Squidoo is a personal web content aggregation tool. In classic Web 2.0 style, Squidoo lets you collect a lot of online content about a specific topic and add your own text and images to it. I’ve given it a try, and I think it’s worth my time to put some effort into it. I do […]

Recently I mentioned I was looking into ways to do unit testing in JavaScript and that I found the script.aculo.us file unittest.js to be promising. Because the maintainers of the code have better things to do than document it completely, I found I needed to read through the code to get a good idea of […]

Introduction This article walks the brave reader through the guts of the unit testing code provided by script.aculo.us, (hereafter referred to simply “scriptaculous”, because that’s hard enough to type as it is) the JavaScript library that powers most of those nifty interactive and Ajaxy effects you’re enjoying on web sites these days. This exegetical exercise […]

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 […]

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 […]