long. And there is very little crossed off! We’re still waiting on correct handling of CSS. We’re still waiting on correct javascript behavior. I worry that it will be forever before Microsoft takes it’s turn in this game.

I’m all for civil discourse. This IE8 hub-bub made me instantly think of an online petition. But while I will be cheering Microsoft on, excuse me if I keep my fingers crossed behind my back. Will Microsoft make the next move? Will they pause the game and get back to it? Hopefully. My father always told me that we had a relative who would pretend to sneeze while kicking the checker board. That wouldn’t be nice, but it would be swift. A game ended by neglect may be far more painful.

IE8, Doctype and potentially broken default behavior

I woke up this morning and read the A List Apart articles (that I defered reading until this a.m.). The powers that be have decided that IE will now use a metatag to decide what rendering type (ie6, ie7, ie9, etc.) to use. This allows for backwards compatibility. Supposedly.

First, I don’t really care about the meta. It’s fine… it is just one more trick to add to the pile. Generally, I agree with Eric Meyer’s points, that it’s better than browser switching. And it is. It’s also better than conditional CSS comments.

There are a few problems that I see, however. The first one was actually thrown into my lap as a twitter discussion between Jeremy Keith (down-to-earth web guy) and Chris Wilson (works on IE). Following the twitter-timeline, first, second, third. Apparently the default behavior for rendering a document with a HTML 4.01 doctype will be IE7. That’s right, it doesn’t fall through, it will be stuck on IE7. That is just wrong. Hopefully, both Jeremy and Chris and the other powers that be work that detail out further before Microsoft proceeds.

My second worry is the case of “edge.” Edge, as far as I am concerned, stands for bleeding edge, and that implies an experimental version, where results will be unpredictable. (I infer that definition based on every other software release that I’ve heard of.) Hopefully that’s not the case, but there sure as heck better be a concrete definition of what they consider “edge”. Hopefully they’ll throw a “current major version” in there as well. Who knows.

The third, and probably largest concern that I have, is that we are now relying on Microsoft to include past browser rendering attributes into current browsers. So IE8 should be able to render all of IE7’s quirks, as well as IE6’s quirks. Based on the fact that Microsoft had a hard time fully flushing out all of the CSS standards for so long, whats to say that that they’ll accomplish this in full. Additionally, there are the worries that including past rendering attribues will yeild the “bloatware” that Eric mentioned.

And finally (at least for today) there’s the mess of doctype and meta. Now you get to define things in both places. It’s just sortof kludgy. One more thing that I have to memorize, and I hate memorizing things.

Anyway, it’s Day one of this stuff, and there will be much discussion to come, and I’m guessing a lot of other stuff as well.