Reverberations

Internet Explorer is notorious for breaking on trailing commas in JavaScript array declaration. e.g.

var obj = {
     a: 1,
      b: 2,
};

fails on IE, while all other browsers just ignore the innocuous trailing comma after second element.

Weeding out these commas from JavaScript code is absolute PITA. However, here is a regular expression search string I wrote to search such instances in the code.

,\s*\n+\s*[\}\)\]]

Even better,
,\s*\n+(\s*\/\/.*\n)*\s*[\}\)\]]
matches multiple new lines and comments.

I’m not much of a fan of Apple softwares on Windows. I like iTunes though, even if it’s a bit bulky. I’ve tried using Safari on Windows for its super pleasing font rendering, aesthetics and, of late, some testing on WebKit/KHTML. However, it crashes just too often to be of any serious use and, of course, doesn’t have any DOM inspector. It has a barely usable JavaScript console though.
On a side-note, I’ve read that Safari can work on Linux under Wine. I’ll give it a try sometime. Now, if only I could run iTunes under Wine .

Sun could’ve just downloaded MySQL from the site and run without paying .

Anyway, Sun buying MySQL is a big deal and a big surprise. Another slightly related acquisition news today is - Oracle buying BEA, the app server company. Incidentally, Oracle owns both InnoDB and BerkeleyDB - two of the better engine options of MySQL.

I’ve downloaded Jetty Server Adapter for Eclipse recently. Jetty is supposedly very nimble Java-based HTTP Server and Servlet Container. I’m not sure if I’m doing it wrong, but I find code redeployment very slow and buggy when using Jetty on Eclipse. Even Jboss, another heavy duty application server, is bad on Eclipse with 15-25 second redeployment time.

So far I’ve found only Tomcat to be suitable for development with almost instant redeployment.

Another nuisance is that Jetty relies on the presence of PID file ( on my RHEL 4.2) to determine whether it’s running or not, which is, more often than not, inaccurate as I usually close Eclipse without shutting down Jetty server. Tomcat is much more stable in that sense. However, Jetty seems much more exciting to develop “for” (as opposed to “on”) as it has continuations, a very clever hack/feature.

I suppose that the preferred way to develop on Jetty is to use Maven, and Jetty Server Adapter will improve with future releases of WTP/Eclipse milestones.

Latest version of BitTorrent client (v 6.0), which is based on closed-source uTorrent (acquired a while back), has not been released, neither has been the protocol specs. The “official” BitTorrent client has never been very popular compared to other protocol implementations like Azureus and uTorrent.

Protocol specs, although technically closed, are available with very tightly maintained SDK license.  And, all previous version of protocol as well as the client are available openly.

In lifecycle of any technology “The step after ubiquity is invisibility“. I always hoped BitTorrent to follow that curve. Not anymore probably.

Just found this patent (#6,988,241) filed by IBM back in 2000 and issued on Jan 17, 2006.
From the abstract:

A method and system that that allows a designer to create “spreadsheet” web pages, which can then be viewed and used by the designer and/or by other users. The described embodiments of the present invention allow people to collaborate and to share spreadsheets over the web. The described embodiment allows a user of the spreadsheet to email the spreadsheet to others and to embed the spreadsheet into web pages owned by the designer or by third parties.

I’m not sure how this works but, if I understand this right, all those web-based spreadsheets apps by Google, Zoho and others are infringing.

Netcraft: Apache has lost 15% market share in last two years.

Fascinating stuff. Amazon has put up a Mechanical Turk task to help find Jim Gray, the Turing Award winner missing since Jan 28, 07 in the sea, by letting people scan and analyze satellite imagery to locate his 40ft (6px-by-2px) yacht.