Our Webtop family has grown to include a personal Calendar, a perfect complement to Laszlo Mail and Contacts. As we said earlier, Calendar is the most requested application and, while we’ve taken a lot of time to get this right, we have decided to release it a little early, as a Preview, because we want to know what you think.

Introducing Laszlo Calendar

BTKeyMini arrives this March, it will work with the iPhone

Macworld | Editors’ Notes | Expo Notes: A Bluetooth keyboard for the iPhone?

Their bad for storing passwords ‘in the clear’. The very least they could do would be to use the well-known mechanisms for storing passwords through a ‘one-way encryption’ that makes it easy to check that the right password is being given, but very hard to figure out what that password is. [Don’t ask me to explain more than that. It’s some deep mathematical magic that has to do with bits of math beyond my fuzzy brain, and the fact that computers are still relatively slow, although if enough money is at stake, you shouldn’t rely on that.]

What to do… In theory, the people with this stolen data could just go round the internet connecting to the usual places like Amazon, PayPal, EBay, etc. enter the email and password they have stolen and wreak all sorts of havoc on me. Luckily, I don’t keep my credit card on file at these places. I force myself to enter it each time I buy something. Slows down the outflow of cash from my wallet — a little bit.

But, now seemed as good a time as any to try to be a little more cautious about the internet. So, what I have been laboriously doing is going through my Keychain, searching for accounts where the login is my email address. If you right click on one, you get a menu with a ‘Go There’ action, which should take you to the site, where Safari should auto-fill in your login and password (assuming you have told Safari that it can do that). Once logged in, I find the ‘change my password’ page, then go back to Keychain and use File/New and click on the little Key symbol to get the Password Assistant. I pick Letters&Numbers and a length of 12, and copy that string. I paste it into the new password field on the website, then I log out, and log back in (with my new password). Safari should notice that you have a new password, and offer to save the new password for the web site.

Other than having to do this for every bleeping account I can think of that might cause me pain if someone broke into it, its a pretty simple procedure.

Now all my passwords are different, so I have less to worry about if one of these sites is as stupid as the one that gave away my old password. It just means that I can’t log in to any of these accounts from someone else’s computer, since there is no way in the world I can remember these passwords any more… Maybe if I am lucky, the iPhone will eventually get a keychain app that can sync to my computer.

If you are using Firefox instead of Safari, Firefox has its own keychain, under Preferences/Security/Passwords. If you haven’t already done it, you need to tell it to use a Master Password, or anyone who can get to your computer can see all your passwords. Once you do that, you should do a similar dance to give yourself different passwords for each site.

In Apple Mail, set my gmail/POP account to inactive. Create a new gmail/IMAP account. Under Preferences/Accounts/Mailbox Behaviors uncheck all the boxes to store messages on the server. (Because mail sent through GMail is automatically saved on the server, so Mail does not need to do it. Drafts will get saved over and over as you write a message and not deleted [a bug Google should fix, IMO], Junk see below, and Trash you don’t want, since that will permanently delete messages [you might as well keep them all since Google allows it, you never know when you might want to search and find something you deleted].)

The easiest way to create the correct account on your iPhone is to re-sync your iPhone, under Info/Mail selecting your new GMail/IMAP account and under Info/Advanced selecting Replace for Mail Accounts. This will correctly create a GMail/IMAP account on your phone. You should double-check under Settings/Mail/(your GMail account)/Advanced that your Mailbox Behaviors all say On My iPhone, for the same reasons given above on why Apple Mail should be set to not save to the server.

Finally, Google does such a good job of junk mail filtering, I turn off Apple Mail’s junk mail filtering. (This is my main reason for switching to GMail. The iPhone does no spam filtering — by sending all my mail through GMail, I see nearly no spam on my iPhone now.) If a message does sneak through, you can inform Google about it by moving the message from your InBox to the [GMail]/Spam folder. Similarly, if you really want to delete a message (not just archive it), you can move it to the [GMail]/Trash folder.

if (d.c[d.f]) d.c[d.f]( sd )

say:

var f = d.c[d.f];
if (f) f(sd);

Even better, when you find yourself having to write a null check, ask yourself if it would be cleaner, simpler, and more efficient to have the variable you are referencing not be nullable. For instance, if a variable is an array, consider using an empty array for its initial value, rather than null. This is a time/space trade-off: if there are many operations on the array and the variable is almost always not null, it will be more efficient to use an empty array; if there are few operations and the variable is usually null, then not allocating the empty array is the better choice.

