I work with EXT and Prototype at the office, and Dojo at home. I have a lot more time with EXT than either of the other two, so when I’m working on a personal project my first thought is “If this were EXT, I’d do it this way, but how do I do it [...]

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I started using this recently. If you do a lot of Python, you’ll sometimes find yourself desperate for breadcrumbs, little print statements scattered throughout your code as you try to figure what you told it to do, since it’s obviously not doing what you want it to do. I’d used inspect previously to [...]

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For the past eight days or so, I’ve been having the absolute pleasure of working on a pure research project, re-implementing FireWatir in Python. The project is known internally as “Whiskey,” (FireWatir without the R) and at some 1805 lines is faster and more concise than firewatir’s 6522 lines.
The real trick was to stop [...]

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Until circumstances change, this will just be the most horrible geek tease you can imagine.
At the office, we have exactly three approved programming languanges: C for performance, Python for everything else, and a begrudging tolerance for ECMA-262 for the WebUI team and site design. (Although the docs deployment people get away with PHP, which [...]

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I don’t usually do Microsoft Windows. Unfortunately, company policy at the office for ${DAY_JOB} requires that I have a copy running somewhere so I can participate in the company calendar because the company, despite having a Unix background isn’t capable of actually running a Unix-based calendaring solution. So I keep a vmware image [...]

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I was up last night hacking on my toolchain and getting it ready for production, and I realized that part of it could be ripped out and put up as a library. I had searched for this library and found nothing, so I scratched that itch and tossed it together. I use Emacs [...]

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A few months ago, I asked a group of web deveropers what the new operator does in Javascript. There wasn’t much of a response, but I did eventually figure it out. Sometimes you just have to wade through the specifications. Here’s the outcome of my research:
[ECMA Version 3 (1999), section 11.2.2, page 56]
The production NewExpression [...]

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I was working today on my storyengine / storykeeper / narrator codebase when I hit a snag. Storyengine converts text to XML and embeds in into a database. Storykeeper is a little rails program that I use to make sure all my keywords and so forth are set up correctly. And narrator [...]

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I recently wrote a game, and found it very much like developing a Javascript-based web application. (My wife, who’s a journalist with the video game industry beat, insists “it’s a toy, not a game. There is a difference.” I will defer.)
If you’re a web developer who does a lot of Ajax, there [...]

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I know there are people out there who love the way Ruby does some things, but there’s one feature of Ruby that drives me nuts, mostly because it doesn’t do things The One True Way of Python. And that’s call by reference.
In Python, everything is a reference. Let’s say you have some methods, and [...]

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