kstruct

Back late last week, I posted the same question to both the ExtJS forum and to Stack Overflow - basically an issue I was running into with layout of some components in IE 6. At the time I wondered if the Stack Overflow one would even get any attention at all - ExtJS is pretty obscure, the tag only having been used six times to date. You would imagine a question on specific forum would have a much better chance of being answered.

Three days later, the ExtJS Forum post has received no response at all where as there were two answers on Stack Overflow, one of which is reasonably helpful, and the other of which completely solved my problem. I guess it’s a testament to the power of offering people some sort of quantifiable ‘reputation’ points.

Reading the announcement of SquirrelFish Extreme it crossed my mind that since Apple seems to be putting a lot of effort into JavaScript performance perhaps there’ s more to it than speeding up Safari. Maybe Apple want to make JavaScript fast enough that it could replace Objective-C in the the majority of desktop Cocoa applications.

I never used the ill fated Java version of Cocoa, but from the bit of exposure I’ve had, JavaScript seems like a much more suitable replacement for Objective-C than Java. In fact, I would say that JavaScript, being prototype based, is quite a bit more flexible than Objective-C (though whether that’s a good thing may be questionable). Presumably Java was originally chosen, despite its static typing, because of its popularity but these days is seems like JavaScript is getting more any more attention as a serious language. I suspect in a few years time, JavaScript will become the most common first programming language for engineers, much the way BASIC used to be, simply because it’s so widely deployed in the web browser platform.

Though Apple must be happy with the Objective-C ecosystem they’ve developed, no one else appears to be moving towards it as a language. When compared to C# as in .Net or the Java-ish platform Google is pushing for Android, Objective-C seems difficult to learn and quite low level, especially without garbage collection as on the iPhone. Fewer and fewer engineers even seem to learn C these days, which will no doubt make Objective-C appear more and more difficult to newcomers over time.

The obvious first objection to using JavaScript in the desktop application scenario would be performance, but with so much effort going into improving it, it seems like it won’t be long before it is at least on par with virtual machine languages like C# and Java. To add a bit more evidence to the pile, Apple is clearly somewhat taken with JavaScript if they’re talking about JavaScript frameworks like SproutCore (which I’m told is very Cocoa-like) at WWDC and there are already bindings available for Dashboard widget development.

Ruby and Python might also be viable options if Apple were to move away from Objective-C, but currently suffer the same performance difficulties, and don’t seem to be getting the same level of performance attention (at least from Apple). Time will no doubt tell, but thinking about it, I can’t see a language which would be more suitable as a replacement for Objective-C than JavaScript.

Looks like the iPhone developer program has gone international - I’m in Australia and just got my approval. Looks like there are now 28 countries (or at least currencies) on the list. (Actually, now I think of it, lots of those countries are in the EU and using the Euro. Hmmmmm)Time to start playing with that accelerometer…

Just worked it out…You need to hold down option, then drag around one of the circles which appears (under your cursor, and in the opposite corner relate to the screen’s centre). The other moves in the opposite direction relative to the centre of the touchpad. If you hold down option and shift, you can move both circles together in the same direction (though I’m not sure what that’s for).What’s surprising is that I only now realise that you can’t pinch into a specific part of the screen (even on a real iPod touch), it always zooms into the centre.

I won an iPod touch for my 5 minute lightning talk about One-JAR at CJUG a couple of weeks ago. The interface is fantastic, and and of the guys at work has already bought one after briefly trying mine.

The guy who beat me out of first place in the talks (and then chose to take the second prize Asus Eee PC instead) is expanding his talk on Selenium for the next CJUG meeting on Wednesday March the 12th, which should be an interesting one.

I was playing with selenium to try testing a web app I work on earlier today, but ran into the following error pretty much straight away…

input [error] Unexpected Exception: message ->
  element.ownerDocument.createEventObject is not a function
...

From a bit of digging, it looks like the current version of Selenium (0.8.3 as of Jan 15, 2008) isn’t compatible with mootools.

The mootools forums have a fairly simple patch to fix the issue.

Apparently Selenium is checking for the fireEvent method, normally only available in IE, but which mootools adds to other browsers. As a result, mootools thinks it’s running in IE, and tries to call createEventObject, which really is only available in IE.

Having made it over that hurdle, selenium is looking like quite a nice tool.

Crossed my mind while chatting with a friend earlier today… How far can you browse without a keyboard. If you’ve got a browser home page with a search box, or a bookmark to Google, you could go there, copy some word on the page, paste it in, search, grab some letters from the summaries, construct words to search for.

For example, copy the word about from Google’s home page, and paste it in, then search.

Ok that page were more than enough letters to make the word kstruct and hence make my way here.

There is a linked list of numbers of length N. N is very large and you don’t know N. You have to write a function that will return k random numbers from the list. Numbers should be completely random.

This one seems pretty simple. Walk the list, generating a new random number for each entry. Keep a ‘top k’ chart of the highest random numbers, and their associated entries. When we hit the end of the list, the numbers in the chart are the required random numbers.

Anyone have better methods?

Apparently Apple is giving all Apple employees a free iPhone. Pretty cool, but I’ve got to wonder if that applies to employees outside the USA. And if so, are they usable (since they’re locked to AT&T in the USA)?

Technorati Tags: iphone, at&t, apple, free

Yes, yes, I’d much rather see a proper API with access to the hardware for the iPhone instead of an Ajax one, but at Google’s devloper day, they claimed Safari support would be released for Google Gears very soon.

If Safari on the iPhone supports Gears, the Ajax only limitation seems a lot less limiting (even if it means we’ll never have Skype). Lots of people seem very upset about the idea that widgets on the iPhone will only work with a network connection, but gears should pretty easily circumvent that limitation.

That said, I’m not too hopeful if it doesn’t support flash movies. That, and, it will probably go through a revision or two before we can get them here in Australia anyway.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, google, gears, api, apple, safari, ajax