The purpose of The Little Schemer, its authors profess, is to teach you to think recursively, and to do so without presenting too much math or too many computer science concepts. The book is a ball to read. However, from the perspective of this reader, who is fairly new to functional programming and totally new […]
Author: mh
Following an admiration chain, starting with someone I admire, I wound up reading Paul Graham’s essays. I added some feeds to my news reader, and all of a sudden I’ve found a fairly big party, in progress. I’m inundated with news, information, and opinion. I’m paying attention. But what does it mean?
Yes, it’s almost time. I can’t resist a post about the forthcoming Harry Potter book, number 7, which ends the epic story of the boy wizard. Incidentally, my wife and I are only one book away from finishing another 7-novel series, which I think clocks in at a few hundred pages more, although we’ll see […]
In my last post I whinged about not liking jsUnit. I hoped I would find something better by looking at how the Prototype people test their code. Well, I was close: I remembered seeing some unit and functional testing in one of the JS packages I use, and it turned out to be Scriptaculous I […]
I’m doing a lot of work with JavaScript right now. I’ve been coding in sin, though: I haven’t done any regression testing. No unit tests, no functional tests. In part, I’ve just been lazy; but in my own defense, how do you unit test JavaScript? Well, I’m thinking about collecting one of the most interesting […]
So I’ve decided it’s time to learn C, for real. I used to know only enough to be dangerous. At the little startups I worked at, it was enough to know that a pointer was a reference to a memory address to impress people, but I couldn’t read real source code, and I didn’t know […]
I have discovered perhaps my favorite thing so far about College Park, the university’s radio station WMUC. It’s a ten-watt station, and I’ve determined its signal doesn’t extend very far beyond the city and university limits. However, its truly excellent web site, wmucradio.com, is available to the broadband-enabled. You can listen in to the current […]
I wrote a little while back about using Javascript and Ajax to build a dynamic and interactive interface for a site that would otherwise be flat HTML. My client is using a commercial ecommerce platform, ShopSite 8.1, which has a web-based admin interface for entering info about a product. The application then publishes summary and […]
On Saturday Feb. 17, six balloons were raised around the Greenbelt Metro station to demonstrate how tall six planned buildings will rise. I am very tardily posting some photos I took of these balloons.
I’ve just spent about three hours debugging JavaScript. If you’ve never debugged JavaScript yourself, let me assure you, it’s a real pain. Rejoice that your life, whatever its disappointments, has not led you to this pass. If you have, and you know my pain, let me share some hard-won insight and advice. For instance, “this” […]