(In Javascript 2, you will have the option of declaring a variable to be of a particular type, and you will have the option of declaring whether or not that variable can also be null. If you declare it not to be nullable, then the compiler will give you a compile-time warning if it cannot prove that the variable is never null, and it will insert the appropriate runtime check for you.

// This can be null, you have to check before using
var uplinkArray: Array;

// This cannot be null, you have to give a valid initial value
var uplinkArray: Array! = new Array();

Even though we don’t yet support the type declarations, we can follow the pattern and be ready…)

My justification: I wanted a new iPod, because it is too hard to find your place in an audio book on a shuffle. And I don’t want to have to carry an iPod and a cell phone.

I love it.

I love the fact that I can be driving, listening to my iPod, and ‘seamlessly’ transition to a phone call and back. I love how easy it is to manage ‘call interupting’. I thought I would never use the camera, but since I can email pix, and for free, it turns out I do. We got lost on a bike ride the other day and maps saved our butt.

My wishes:

1. Merged inbox. Too painful to visit each of my (4) email accounts
2. Threads. I am so used to them in Apple Mail, I get lost without them.
3. Real IM, not this dumb-ass SMS impostor
4. GPS. Don’t cell phones have to have GPS for 911? Why can it not tell me where I am on the map?
5. .local addresses. Why should it not understand Bonjour?

WE’RE LOOKING FOR PRESENTERS!
OpenLaszlo Developers: We’d love to catch a glimpse at your latest applications and projects. Each presentation should be technical in nature with a demo included. 10 minute slots will be available from 7:30 pm - onwards, and there will be a projector on site.

COST
Free. Pizza, beer and non-alcoholic drinks will be provided by Laszlo Systems.

TO SIGN UP
Please register at the following link

My understanding is that in js, if a variable is declared var foo, and then it is read without an explicit initializer or setter being called, the variable still has a value of undefined and an error is signaled. If that is so in all js dialects then I don’t see any reason why adding variable declarations [to a class declaration] should ever cause problems. I don’t see how it could affect inheritance, for example. Am I missing something?

Sadly, JavaScript has way too many ways something can be undefined, and the two cases you cite are not equivalent:

1. A global variable can not be declared at all. If you reference it, it is an error.

2. A global variable can be declared and not initialized. If you reference it, it is not an error, you will get as a value the sole member o the Undefined type. (Note that undefined is not a JS literal like true, false, or null. It is just a normal variable, that initially has an undefined value. You can set it to have a different value, and probably break lots of programs. I recommend using void 0 as the best way to get the undefined value.)

3. A global variable can be declared and initialized to void 0. This is indistinguishable from 2.

4. Note that global variables are just properties of the global object (typically bound to this at the top level, or self or window in a browser), so although it is an error to reference an undefined variable, if you ask for that variable as a property of the global object, it is not an error (and you will get the undefined value as a result). [It is not an error in Javascript to ask for a non-existent property of an object. But, because this can be the source of bugs (a type-oh in your code), our debug compile does warn you when you make such a reference.]

5. If you want to know if a variable has been declared or not (without using try/catch or provoking a warning), you can use hasOwnProperty on the global object, or the in operator. [For the global object, they are equivalent.]

Here’s some examples illustrating the above:

js> foo
js: "<stdin>", line 2: uncaught JavaScript runtime exception: ReferenceError: "foo" is not defined.
js> var bar
js> bar
js> var bletch = void 0;
js> bletch
js> bletch === bar
true
js> this.foo
js> this.foo === void 0
true
js> this.hasOwnProperty('foo')
false
js> this.hasOwnProperty('bar')
true
js> 'foo' in this
false
js> 'bar' in this
true

Now, that all said, your original question was about a class instance variable. Classes are implemented as objects, so instance variables are properties. It is not an error to reference a non-existent instance variable. There is still the tiny distinction that you can discover whether or not the variable has been declared or not using the hasOwnProperty method or the in operator. If you can prove that no code tries to do that for the variable under consideration, and that the declaration will not shadow an inherited value, you can assume that adding the declaration is safe.

Unless the music industry wises up, it will be faced with a long and protracted battle that may end up alienating the next generation of music fans.

The latest BS from the RIAA: They send you a letter and offer not to sue you if you go to their web site and send them $1500. Idiots. It’s basically a ‘phishing’ scam — they are hoping people will be stupid (or scared) and send them money, because it is not really worth it to sue you.

