Rantings, mostly…

It seems that DreamHost has opted to ditch Gallery in lieu of zenphoto when they rollout their newest patches/updates to their One-Click Installs.

…and dammit, I couldn’t be happier.  In software development and software testing “we” call software like Gallery one thing — bloatware.

Granted, I’ve used Gallery since its inception and in fact, it’s all I’ve ever used, but you better believe I wish I had a better alternative and the time to invest learning it.  In fact, Gallery made me gun shy — that’s right.

So afraid to try anything new for fear it would be as horribly confusing as it was.  Well, I may not be much smarter, but I’m definitely much braver.

I’ll be seeing what is in the works for porting existing pictures — despite zenphoto only having a Web interface thus far.

Sorry Gallery, but you won’t be missed.

From a direct quote on the page, “It’s heartbreaking to us that someone would do this to the site.”

I cannot agree more.  Why in the hell would someone hack a site dedicated to helping cheap software movements (mostly free)!?  Oh, that’s right… because virus writers have nothing to do with their pathetic permanently fused to their chairs, lives.

I mean, I went through a small phase of “virus” writing — the joke kind, and the “Haha, you trusted me ph00l, now you’re pr0n is gone!” kinds, but never this “My baby must propagate to the ENTIRE world so that I can spend the rest of my life in prision!  Moo har har!” kinds.

The problem is such widespread ignorant use of valid “hacking” tools being employed by everyone and their 11 year old brother or sister.  Or the retard little hackling (script-kiddie) who desperately wants to be a “hack4r” and proceeds to (hopefully) impress others by utilizing one of the most mundane, and idiotic (although sadly, extremely prolific) routines of exploiting old or abandoned software.

So here is my final thought on the culprits — either you’re retarded or you are a stupid child.  Otherwise, you might be smart enough to say, “Hey, I think you need me on your team — I’ve something to show you.”  If no one wants to reward you for your efforts (although nefarious in nature) then screw it — do what you feel you have to.

But I know damn well DonationCoder (and gang) would have gladly accepted you or made things worth your while if they didn’t.

This rant was made possible by parentheses.

But now there’s no excuse!  Download YSlow for Firebug to get a ton of additional detailed information about performance issues in your Web pages.

You need Firebug, for Firefox, but it’s well worth it to make the chance if you aren’t already using a real browser.

That’s right, Opera 9.5 codenamed “Kestrel” is finally here.  Currently only available as a nightly build, its release is imminent.

It is also the first browser to date that supports all CSS1, 2, and 3.

*glares at Safari and Firefox*

Why don’t you guys fully support CSS2 yet?  Opera is making you guys look bad.  You might wanna’ hurry up.

I just ran across a post by David Flanagan, wherein he mentions that Internet Explorer on a Windows machine, XP in this case, doesn’t agree with its own understanding of global objects, namely the Window object.

The code he illustrates that does not behave as expected is:


window.onload = function()
{
    alert(window.event == window.event);
}


For some strange reason, Internet Explorer believes this comparison is false.  To fix this behavior, or rather, *tell* Internet Explorer how it should behave I propose resolution.  You can achieve resolution in one of two ways.


var we = window.event;
alert(we == we); // true in IE

*OR*


window.onload = function()
{
    alert(!!window.event == !!window.event);
}


It should be mentioned, that the double NOT’s first create a Boolean conversion, returning the opposite (logical NOT), then reverses what was returned.  I forgot exactly who coined this particular use, but it was first made apparent to me by a very talented gentleman by the name of “RobG” in the comp.lang.javascript newsgroup.

This process is however called normalization, well, not in a database-sense, but anyway… see “A double use of the ! operator…”

*OR*


window.onload = function()
{
    alert(Boolean(window.event) == Boolean(window.event));
}


“Um, but you said 2 methods, toe.”  Right, I know.  But the last method is doing the same as the second method, only much cleaner and technically faster.

Granted, as Mr. Flanagan explains, “This probably does not have any impact on real-world code.”  But nonetheless quirky, well, rather downright stupid oddities in one of the most mainstream browsers (sadly) is an oddity that all JavaScript developers should be aware of.

I was checking my server’s logs today, and noticed that in the past few days hits have jumped dramatically.  So much so that well, I am thinking about adding all that Google-ish stuff to you know, make me a 1/10 of a penny per click and all that jazz.

Not bad though, almost 10,000 hits last month.  Don’t know why… most of my content sucks (OK, arguably all of it sucks).

Seriously though, it seems to me that people just *love* to attempt to insert spam comments.  What is so funny, is that most of these *bots* actually pass CAPTCHA tests.  Ooo, spooky!

As of this post, 67,727 spam comments have been “eaten.”  If you run WordPress I highly suggest you check out Spam Karma 2.