On Nov 11th at 4:58pm, my daughter Caitlin Joy McCormick was born. She arrived a bit earlier than we had planned, but healthy and happy, which is what really matters.

I was playing around in the adsense management area today and saw that the referrals area was still there. Even though there was a message that stated that it was being phased out and that the phase out date had already passed. I’m curious if the real phase out was just of Firefox and that the system will now be used to push Chrome.

There was one major bug though. On the news page, there is a folder list on the left hand side. This is populated from data in JavaScript and then written onto the page. The data starts off as an array of the form:

var folders = [{"id":128,"name":"Auto"}
,{"id":2,"name":"Business"}
,{"id":53,"name":"VMware"}];

The folder objects from this array were then put into a sparse array of the form:

var folderHash = {};
for(var i = 0; i < foldersSize; i++){
var folder = folders[i];
folderHash[folder.id] = folder;
}

This code was then used to output the folders onto the page:

$H(folderHash).values().each(function(folder) {
...output code...
}

The anonymous function in every browser other than Chrome lists the folders in the order “Auto”, “Business”, “VMware” (the order from the original folder array). Chrome however outputs them in the order “Business”, “VMware”, “Auto” (id sorted order).

While this is probably a bug in my code since I’m relying on default behaviour instead of explicitly sorting the items the way that I want them, it just shows that there are going to be some differences with the way that Chrome is executing javascript.

The one thing that will be to their advantage is that in many markets they essentially have a monopoly. Users won’t be able to switch no matter how poorly Comcast performs.

Well, this post looked like a meeting agenda and it appears to be from the Blogger management. The link on Blogger is no longer available but I’ve pasted the message here and it’s still available in the ReadPath archive.

MGMT Updates

• No BMG
• No Managers meeting (offsite)
• Blogger Strategy Onsite Offsite and Dinner
• OKR update next meeting, check out your doc and update (linked to under Ray’s OKR in MoMA) - add any additional OKRs
• PERFs working day
• Start using Podcast (results are tracked at team level)

U2U

• Meet up interest survey (Bay Area)
• Custom Domain issue is still open
• New super user since last week (rookie of the year)

Help Center/Metrics

• Visits to HC and U2U up 11%
• Getting Started Guide for Help Center
• Email elimination project - Need to finish building out Blog Gone and Login tools
• U2U Survey - Brett & Danish to finalize questions

Product/Bugs

• Following Launched to 20%
• Known Issues :
• Disconnect between Reading List and Managed Blogs
• Profile photo change - Picasa
• Duplicate entries on Reading List

International

• Gerard is very happy with the team
• International contact forms rolling out in Spanish
• Europe Sales Conference, Gerard OOO
• Team Perf review for Gerard?

It seems that globally there have been a few more accidents lately. I believe there were 3 major crashes in the last two weeks. With all of the cost cutting going on, how do you make sure that the airline isn’t getting too close to the line on safety requirements?

– Update –

It seems that we’re getting notices of new fees about once a week now. Here’s the latest from NWA, $15 for your first checked bag. It just keeps getting better.

I also enjoyed seeing Joe Biden speak. There were some bits that were repeated out of his speech with Barack on Saturday but overall I thought he did alright.

The main thing that I really liked was when Biden laid out how the media narrative is that McCain has all of the experience with foriegn policy and that Barack doesn’t, but how with almost every single foreign policy issue that’s come up since the campaigning began Obama has been proven right and McCain was forced to take the correct position after being wrong. Biden and Clinton need to be out on every news cast from here to Nov repeating this until the media gives in and stops giving McCain credit for things he’s gotten wrong.

Obama says he’s been trying to run a clean campaign, but I think there’s a difference between going negative, which McCain has jumped into with both feet, and pointing out where you honestly believe the other side has made mistakes and used poor judgement. There are all sorts of issues that the Democrats need to bring up, Clinton and Biden just barely got started tonight. If Obama is going to win I really think someone needs to bring them up repeatedly. The American people just don’t seem to react well to leaders that they don’t believe are sticking up for themselves.

Scalzi has created a universe a bit into the future where humans have moved out into the Galaxy and found that it’s a very crowded place. All of the books have quite a bit of action, but also some plain good old sci-fi. My idea of good sci-fi is when it’s used to test out new ideas and the story is a dry run to see how they would work. The best sci-fi has a good story to go with the good ideas.

I also love his sense of humor, think Heinlein’s Starship Troopers with a touch of Monty Python satire. The book “The Android’s Dream” deals with the interplanetary fallout of a disgruntled diplomat killing a visiting alien ambassador with his flatulence. For the first bit of the book you’ll be wondering where this could possibly be going, but the second half is well worth your patience.

Along with the need to make sure my work area is physically set up properly I also had to take care of a few things with my development environment. The biggest issue that I had on my main linux dev box was that in Eclipse I was getting all sorts of weird errors with cut and paste. Sometimes it would work and sometimes it would pick up strange fragments of the desired text or I would have to do it 3-4 times to get it work. I did a bit of googling and got a good hint in the Eclipse bug reports that there may be an issue on linux with interactions between Eclipse and Klipper in KDE when doing cut and paste. Since I have no real idea what Klipper is supposed to be doing in the first place I simply disabled it and now everything works great.

