Roller coasters: not so much

Wednesday classicaljunkie and I went to Six Flags. It was weird and nobody had any fun. Basically, her approach to amusement parks is to ride the 500-foot coasters over and over until she can't walk anymore. Mine is to go on the baby rides with my eyes squeezed shut while I go FUCKFUCKSHITCOCKNONOAAAAAAAAAAA, and then sit for a while to recover. A basic incompatibility was thus discovered.

But then we went shopping and had coffee and felt better.

Ignite Boston happened

For Volity, it was a win. The audience was quite large (given the venue of a pub's second-floor function room) and I'm pretty sure I succeeded in keeping its attention for the whole four-and-some minutes of my talk. There was much enthusiastic cheering, and I got some nice compliments about it, chatting with lots of folks afterward. These included total strangers, friends of friends, and two people from O'Reilly I hadn't seen in several years.

The major take-away was an invitation from the director of the O'Reilly Network to help create an article about Volity. I am not sure if he's thinking more an interview or a technical article, but I emailed him a little while ago saying I'm willing to do anything up to and including writing the whole article myself, noting that I wrote several articles for ORN before I started Volity in 2003 (and when it had a different director). Dunno what their editorial policy is on technology inventors writing about their own stuff. We'll see.

I credit the Ignite organizers for posting video from previous events on blip.tv. I watched several before I started putting together our bit on Tuesday. I applied my observation that, with only five minutes to work with, big grabby visuals worked much better on slides than lots of text bullets. The result was a fine success and I really gotta post a version online for y'all to see. Bug me about it if I don't!

Unfortunately, the venue for this event wasn't so hot. The room was a long and somewhat skinny rectangle with the stage at one end and the bar at the other. It quickly fell into a use-pattern where people who wanted to watch the presentations sat or stood in the stage half, while people who didn't really care hung out in the bar half, talking in the shouty voice one uses in a crowded pub.

Sadly, sound travels. One of the organizers repeatedly took the mic between presentations to ask for quiet from the back, which worked for about 2.5 minutes each time. And it got worse as the evening wore on; a colleague and I agreed that we were fortunate to have our talks scheduled among the earlier block.

Also the assembled geeks apparently failed to drink enough, since the same organizer asked people to enjoy another drink if they were thinking of it, since if they didnt O'Reilly would be stuck with a your-event's-attendees-didn't-cover-our-costs bill. I had three pints all told, which was about two and a half too many given my medication. But, you know: business. It's a write-off.

Oh, also the keynote was actually kind of interesting content-wise but the guy stumbled weirdly a couple of times. He was met with grumbling at a throw-away comment that the number of women in the audience was in the single digits - a strange thing to say since this was visibly untrue to anyone there. Then he responded to this grumbling by making a sarcastic jab at "feminists". WTF? It got things started on odd footing. Fortunately, most of my fellow lightning-talkers were smoother. (And if some weren't, they were yanked off after five minutes anyway...)

XML DOM hacking in MSIE: halp!

Righto, I just sacrificed a couple of hours on the altar of trying to get shit to work in MSIE. On the plus side, I think I can eliminate one of the third-party libraries I've been using; MSIE was barking at it, and I find that I can do the same thing it was doing using Prototype, which the application already depends on.

On the minus side, MSIE's XML API eludes me. Consider this code snippet. Given xml_request, an XMLHttpRequest object:

    alert(xml_request.responseText); // This prints the correct thing.
    var xml_doc = xml_request.responseXML;
    var root_element = xml_doc.documentElement;
    if (root_element) {
        alert("I have a document element. I am a sane browser!");
    }
    else {
        alert("I have no document element. I must be MSIE. Fuck.");
    }

The initial alert() makes me sure that MSIE (as well as any other browser) is in fact reading the XML. I just can't do a damn thing with it after that; every attempt to peek into any DOMmish properties of xml_doc returns null.

xml_doc.firstChild and equivalent statements all fail equally (while succeeding on sane browsers). Wha?

---

Another good reason to drop the library I am dropping? It contains lines of code like this:

MWJ_ldD[MWJ_ldD.length-1].onreadystatechange = new Function( 'if( MWJ_ldD['+(MWJ_ldD.length-1)+'].readyState == 4 ) { '+oFunct+'(MWJ_ldD['+(MWJ_ldD.length-1)+'].load?MWJ_ldD['+(MWJ_ldD.length-1)+']:MWJ_ldD['+(MWJ_ldD.length-1)+'].responseXML); }' );

Holy hannah. That's no way to make friends.