• With
• In
• Eval

Eval is generally understood to perform poorly and to be unsafe. But what’s so bad about ‘with’ and ‘in’?

With

It is sort of a quirk with JavaScript where the scope of an operation changes when you use “with”. As with a few things in programming it is not that they can’t be used but they are often used badly. In JavaScript we are accustomed to the scope of “global” and functions. So a variable used in one function can’t be accessed by another function, right? Well when you use “with” you’re in ANOTHER scope, the scope of the thing you’re using. Let me explain.

Imagine you create a wipe function. It takes a cloth object and wipes a table. After you wipe a dirty table the cloth sadly becomes dirty. In JavaScript you could say –

You can run this code in a browser console to see the results. If you look at this simple program at the end the cloth is clean but it is not blue, what happened? We were supposed to be in the scope of the “cloth” object which is how we set its property to clean but something weird happened and we couldn’t set the cloth’s colour. Uh oh! We ran into problems because the colour property was defined but JavaScript usually lets us define properties on the fly.

As you can see, there are some cases where you might want to use “with” but it can also lead to bugs which are unexpected and so difficult to debug. There’s a thread on Stackoverflow about it. My point of view is along the lines of what Alan Storm says.

In

My opinion is as a result of coming across a bug a long while ago. I remember trying to use “in” to iterate over some DOM nodes because I thought it was cool but strange things kept happening and I was lost as to why so I used another method. Much later I read about how it walks up the prototype chain (with respect to DOM nodes it’s a bit more complicated than that). That’s why it’s evil. Again, not because it is “wrong” but it causes more problems than it solves so it is better to avoid it and do what I know is going to work the way I want it to work.

http://unify.github.com/unify/

The most interesting thing for me is that it’s written by Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile. Yes, how many T-Mobiles do you know?) And Vodafone have come up with a widget library called JIL also based on open standards. I heard about Vodafone’s offering at the AJAX meet-up in London 2 weeks ago. Vodafone’s special sauce add to the mix is the ability to do cross-platform testing via Perfecto Mobile. I am told it’s like logging into a video camera looking at a mobile device running your app. That sounds cool right?

Both Deutsche Telecom and Vodafone are members of the Wholesale Application Community (WAC – I kid you not, the truth is better than fiction) that includes NTT DoCoMo and China Mobile among others. Unfortunately Google has not joined yet

So, would you use a framework built by your mobile service provider?

Apart from being interesting in it’s own right, the reason I was watching it was to see what design principles I could apply to my code practice. On a side note, I agree with Effective UI that software design is more like warfare than building construction. Anyway, here’s what made sense to me.

The best buildings are -

• Built to change – by the user for the user because not all use cases can be predicted before hand. Write code looking ahead to make it easier for someone else to understand and change.
• Valuable because they are disposable – can be re-purposed easily and therefore develop a rich history. Disposable code? Umm. . how about making better interfaces so modifications don’t break things.
• Make problems visible – easier to maintain. Less fancy designs.

What I found insightful is that (if the narrative is to be believed) architects are reluctant to learn from their mistakes e.g. flat roofs are notorious for leakage but are popular and that a lot of problems can be solved by adopting a user focused design approach. It looks  suspiciously agile! Go to time stamp 16:20. I’ve become quite keen on user centred design and usability in general recently. More on that later.

• Option 1: launch the python IRB by using "python manage.py shell"
• Option 2: in python IRB enter "from django.conf import settings; settings.configure()"

http://goo.gl/YtZJ

What it is:

• HTML5 is anything but Opera started it in reaction to XHTML 2.0 via Web Application 1.0 with WHAT-WG. Joined forces with Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft and Google.
• HTML5 supports existing standards with additional features

Features:

• <!dochtml /> is used to kick browser into standards mode
  Mark-up is loose but browser behaviour is strict. Mark-up is not case-sensitive, you don’t need quote marks but browser behaviour relative to mark-up is well defined.
• New elements – header, nav, article, footer, section etc. machine readable and in older browsers it is styled as in-line elements. To render as block level elements use CSS and IE use document.createElement(‘header’);
• Canvas
• Audio (mp3, ogg vorbis, WAV) [not that accessible]
• Video – API controls plays nice with the rest of the page and it’s accessible (H.264 [Apple] vs. Ogg Theora vs WebM [Google]). Browser will check source of video element in cascading order – top to bottom.

