Mitch Fincher: The Distracted Programmer: January 2008

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Last Night's Austin Java User's Group

Last night Ernest Hill gave an excellent introduction to the SCALA language. It continues the recent trend of all objects, even lowly integers, are real objects.
Eitan Suez talked about his recent work with jmatter.org. One idea was to create a "browser" environment for jmatter applications. A user would download a 25Meg file containing all the libraries for a jmatter app, and then only have to download the 100K or so for all the other jmatter applications they would run. I liked the idea.
Eitan also talked about his new open source project css4swing which allows java Swing applications to use css rules to define the look of an application.
I always enjoy hearing Eitan speak since he so often has curious, interesting, and big ideas.
I also won the very cool Google Toolkit book.

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

LifeHack: Perfect Exercise Setup

Here's my perfect exercise setup: An elliptical rider with a heart monitor set in front of a TiVo. Now when I want to watch TV I go to my rider and exercise while watching while keeping my heart rate above 125.
I can breeze through an hour workout and really enjoy it.

Friday, January 18, 2008

Austin on Rails Meeting

This last Austin on Rails meeting highlighted the latest version of Sun's NetBeans IDE. Gregg Sporar gave a good overview of all the new Ruby and Rails features in NetBeans. I am very impressed with Sun's commitment to Ruby and Rails. My favorite feature was the ability to convert javaStyleCamelCaseVariables names to their equivalent, java_style_camel_case_variables ruby style automatically.
The ability to switch easily between model,view, and controls looked very helpful.

Monday, January 14, 2008

Interesting difference between ie and firefox/opera regarding location.href

Recently here at inotech we ran into some oddities regarding javascript in different browsers. This test page shows the issue:


<body>
<h2>Test of ampersands </h2>
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" ><!--
location.href="http://www.myhost.org/cgi-bin/SimpleFormAction.pl?cat=felix&amp;dog=fido";
//--></script>
</body>

Note the the "&" in the location.href value have been escaped already to "&".

In Internet Explorer the following is echoed back from the form:


cat = felix
dog = fido

But in Firefox and IE we get,


cat = felix
amp;dog = fido

IE converts the "&" to just "&", although I think Firefox/Opera are doing the right thing not to escape the amp. No charge for this tip today, but be careful in how you specify the ampersand in your hrefs.