kstruct

If you’re in Australia and want to vote…

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.

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.

Google Gears (Google’s toolkit for off-line web applications) looks really cool (thought it’s a pity it has to be installed as a plug-in and there are a lot of “We have nothing to announce at this time” type responses floating around. A lot of people seem to be asking about things like conflict resolution etc. which is being left as an application concern for now. The few web developers around seem to be underestimating the amount of rework which would be required, but for new web applications it looks like it will be quite easy to produce a radically better off-line experience.

Maplets look cute, but I’ve not really played with maps much, so it doesn’t seem to radical to me. The ‘coming soon’ mention of AdSense for maps is interesting – looks like you’ll be able to make a call with your id and a number of ads to display and have them shown along with whatever other map content your maplet/mashup is adding.

Food’s been pretty good, got a very cool notepad which has a picture of the earth on the cover then zooms in as you tilt it forward.

…And why do they always have conference name tags designed so they turn backwards accidentally so easily. Surely it would be simple to attach it to the lanyard at two corners rather than just at the centre…

Technorati Tags: GDD07, GDD07au, google, gears, maplet

It’s a real pity that none of the decent mapping sites in Australia seem to offer directions. (i.e. Zoom In or Google maps)

whereis.com does seem to give semi-decent directions, but has poor looking maps, and the interface is horrible by comparison (though they’re attempt at dynamic zooming is quite amusing). The other problem with whereis is that it’s impossibly to email someone a link to one of their maps without paying for it, which seems rather silly.

I imagine it would be quite challenging to generate good driving directions efficiently, but then, it would also be difficult to build the maps in the first place I imagine. Anyway, here’s hoping the other guys get the directions working sometime soon, or whereis gets it’s interface act together.

On the other hand, perhaps there’s one I haven’t heard about yet.

I’ve been running into some problems porting a perl based CGI program from Linux to windows lately. The key issue is that when running perl in taint mode, you must set the PATH environment variable to some known string prior to doing anything which executes another common (exec, system, backticks etc.). The problem is that clearing the path means that perl is then unable to find the cmd.exe shell when running on Windows.

I’m not all that up on Windows programming in perl, but it seems that adding in any particular path (say C:\WINDOWS\system32) isn’t likely to work if Windows is installed in some unusual location. Unfortunately avoiding the shell processing (by passing a list of arguments to system or exec rather than a string) isn’t looking like it’s a viable option either, at least in the short term, so I’m more or less stuck.

I’m sure there’s some sort for clever trick for solving this, but Google has not turned up anything obvious. Perhaps, as a last resort, there’s some way to find out where Windows is installed through the registry?

Update

Thanks to Victor for his suggestion about the registry. What I ended up doing was looking at the SystemRoot environment variable with some code along the lines of the following.

delete @ENV{qw(IFS CDPATH ENV BASH_ENV PATH)};
if ($^O =~ /win/i) {
            # Perl must be able to find cmd.exe, so add
            # C:\WINDOWS\system32 to the path
            $ENV{'SystemRoot'} =~ /([A-Z]:(\\[A-Za-z0-9_]+)+)/;
            my $system32_dir = catdir($1,'system32');
            $ENV{'PATH'} = $system32_dir;
}
exec($command);

If anyone has suggestion, or just knows for a fact that this will fail in some case, please let me know (in the comments).

Technorati Tags: windows, perl, cmd.exe, taint

Bigger organisations have long since taken the job of designing websites away from technical staff, but smaller ones still have a tendency to lump all the ‘computer related’ tasks onto whatever technical people they might have.

Here are a few classic excuses for not putting effort into building an information architecture for a small company website.

1: We don’t have time

So do you have time to build a web site at all? You need to ask yourself what exactly the goal of building the website is, and hopefully come up with an answer which is centred around the expected end users. Unless you have time to build what these users want, then there’s really no point in building anything at all.

If you don’t have time to work out what to build, you certainly don’t have time to build it.

(more…)

Cookies are great and all, but I was thinking the other night that it would be nice if there was a way to store state purely in JavaScript land.

If only JavaScript needs them there really no reason to send bits of state back to the server, and you might imagine this sort of mechanism might even afford some small degree of privacy (though it wouldn’t be hard to write JavaScript to pass the info back I suppose).

Anyway, is there any such mechanism for storing state information which is preserved between pages (and browser sessions) but is only normally available to JavaScript?

Technorati Tags: javascript, ajax, web

So far this month, Googlebot has hit kstruct 521 times, downloading a total of 2.8 megs, where as MSNBot has 496 hits for a total of 11.32 megs.

That means that, per hit, MSNBot is loading about 23.3k of data, where as Googlebot is loading about 5.5k (and Yahoo slurp is similar with 4.5k).

My question is (being far to lazy to go and actually look at the raw logs myself), what’s MSNBot doing differently that it should be downloading over four times more data per hit?

My guesses would include MSNBot not understanding some ‘content not changed’ hint or being more interested in images and PDFs than the others, but I’ve no idea if that’s even close.

[Update: Looks like I'm not the only one to have noticed.]

Technorati Tags: search, googlebot, msnbot, web

So, Google is censoring search results on their Chinese site, presumably because the Chinese government asked them to do so. Lots of people (mostly Americans) seem to be very upset about this.

Putting on my devils advocate hat for a moment…

Just because Americans happen to equate censorship and ‘evil’ doesn’t mean everyone does. From the Chinese government’s perspective, ‘evil’ could very well be defined as assisting Chinese citizens in accessing material the government considers inappropriate. That, in fact, would be why they have made doing so illegal.

As an international company Google is going to be faced with many situations where what happens to be considered evil is going to vary from society to society. How they try to resolve this with their ‘do no evil’ policy will be interesting to watch.

Technorati Tags: google, censorship, china, america, law