The next major issue involves the fact that I can’t help myself upgrading to the latest version of software that I’m using. It doesn’t matter if the current version is working just fine. I’m just always tempted to follow the bleeding edge (Not the best candidate for sysadmin of critical systems). So when a new version of Eclipse came out, of course I had to upgrade. The new version has a built in web development toolkit that is supposed to be all that you need. Unfortunately the javascript editor in this latest build is just not up to snuff. Other than some basic code coloring and outline of methods it doesn’t appear that it’s able to do anything else.

Prior to the upgrade I had been using the JSEclipse plugin, which works great. So I decided to go back to it since so much of my work these days is with javascript and I couldn’t afford not to have it. The problem though was that the company that created the plugin was bought by Adobe. This wasn’t an issue at first as it was put on the Adobe Labs site and supported. However, just recently they’ve pulled it from the Labs site and the only obvious way to get it was through purchasing a copy of Flex. So I did a bit of digging around and found the update site for JSEclipse and was esctatic to realize that it still worked. One quick install later and I’m back in business tapping out javascript.

I’ll post again later after I’ve had some time to play with it more.

I was wondering how they were going to convince people that something was untraceable on a point to point network. Of course it turns out that Untraceable isn’t really an accurate description. What they used was more akin to a Hydra situation where you can keep knocking the server down and it’s just replaced by others from a botnet. While this explanation works on the surface it gets you into all sorts of other issues.

Botnet servers aren’t really going to be server grade. They’re useful in aggregate for doing something nasty, but more often than not they’re a grandmother’s Win98 computer in Ohio and just not all that powerful by themselves.

Next, it doesn’t really matter how annonymous you are on the internet, if you start live streaming to 15 million people simultaneously, someone in an ISP monitoring center is going to notice. Comcast would have cut the user’s account after a few seconds of that type of bandwidth.

It would have been interesting choice if the killer had been dropping bittorrent seeds all over the internet using his botnet army. This would have the benefit of having the public take an active role in the distribution of the videos. Of course, while this would be more plausible and actually harder to trace, it would take away from the drama of seeing everything live.

Another option would have been for them to include the use of an Onion Router to anonymize the traffic, which is where I thought they were going to go initially. This would have probably gone over too many viewer’s heads though.

All in all, the movie was just sadistic and I didn’t really feel that it had any real message, definitely not worth the time. They could have gone into some of the issues in much better ways without the hoops that they had to jump through and come up with a much better story.

A scarier topic, along the same lines, that is much more real would have been to focus on the anonymous harassment of school age children that can drive them into depression. A very scary and very real issue with the internet.

Seems like they should be able to do the same thing for CSS shortly. Always working to get the number of http requests for a complete page load down.

First off, I had been playing with YSlow and working on getting the pages optimized for speed and cacheability. I had been appending random param strings to the JS includes so that IE wouldn’t cache it. At the time it was just too much of a hassle to try and determine if the problems I was seeing were due to bad code or just old code. So now that things were settling down a bit I pulled those params out. This meant that IE would start caching JS files.

Second, I started using the YUI libraries for a lot of the UI widgets. These really make it easier to develop a web application and it’s truly amazing how well they work across all of the major browsers. Web application development has come light years from where it was just a short time ago.

With these changes, I booted up my Win2k VM with IE6 and found that I was now getting “Operation Aborted” errors in IE. The page wouldn’t load at all and there was no way to determine what was causing the problem. So off to Google I went and quickly came across this solution.

If you are using a Javascript framework like YUI, you may encounter problems with Internet Explorer 6 spews the “Operation Aborted” errors.

This error occurs because

1. IE loads the entire HTML including Javascript the first time it loads data
2. When you try to refresh the page, IE would have cached some of the Javascript files which try to execute on a HTML page which isn’t loaded fully yet
3. IE thinks its illegal to do the above operation and throws up the error.

So the solution, which YUI already recommends is to wrap your initilization code in:

YAHOO.util.Event.onDOMReady(initialLoad);

This causes its own problem of course. The pages on ReadPath have a fair number of dialog boxes that are rendered by the YUI library and then hidden until they’re needed. With the new way of handling the initialization code, Firefox renders the unformatted dialogs for a brief amount of time before the page has finished loading. This causes a really ugly loading effect.

So the final solution, give all of the dialogs a class=”hiddenInitial” with that class set to display:none;. Then when the javascript gets to around rendering these dialogs, have it also pull the css class off of the divs. This way they don’t show up in IE or Firefox before they’re needed and everything works as expected.

tv

I compared searches for “Seattle Conference” which pulls up a large number of the GoogleTechTalks, but all of the recent posts were missing from the tv results. The rest of the results were all there. Finally I tried adding the video as a favorite. It still won’t show up though. tv still says there’s nothing there.

I’ve tried looking around to see if there is anything about a two month blackout on tv but haven’t come up with anything yet.

Update:

Hmm, looks like this might be part of the problem. Trying to determine if there is a way to determine how the video is encoded.