I've been waiting for this announcement for a long time. Finally the greatest comedy show returns for what is likely the last season:
Larry David has decided to bring “Curb Your Enthusiasm'' back to HBO for a sixth, 10-episode season. Continuation of the series had been somewhat
up in the air since last season's finale was entitled, “The End.''
(Gee, that sure seemed like a hint.) HBO executives had indicated last
month that David was on the verge of signing on but it took a while for
him to make the final call. No word yet on when the new season will air.
Also of note is The Book
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See previous articles Part 1 and Part 2.
Implemented some changes that are available in the Google Maps API v2. Apparently Google made significant speed improvements so that should help when network nodes update. Also double-click to zoom and continous zoom are now enabled.
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Dojo (an Ajax toolkit) has added the ability to make cross-domain requests using an iframe.
See this and this.
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Joel follows up on his article “The Parils Of JavaSchools” (which I blogged about a while ago here) with another excellent article titled “Can Your Programming Language Do This”. Go check it out here.
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So says Sleepyhead. Check it out here.
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The developer of the best windows utilities on the planet has been gobbled up by Microsoft. Probably means the end to a lot of these utilities being available for free download.
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Waterboy points to an article by Joshua Bloch of Google Research worth reading:
If someone ever asks you why does this computer thing have to be so
complicated, review this little piece of math niceness with them. I
find that encapsulates in a nice single story the simplicity of a
mathematic idea with the complexity of a complete solution. Of course
once you mention the words math and binary in the same sentence you’ve
probably lost 95% of your audience (
via waterboy).
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I did a study on this in the late 90's for a customer in which I came up with pretty much the same results. Even worse, skipping the website altogether was very high on the list. So not only did they not see the flash intro they never saw the homepage:
“The common use of “flash intros” to corporate websites has never made
much sense. Generally, they're a pain, and even for the few folks who
want to watch them, after seeing it once, why should they ever want to
go back again? Yet, for some reason, web designers love them, and
somehow keep convincing corporations to use them. However, a usability
expert studying these things now says that
” the skip intro button is the most used button on the Internet.”
While you can quibble over the hyperbole, it does make sense to
question why so many firms keep using these types of entryways, when it
clearly keeps people from the content they actually want — such as how
to buy your product. (
via TechDirt)
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As Sunava Dutta points out, IE7 now includes a native XMLHTTPRequest object along side support of the ActiveX object as well.
In looking into a BlogChat bug with IE7 Beta with help from Sunava and others from MS we have determined that the ActiveX implementation in IE7 doesn't work exactly the same as pre-IE7 browsers. Brent had a theory about what was happening, although he mistakenly thought we were using the native object at the time. It seems it is the ActiveX implementation in IE7 that is refiring or some such thing.
Folks should be cautious with their AJAX implementations in supporting IE7 and make sure they instantiate a native object in IE7 instead of the ActiveX one.
One way to do this was posted by Joe Walker here.
And I'll post from the current Dojo source code (revision 4219). Please forgive the formatting as I don't feel like editing it myself:
101
102 // These are in order of decreasing likelihood; this will change in time.
103 dojo.hostenv._XMLHTTP_PROGIDS = ['Msxml2.XMLHTTP', 'Microsoft.XMLHTTP', 'Msxml2.XMLHTTP.4.0'];
104
105 dojo.hostenv.getXmlhttpObject = function(){
106 var http = null;
107 var last_e = null;
108 try{ http = new XMLHttpRequest(); }catch(e){}
109 if(!http){
110 for(var i=0; i<3; ++i){
111 var progid = dojo.hostenv._XMLHTTP_PROGIDS[i];
112 try{
113 http = new ActiveXObject(progid);
114 }catch(e){
115 last_e = e;
116 }
117
118 if(http){
119 dojo.hostenv._XMLHTTP_PROGIDS = [progid]; // so faster next time
120 break;
121 }
122 }
123
124 /*if(http && !http.toString) {
125 http.toString = function() { “[object XMLHttpRequest]”; }
126 }*/
127 }
128
129 if(!http){
130 return dojo.raise(“XMLHTTP not available”, last_e);
131 }
132
133 return http;
134 }
135
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I really enjoy reading stuff like this as it reaffirms that what we're doing at SimpleFilter is just above and beyond what these big guys are doing:
It really was just three weeks ago that the news came out that Verizon agreed to
settle a class action suit
brought against the company for being too aggressive in blocking spam.
Apparently, what the lawyers agreed to hasn't filtered back to those in
charge of handling the spam filters (perhaps it was caught in their own
spam filter), as the company is now being accused of turning on (oh
yes, once again)
an overly aggressive spam filter
leading to many problems for users not getting important, legitimate,
emails. It's great that Verizon wants to curb spam for its users — but
being overly aggressive without any way to opt-out or check the filter
is clearly problematic for people who expect to be able to get all of
their legitimate emails.
Update: Verizon is now claiming that this was simply
a glitch
with their spam filters — and it's now been fixed. However, anyone
from Yahoo, America Online, MSN, Google, Roadrunner and a few other
ISPs who tried to email someone with a Verizon.net email address over
the past few days might want to try to resend that message. (
via TechDirt)
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