I expected this to print the words of my phrase in order. It did not. What gives?

lzx> words = "The quick brown fox".split(" ") 
«Array(4)#55| [The, quick, brown, fox]» 
lzx> for (var w in words) Debug.write(words[w]); 
fox 
brown 
quick 
The

Gentle reader,

for in iterates over the ‘keys’ of an object. An array is just an object that happens to have (mostly) numbers as keys (and auto-maintains a length property that is one larger than the largest numeric key).

An object is just a hash table, and there is no implicit order of elements of a hash table (Java has LinkedHashMap which preserves entry order for iteration, and TreeMap which sorts entry order for iteration, but Javascript is a simpler language).

If you want to iterate over an array’s entries in order, use for (var i = 0; i < array.length; i++).

lzx> for (w = 0; w < words.length; w++) Debug.write(words[w]); 
The 
quick 
brown 
fox

If you want to iterate over an object’s keys in a particular order, you have to pull the keys out into an array, sort that array, and then iterate over that array:

var keys = new Array();
foreach (var k in array) { keys.push(k); }
keys.sort(function (a, b) {
  return (a > b) - (a < b);
});
for (var i = 0; i < keys.length; i++) {
  Debug.format("%s -> %s\n", keys[i], array[keys[i]]);
}

The fact that any particular runtime iterates over object keys in any particular order reveals an implementation detail of their hashes, but if you write your code to depend on that you are setting yourself up for a fall. Most Javascript runtimes just happen to use particularly trivial hash implementations that give you the illusion the keys are iterated in order.

See also the yellow box caution here.

• It goes wrong too often.

• No one is so important that we all need to know they are on vacation.

• If you are important to me, I had better have more ways to contact you than by just email. And I probably know you are on vacation already anyways.

• Do you have a vacation phone message too? I hope you have a good burglar alarm.

Vacation mail is about as useful as the boilerplate .sig lawyers and brokers put at the bottom of their email telling me the dirty joke they just forwarded to me is privileged information and that if I am not the intended recipient it is my fault not theirs.

Laszlo - Pizza, Beer and AJAX (Chicago)

Is limewire legal? I heard on the news that the recording companies are going after folks for downloading songs that don’t have documentation, such as ordered thru iTunes. $750 per song.

You should read my blog! :) Sharing != Stealing

Here’s the deal: Downloading is not illegal, even though the record companies would like you to believe it is. (Think about it: if downloading copyrighted material was illegal, you would not be able to go to most of the websites in the world. Nearly every web site is copyrighted, but you can’t read it without downloading that copyrighted information into your computer!)

What is illegal is making songs that you bought (which are licensed to you for your personal use) or songs that you stole (which you have no right to at all), available for downloading. That is the same as making copies of a movie or a book — even if you are giving them away, you are infringing on the owner’s “copy” right. That’s the law today. The record companies would like you to believe that it is downloading that is illegal, because when you download a song for free, they lose money. But that is not what is illegal under current law. The only people they have successfully sued are people who are “publishers”, who are making huge numbers of songs available for downloading by others.

So, Limewire (et al.) are not strictly illegal. But if you operate Limewire in its default mode, it automatically shares all the songs that you have downloaded. That’s what could get you into trouble. You can turn that sharing off, and not get into trouble; but then you become a “leech” in the Limewire community, and most people won’t share with you any more.

The simplest solution: Tell your kids to use iTunes or some equivalent legal service for purchasing their military-industrial complex endorsed pop pap. That is legal, and the songs can be shared legally on up to 5 computers, and you won’t get in trouble. Although you will have very poor taste in music.

There are lots and lots of legal downloads out there, although not of the current “Top 10”. Many of the newer bands put a lot of their concerts up for download for free. Lots of bands put up singles for free on their own web site. iTunes has a free download of the week. Salon has a “Daily Download” where they review new bands and always give one free sample. And if you want to turn your kids into “Dead Heads”, every concert the Grateful Dead ever did is available on line for free.

So, you shouldn’t have to use Limewire to build up your music collection.

[I admit that when I have a single song that I want, and it is not available as a legal download, I do fire up Limewire and look for it there. I try to get it legally first, but if the copyright holder thinks they are going to force me into buying an 18-dollar CD for one song, they are deluding themselves.]

Oh, one other reason not to use Limewire: Several of the record companies routinely “poison” Limewire by putting out files with titles that match the most popular songs. But these files are not songs at all. They are sometimes just warnings (like Madonna screeching “Don’t steal my f*cking music!” over and over), sometimes they are viruses that report back to the record company on your activity, and sometimes they are pornography with a handy web link to suck you into a porno web site… Not always, but all of these things have been reported.