A friend wants to consolidate his domain registrations. Not technical, so they ask me to help. What seems like the right approach? Let’s log in to your account at Register.com and make me the Admin contact, so I can help you out. Simple enough. Hum. Your domain is set to auto-renew, be locked, and have safe-auto-renew protection. Guess we’ll have to turn all those off to be able to transfer. Okay, I suppose they should tell you that by turning all that off you might lose your domain if you don’t know what you are doing, but we do. But, you can’t turn off auto-renew, because you have “mail” and “hosting” bundled with this domain. Ok, how do we unbundle those? Turns out you haven’t been using these features anyways, since your webmaster is hosting your site and email accounts on their server. Maybe if we just turn off auto-renew on those… That seems to do the trick.

Now, we need to request the transfer. We’ll log in to the registrar you want to consolidate to, and ask them to initiate a transfer. That’s working, I got an email (as admin) and they just need me to enter an “auth code” to proceed.

Back to Register.com. How do we get an “auth code”? Burrow down about 5 levels… aha, there’s the “request auth code” button. WARNING! Turn back, you surely don’t know what you are doing. Yes I do. Okay, but don’t say we didn’t warn you. BTW, did we mention that this is a bad idea? Yes, but I want to do it. Okay, but you know you could LOSE YOUR MANHOOD by hitting this ok button! Are you really sure?? YES! Just one final question, since you are trying to leave us, we’ll offer you a nifty renewal package at 10% off. I don’t want that. Are you sure? Yes. Ok. We will send you an auth code IN 4-5 DAYS, after our “security staff” have had a chance to evaluate your request.

[5 days elapses]

My friend gets an email from Register telling him that his request for an auth code has been denied due to “suspicious activity” on his account and that he has to call a customer service rep to get one. What is the suspicious activity? His domain records were recently updated to have a new Admin contact!

I volunteer to make the call, but of course, I don’t know the answer to the “security question” (What is the name of your great-grandfathers previous ex-girlfriend?). That’s ok, they can send an email to my friend so he can reset that question, or, they can call me (using the suspicious update that made them deny the request in the first place) to verify that I really am the admin contact. Anyone else think this is a sham yet?

So, I hang up, wait, they call, all is well. We’ll send an auth code. To me, the admin contact? No, we’re not allowed to do that. It has to go to the owner. Ok fine, just send it. I will have him forward it.

[2 days elapse]

We have an auth code! Well, I have to refresh my transfer request, because that has timed out in the interim. We plug in the auth code. Things seem to go through. Our transfer is now “Awaiting Registry Approval”.

My friend gets an email from Register. They are sorry to see him go. Just to make sure, they are NOT going to okay the transfer for a week, in case he would like to take advantage of this really tempting offer to renew his domain services for 10% off…

Funny how that is justshy_ of the maximum possible time they are allowed to actually effect the transfer.

I think it has the potential to be the ideal computer for 90% of the people in the world who really only use a computer to read email and surf the web. The one catch: it seems (as far as I can tell), you still need an “iTunes base station”, albeit only occasionally. I understand that there are people who have iPhones that have never connected them to their PC, so, perhaps the iPad can also run stand-alone (once activated)?

I am angling to get my company to buy one (because I think we can make some hay on Steve’s anti-Flash stance and OpenLaszlo’s ability to deliver to Flash and HTML from the same source). If they won’t, I will surely buy one myself, rabid fanboy that I am.

If “grampa” were not such a technophobe, I would say it would be the perfect computer for him, because it should be simple enough to operate that even he could read email. Even if he never replied, at least he could see email, see pictures his children and grandchildren send him, etc.

For the student (for any casual user who mostly takes notes, looks things up on the web, and maybe has a few job-specific applications) I can see it replacing the laptop they carry now. Modulo the concern above that you need an “iTunes base station”. Maybe the Mac mini will be repurposed to be that?

For the geek household, I see it as replacing the hand-me-down laptop that you keep rather than sell, just so you have one you can browse with from the breakfast nook, or loan to visitors so they don’t accidentally peek at your bank statement that is open on your machine in your office. I don’t see it replacing my laptop. Although I wonder how long it will take for someone to package Emacs as an app?

I’m looking for your financial support so that I can finish writing my fourth novel, Creation Science, and publish it.

Creation Science

What’s a third party? It’s someone that is not you and is also not the owner of the website you are visiting. Usually it is an advertiser that is showing ads on the side of the website you are visiting. They have their own website that serves up the ads. You are not intentionally visiting their website — you’re just getting there as a side-effect of seeing their advertisement.

In the bad old days, web browsers used to let any site see all the cookies on your computer. This was bad. It might let the evil Pr0n site you “accidentally” visited gather information to impersonate you at your bank. They don’t do that any more, but they still, by default, allow any website to store and retrieve cookies. Which means, unfortunately, while you may be visiting yourfavoriteblog.com, if they are showing ads on their page, those advertisers can also read and write cookies. When you go to another website (say sillyvideos.com) with the same advertiser, they can ‘track’ that you saw one of their ads on both of those sites — they can track what sites you visit. In this case, the advertiser is a “third party”. They are not you. They are not the website you are visiting. They just happen to show up on that web site. If you don’t like being tracked, you should turn off “third party cookies”.

