BurningbirdRecovered from the Wayback Machine.
I have Windows XP SP3 installed on my Dell I was therefore more than a little taken back about the instructions to follow to install IE8 beta 2:
If you don’t follow this path, you’ll have permanently installed IE8 on the machine. You know, you can’t make up stuff like this.
Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
From Chip’s Quips a test to see your programming language preference:
Here’s a quick and easy test to determine what programming language best suits your personality.
There’s a very tall palm tree, and four animals happen to pass by: a chimpanzee, a lion, a giraffe, and a squirrel.
They decide to have a competition to see who is the fastest one to get a banana off the tree.
Which one won? Think of your answer before you read on…
Actually, what you don’t see in the animal lineup that Sterling has provided, is a rhinoceros heading straight for the tree at full ramming speed. It skewers the lion with its horn, steps on and squishes the squirrel, pushes aside the giraffe, and knocks the chimp from the tree when it hits—the force of which also knocks the banana down.
Except that the rhino decided, right in the middle of its headlong run, that it really doesn’t like bananas. However, it had built up too much momentum to be able to stop in time to save the lion, the chimp, the squirrel, the giraffe, the banana, and the tree. Poor tree.
And that makes me JavaScript ECMAScript.
I was asked for links to SVG resources, and my immediate thought was to look for a Planet SVG. Though I found a planetsvg.com, there’s no entry at the site, and I couldn’t find any elsewhere. I then decided to create a new Planet SVG, using Sam Ruby’s Venus adaption of the Planet software.
Of course, I use SVG in the background of the page, though I imagine most people would only be interested in the Atom-based syndication feed. I’ll play around with the design when I have more time, but for now, I just grabbed an old one that seemed to work.
I’ve populated the Planet with a few URLs, but I need more. Though there are quite a few people interested in SVG, I’m finding that most don’t seem to have a weblog. Or if they do, I can’t find it.
There is a weblog for the SVG Open conference next week, but the weblog doesn’t have any syndication feed I could find.
If you write about SVG, or have a weblogging category devoted to SVG, or vector graphics, or even the Canvas element, please email me your feed URL, or drop it into comments.
Speaking of SVG, Lachlan Hardy pointed out the Raphaël JavaScript library to me, and I wanted to pass it along.
This library provides cross-browser dynamic vector graphics that generates VML for IE, and SVG for the rest of the world. Among the graphical elements you can create are paths, eclipses, rectangles, circles, and text, and be able to apply a number of transformations.
Included in the library web site is a playground where you can try the code out.
The downside of the recent flurry of activity regarding JavaScript/ECMAScript is that I’m in the middle of tech editing Learning JavaScript, second edition, and not sure what to include.
On the one hand, it’s extremely important to me that the book be accurate, so my inclination is not to including anything that isn’t implemented in all four of my target test browsers (IE8, Firefox 3.x, Safari 3.x, and Opera 9.x). However, we plan on the book having a two year shelf life, and the discussion around Harmony notes implementations of ES 3.1 as early as next spring.
It used to be, at one time, companies and organizations would work with tech book companies and authors in order to ensure the accurate representation of information. What’s happened, though, is that many of the people working these issues on the committees are now writing their own books, and don’t particularly care about the accurate dissemination of information in other books. This in addition to everyone and their brother (rarely sister) having their own weblog, wiki, email list, Twitter, ad nauseum and if books like mine have inaccurate information, they can just publish The Truth in their own spaces.
So, now I’m left with a decision: don’t include anything at all on ES 3.1, and face emails and book criticisms about why I didn’t include coverage of such and such; or try to decipher what will eventually be implemented from this new effort, and run the risk of the pundits carefully pointing out everything wrong with the book, and how can O’Reilly publish a book by an author who is too stupid to know what she’s talking about.