NB: Chrome prefers WebM. There’s a bug in Safari iPad that causes it to only check the first .mp4 file source.
Web forms – use built in  validation and new input types. Use feature detection.
Anchor elements can be used around block level elements.

Questions

• Is it a flash killer? Not really, there is a valid place for flash.
• How were the new elements chosen? Scooby Doo algorithm. Google made a short list from the most used identifiers and then made decisions based on those.

You can start using it today!

• Install Pidgin
• Add account.
• Select server e.g. IRC freenode enter username and password
• Tick checkbox next to account name to connect to server
• Nick server window will open a window with the message that your username "is not a registered nickname."
• In the input area at the bottom of window enter –

/msg nickserv register your_password your_email_address

• An email will be sent to your email accout to verify it.
• Copy the command from verification email and paste it into the input window.

Why make it easy when it can be hard? (sarcasm).

I had to read, I mean listen, to this book. My brother was raving about it, it was being mentioned everywhere, I saw a presentation by Malcom Gladwell at an AIGA conference . .  I had no choice.

The big idea in this book is that really successful people, like really successful, are not products of chance but of systems that are selectively biased to favour certain individuals over others. The best example, given at the start, is that of hockey and football (soccer, hello Americans ) players. By setting eligibility dates for admission the scales are tipped to favour those who are the most mature by those cut-off dates.

Another noteworthy example is Bill Gates who was fortunate enough to go to a high school that happened to have mothers who raised money to invest in the science department, who happened to have a pupil whose father donated advanced computing equipment, and also happened to go to a college with some more computing facilities . . etc. etc. etc. And now we have one of the richest men in the world.

Now instead of crying over all the opportunities I didn’t know I didn’t have till I read this book, I want to try something out. A point Gladwell makes is that if we identify areas in which we are disadvantaged we are able to systematically overcome them. If it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something, then I better start counting those 10,000 hours, shouldn’t you?

But just as important were the ideas with which they shaped this new company. How do you build an innovation machine? Allow researchers to pursue personal interests that may not have short term goals but may be of long term strategic importance.

Giving colour and insight to this story are Morita’s reflections on Japanese history, work culture and the future. If you want to understand a little bit of where “life-time employment” came from then read this book.

The book meanders in some places and has personal opinions mixed in with factual information but it is was an easy read.

I will leave you with this quote of Morita speaking about his colleague Professor Ibuka -

“Ibuka is a great person with great leadership qualities – he attracts people to him and they invariably want to work with him. In fact, the history of our company is the story of a group of people trying to help Ibuka make his dreams come true. He never believed in one-man management. It was not only Ibuka’s genius and originality in technology fields or his ability to look in the future and accurately forecast for us accurately that struck everyone so forcefully, but his ability to take this group of young and cocky engineers and mold them into a management team that could cooperate in an atmosphere where everybody was encouraged to speak out.”

I might have overstated things when I said it was a rag to riches story. Morita’s family had a successful family business and he had been groomed, as the first son, to take over. Which brings us to …

The author thoroughly explores the differences between these two companies – one a well respected icon in electronics and the other a young upstart with a coloured past. And comes to rest on the conclusion that it is the companies deep seated structures, processes and environments which have allowed Samsung to not only catch up but to overtake Sony.

In a summary that will not do justice to the book, Samsung has a strong command and control structure that has allowed them to make strong profits from building parts for other companies, mainly memory chips, at the best price. They invested aggressively in their business and by some clever strategic thinking positioned themselves to become a quality brand to escape the harsh realities of always trying to be the cheapest bidder.

Sony because of their charismatic founders Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka embraced an open culture that allowed creativity to flourish. They focused their attention on premium products and creating markets. That worked well in the beginning but managing a global enterprise has been a challenge for their successors.

It is like reading a book of modern warfare but nobody has to die. In fact, for a while neither of these companies were in direct competition with each other.

What is in it for you? Are you in an industry where you are trying to make more for less or you want to create something so cool everybody will pay you just to look at it? I find myself leaning towards the latter and this is a history lesson that will be good to learn from – if you don’t want to be overtaken like Sony has been. But the story isn’t over because Samsung is struggling with innovation and Sony have the oppotunity to learn from their mistakes

At the same time I was reading this book I was also reading…