Most web browsers by default don’t allow third-party cookies these days (or as Safari puts it “Only accept cookies from sites I visit”). But if you turn off third-party cookies in your browser, a lot of sites will just use Flash cookies instead. Stupidly, the default for Flash is to allow these “third party” cookies. If you follow the link below:

Adobe - Flash Player : Settings Manager - Global Storage Settings Panel

you can turn this feature of Flash off. I recommend you un-check the box that says “Allow third-party Flash content to store data on your computer”, if you value your privacy.

So I’m profiling along, and I find an anonymous function that is being called a number of times. It doesn’t cost a lot, but I’m curious why it is anonymous. It’s not really anonymous, because our compiler assigns a debugging name to anonymous functions that you can use to find them in the source. Here’s the anonymous function:

static var _ignoreAttribute = {toString: function () {
      return '_ignoreAttribute'}};
  

_ignoreAttribute is just a unique sentinel object that we use as a way to indicate that an attribute has already been processed, deep in the inner workings of LZX. Someone (probably me) graciously gave it a toString method, so that when you are debugging and trip across it, you will realize that it is not just any old empty object.

But I’m not debugging. I’m profiling. I’m not calling _ignoreAttribute.toString(). It’s nowhere in the source code that I can see. What is going on?

Gentle reader,

Well, here’s a problem:

if (null != this.datapath && dp != LzNode._ignoreAttribute) {
  this.datapath.setXPath(dp);
} else {

Can you spot it? When dp != LzNode._ignoreAttribute runs, dp is normally a string, and read the fine print for how equality is computed in Javascript (from p. 64 of ECMAScript Language Specification Edition 3):

1. If Type(x) is different from Type(y), go to step 14. […]
2. If Type(x) is either String or Number and Type(y) is Object, return the result of the comparison x == ToPrimitive(y).

Well, I won’t bore you with more gory details, but the bottom line is, every time we compare _ignoreAttribute to a String, the runtime has to call its toString method to see if it is “equal”.

The storal of the morey is, when you want to compare for “identity”, use the “strict equals operator” (=== or !==), not the “equals operator”. [For my money, the former should have just been called the “identity” operator, but unfortunately it isn’t quite. There are some odd edge cases that make it not a true identity operator.]

P.S., Heck, global warming would probably be solved just by turning off all the computers that are wasting cpu-cycles folding, spindling, and mutilating tax returns today.

First, baseball wanted Microsoft to make it possible for users to download Silverlight without having to possess administrative rights. When people are at work, it’s often the company that possesses those rights and employees would need authorization to download the player. That frustrated plenty of MLB.com subscribers, according to the sources.

Why Major League Baseball dumped Microsoft’s Silverlight | The Industry Standard”

Posted via email from PTWithy

OpenLaszlo 4.3 Released

‘nuff sed.

First go into your Settings - Turn on Airplane Mode - and then turn your Wi-Fi connection (back) on.

Doh!

I just checked it out and it works perfectly. If you try to make a phone call or text, it tells you you have to turn off Airplane Mode, and gives you choice of not making the call or turning the phone back on. Ditto if you try to text. But I can still surf, email, use AIM, etc. Nice!

How To: Turn on WiFi While the iPhone 3G/EDGE Radio is Off | The iPhone Blog

Laszlo has to sell products and make money, but I think the OpenLaszlo platform has lost in priority with the current management. Not money-wise (how much money they spend on it), but seeing it as a marketing-vehicle for the company. I would love to see more DHTML apps, that would really convince people of the dual-runtime power.

Gentle Reader:

I look at it this way: OpenLaszlo is practically a separate entity. Laszlo is our main sponsor, so we mostly do what they ask. But, we do have other sponsors: G.ho.st directly, others through support contracts. So they also get attention. Community stuff comes last, because that has no $ attached to it. But community leaders can be given commit privileges and see their goals achieved directly.

While OpenLaszlo is a valuable technology base, the company can’t make (as much) money off of it as they can with a proprietary product. Laszlo is doing kind of the same thing as Apple: adding proprietary value to an open-source base. And, we like that, because it means they can “donate” more money to the OpenLaszlo team. :)

Laszlo is a venture-backed company, and venture capitalists are all about making money. They pretty much only see as far as the Webtop licenses. But the management has been made well aware of how the community has made the base they build on much more solid than what they would get with a closed source.

As to DHTML applications, in reality, swf9 is so different from swf8, that is the more convincing port to me! swf8 and DHTML are only different in their UI model, the Javascript is 99% the same. To do swf9, we really had to re-engineer the guts of the whole tag compiler and script compiler, to implement a lot of Javascript 2 (Harmony) and then compile down to Javascript 1 for swf8 and DHTML.

We knew it would be a lot of work, but we knew if we could do it, we would really prove we had a platform-independent language in LZX, and we ended up with a much more robust system in the end.

There is a rule of thumb: 2 ports does not make you platform-independent, it is the 3rd that is the test!

In the end, we were very pleased that we were able to keep nearly all the dynamicity of LZX and target a strongly-typed, much more static platform. The strong-typing and ‘true’ classes of Javascript 2 have given significant performance gains (some claim a speed-up of 5-6 times), but the OpenLaszlo compiler has been able to shield the LZX developer from most of the requirements of declaring types and overrides in their LZX code and has been able to keep dynamic features like <state>s and constraints.

Let me conclude by saying, overall you are right. OpenLaszlo needs more publicity, whether for Laszlo as a company, or just for it’s own growth. Let’s hope this little post can help it along the way…