The Author – Bart Busschots
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Aug
5
JavaScript – Much more than Java’s Mini-Me
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Software Development on August 5, 2006 | 3 Comments
Something that has annoyed me for a long time is that JavaScript is looked on by many people as just being a stripped down version of Java. You take Java, you take out most of the features and you get JS. This is completely wrong. The two are two completely different languages which follow different paradigms. One is Hard Typed and Object Oriented, the Other is Loosely Typed and Object Based. To give you an idea of just how different the languages are I would say that Java is to JavaScript like C/C++ is to Perl. I.e. they are completely different languages in just about every respect but their syntax is superficially similar.
Far from being a stripped down version of Java, JS is in many ways a more powerful language and is certainly more feature-rich. And I’m not talking about little conveniences that make programming a little easier but major features that make some things all but impossible to do with Java but which JS does simply and naturally. In this article I’m going to look at some of these features. While I was writing this article, I came up with many less dramatic advantages which JS has over Java, which just make things easier with JS. Initially I had also included those in this article but they made it too long for the modern attention span. Instead, I’m compiling them into a separate article with the working title Hidden JS which I hope to publish within the next week or so. The inspiration for this article was a post by Joel Spolsky entitled Can your programming language do this? which details one of the advantages JS has over Java.
Jul
31
Welcome to the new home for my Blog
Filed Under Computers & Tech, My Projects on July 31, 2006 | 4 Comments
This is the first post to my new blog since I moved it from www.minds.nuim.ie/~voyager/blog to here. The move has not been a smooth one because I also moved from using the Serendipity blog software to WordPress. ATM all my old posts are here but many have not imported perfectly and all the comments were lost. I’ll be fixing the posts over the next while and I haven’t quite given up on find a way to get the comments across but the changes are it won’t happen.
I still have some work to do here before I get back up to my normal level of posting but from tomorrow on expect to start seeing new posts again.
Jul
13
Microsoft Update – A HCI Nightmare
Filed Under Computers & Tech on July 13, 2006 | 1 Comment
I have always assumed that miss-leading your users and making them jump through many hoops is a bad things. MS appear to disagree. Read more
Jul
6
The Problems with the IE Domain Registry
Filed Under Computers & Tech, System Administration on July 6, 2006 | 3 Comments
For those of you who have no idea who or what the IE Domain Registry (IEDR) are, they are the people who decided who does and does not get what .ie Internet domain name. You can find out more on their home page. Below is a quote from their front page in which I have bolded the bits that I find particularly positive.
“The IEDR is an independent not-for-profit organisation that manages the .ie country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) namespace in the public interest of the Irish and global Internet communities.
The IE Domain Registry is not a governing or regulatory body, but provides a public service for the .ie namespace on behalf of the Internet community.”
These people have a very important responsibility, they manage the Irish-branded presence on the internet. They literally determine who is good enough to belong to Ireland on the internet. Were they to genuinely live up to the bolded parts of the above quote I would have nothing but praise for them. However, my many experiences with them over many years have lead me to the conclusion that they are falling far short of these ideals. Read more
Jun
28
Some Help with Webdesign and Colours
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Software Development on June 28, 2006 | Leave a Comment
Something I’ve always had a lot of trouble with is developing good colour schemes for web pages. (The fact that I’m rather colour blind does not help matters!) I generally end up falling back to a mono-chrome scheme where the site just uses many different shades of the same single colour. This works but often leads to sites that look a little boring. I need to skin a new web portal at work that I want to make look good and professional to speed up it’s adoption so I decided I just had to get to grips with this colour thing. There is no magic quick fix but here are two links I found in-valuable and that I’m sure will also be a great help for others trying to get to grips with this:
- A page explaining the theory
- A nice interactive web-based colour wheel to help you put it into practice
Jun
25
MBP Update – Gets a Little Warmer Than I First Thought
Filed Under Computers & Tech on June 25, 2006 | Leave a Comment
Just a quick follow-on from my initial review of my new 17″ MacBookPro. In my initial review I had said that the MBP does not get very hot but that is not entirely true. It is true that when just running on the battery it gets significantly less hot than my old Pentium 4 Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook however, while it is charging it does get annoyingly hot. Still not quite as hot as the LifeBook but the battery it self gets hot enough to be un-comfortable on the legs. However, the base of the 17″ MBP is more than big enough so you can easily sit it on your lap in such a way that the hot bit is not resting on your legs!
Jun
19
The Black MacBook – Disappointing
Filed Under Computers & Tech on June 19, 2006 | 1 Comment
Following on from my review of the 17″ MacBookPro yesterday I got to play with a 13″ Black MacBook today. I was, to say the least, underwhelmed. The black is horrible and tarnishes instantly. The machine I was playing with had had nothing more done to it than have it’s initial setup done and it already looked like it was a few years old. I could get over the look of it but the screen is just too small for me with too poor a resolution and the keyboard is terrible. It looks ‘unique’ which I can live with but then I tried to type with it and was not at all impressed. On a more positive note it is not too heavy and feels much more sturdy and robust than the old iBooks. It’s also very fast to boot and apps load quickly (as you’d expect from a CoreDuo machine). I guess if you had an iBook the MacBook will feel like an upgrade but if you had one of the small PowerBooks you’ll really feel like you’ve gone down in the world. Having said that I only got to play with it for a few minutes so this should be taken as nothing more than ‘first impressions’, this is FAR from an exhaustive review.
Jun
18
17″ MacBookPro Review
Filed Under Computers & Tech on June 18, 2006 | 2 Comments
I’m typing this in a swelteringly hot terminal in Valencia Spain waiting for my plane to arrive and hopping that the thunder and lighting in the distance stays in the distance long enough for us to get outta here! Anyhow, I’ve had my 17″ MacBookPro for a week and a half now so I think I have enough experience with it at this stage to go a head and give it a review! BTW, the machine I got has the standard 1GB of RAM, the glossy 17″ monitor and I opted for the smaller but faster 100GB hard disk. Read more
Jun
8
PostgreSQL on the Mac
Filed Under Computers & Tech, System Administration on June 8, 2006 | Leave a Comment
Having recently discussed running MySQL on the Mac I’d now like to tackle PostgreSQL. I’m sorry to say things are not quite as rosy just yet. PostgreSQL don’t provide us with a binary distribution for the Mac nor do they provide a nice Panel for the System Preferences App. There are also less choices when it comes to GUIs for manipulating and designing your database but there are still options and things are still a lot better than they could be. Read more
May
31
On Third Thoughts – iWeb REALLY Sucks
Filed Under Computers & Tech on May 31, 2006 | Leave a Comment
Having recently updated my opinion on iWeb from “it’s OK” to “it sucks”, I’ve now gone one step further and decided that it REALLY sucks! I just did a very minor upgrade from iWeb 1.1 to iWeb 1.1.1 and it broke my site. I can’t really put it any simpler than that, it just broke my site. Read more