Archive for May, 2006

Running the last mile

Saturday, May 27th, 2006

Last week was amazing. I was finishing two projects at the same time. And as if this was not enough I had a bunch of other meetings for other projects. You just can’t belive how exhausing this can be untill you ‘try’ it yourself.

Finishing up is always difficult. It takes 80% of the time to accomplish the last 20% of the things that make the 80% of the impression on a user. It takes physical and mental strength to accomplish this as you have to tie all loose ends that you don’t even know exist. A nice end to all this was the feeling at the end of the week that it’s all 1.0 ready and released. It doesn’t mean it’s perfect, but it’s close.

Now it’s time for recuperation – watching movies (Aardvark’d was insightful), relaxing, sleeping… During such periods I always get a bunch of cool ideas that will make the next month interesting. Not to get carried away, I really need to finish my last project before going to London.

Live-clip & microformats

Saturday, May 20th, 2006

This is exactly why we (webdevelopers) don’t want programmers to develop the tools we use. I was thinking of a nice way to say it but Ryan got there first.

Javascript compare

Thursday, May 18th, 2006

Today I found something in Javascript that just doesn’t make any sense. Ok, maybe some other things don’t make sense either, but I think this one just beats all of them.

Let’s say we have a string and a number:

a = "1";
b = 1;

Now we want to compare these:

alert((a>b) ' : ' (aa) ' : ' (b==a));

Both will give you ‘false : false : true’.

If we change a to “2”

a = "2";
b = 1;

we get a ‘true : false : false’. We’re still OK.

Now let’s change a to “a”

a = "a";
b = 1;

The weird thing is we get ‘false : false : false’ on both alerts.

In typestrict languages you’d get an error. Or at least you should. In php you get a ‘false : true : false’ and ‘true : false : false’ which would mean they decided that all strings are smaller than numbers. This is weird – if you make b a string “1” the return values change – but at least they made a choice.

For what I can comprehend Javascript casts both values to int and I can understand that. The core of the problem is obviously with the NaN value. What I can’t understand is how something’s not smaller, not bigger and not equal at the same time? I’m sure someone can explain this…

Yahoo!

Thursday, May 18th, 2006

Today I first saw the new Yahoo. It looks nice if you’re using Firefox 1.5 or IE 6. I’m not sure why it’s so hard to support other standards compliant DOM browsers. Obviously we’re still not out of the 90s…

Web 2.0 all-in-one

Tuesday, May 16th, 2006

Just saw this on SVN. It’s really a nice showcase of almost all “web 2.0 design” characteristics…

Failing…

Monday, May 15th, 2006

Web apps fail. Why? I really need to think more about this…