Archive: June 13, 2002
I just added a new search option for my weblog. In addition to the default "phrase search" (which is how the search has always worked), you can now do a "word search", which is what it does if it's not a phrase search. 
- Phrase search means search for the entire string entered verbatim.
- Word search will search for posts containing each individual word, and they may be separate.
Note that the individual words are "and'd" together rather than "or'd".
So, when looking for this post, if you search for "releasing Gecko" with the normal phrase search, it won't find it [bah, but now it finds this post!], but if you search with the word search it will. Try it out.
Looks like AOL may be releasing version 8.0 without Gecko (the Mozilla engine) embedded. Bad news.
A more interesting PHP Weekly Summary this week than usual. Important points:
- PHP on Apache 2 will probably be significantly slower because of changes in Apache. However, it will probably be more scalable (isn't that the usual trade-off?) and use less RAM and perform better under heavier loads.
- "Andrei Zmievski has put together a controversial little patch that changes the operation of the concatenation and object operators."
- "Inspired by Larry Wall's talk on Perl 6. This patch changes concatenation operator to be ' _ ' (note the whitespace) instead of . (dot), and object operator -> to the newly available . (dot). Looks much better and easier to type, IMHO."
- Very cool! I don't like "->" .
- Unfortunately, as we clearly know, PHP isn't in the same position Perl is right now (in the middle of a rewrite), so "It is doubtful that this patch will be included in the mainstream distribution anytime soon, as it does change part of a code functionality that people rely on in most scripts."
- There are some notes on the future of PHP. From everything I'm hearing, they want PHP to be the platform for dealing with "web services" stuff: XML, XSLt, SOAP, XML-RPC, etc. Fine with me .
Ok, just implemented the MetaWeblog API. Boooring... now what tools support this?
For my weblog I don't think it gives me any more features than the Blogger API does. In fact, for two of the three functions he defines I just implemented them in terms of the Blogger API functions I already have.
Also, I don't think the MetaWeblog API is consistent or very well explained. He has newPost returning "a string representation of the post id", but in his example request and example response he's treating the postId as an integer. I also want examples of all requests and all responses.
This is really cool. Check out The amazing tree generator (via WebGraphics). This will take a normal nested unordered list and turn it into a dynamically expandable outline, just using the Document Object Model. In other words, it dynamically queries the structure of the HTML document using JavaScript and builds the tree. Very cool. I'll have to check out the source. I bet it isn't hard to do at all.
Via WebGraphics, Digital Web Magazine: An interview with Eric Meyer, CSS expert.
Really really good interview. Talks a lot about the tables vs CSS issue, as well as a bunch of other stuff impacting CSS design, from positioning, to browser compatibility hacks, to Mozilla. There are also a bunch of good links to other resources. Check it out.
See, this is the type of stuff I'm looking for. A simple explanation of the Flash object hierarchy. I need a "Flash for Programmers" tutorial, rather than a "click here, drag this thing here" one. This document goes a little bit of the way to getting me there.
Right now, Flash is just like Visual Basic, except it gives you more tools in the animation department, and is more limited everywhere else.
Brought to us by the University of Virginia computer science department, everyone witness The Oracle of Bacon.
It's infuriating. By choosing really obscure Japanese actors we were able to get it up to a Bacon number of 5, but we weren't able to get it up to six, let alone the magic number 7. With "normal" actors who you'd think of, we could hardly ever get even three degrees of separation.
Dave Winer: XML.
At the time, and probably still to some extent today, mathematicians looked down on computer science. In their mind, there was a hierarchy. The smartest minds work on pure math, manipulating symbols, and less powerful intellects apply it.
Anyway, this really is about XML. I finally figured out that we're having the same disconnect in the XML world. There are a lot of pure mathematicians in our midst. They, like my advisor in 1976, believe they're at the top of the pyramid (I have no other explanation for how they behave), looking down on the lowly implementors. Like Dr Lawson, they are wrong. The hard work is unlocking the power for masses of people...
Cool.
|
Generated in about 0.055s. (Used 7 db queries) |
Thursday, June 13, 2002
Permalink
new⇒I hate ASP.NET
CF, why pick that piece of trash?Cold Confusion. Is it finallyreally a OO...
ColdConfusion: Sep 5, 8:36pm