Developer's notebook OTD

Last night's growling due to happy news: my web-client work is more or less integrated into (my test branch of) the volity.net website, and it works on all browsers I can be bothered to care about, including Opera (yes, I have tested it on my Wii) and both MSIEs. I'm going to push to take it live by month's end.

It's technically not slippage, because my original deadline was Sept. 30. Let us ignore all the boasting about earlier releases I did a month ago.

I do all my JavaScript development on Firefox + Firebug, and Safari generally follows suit without any extra work. It took me an hour or two on Saturday to make it Opera-compatible, figuring out that it didn't like how I was handling cookies. Opera seems to insist that you set the cookie header used for subsequent AJAX calls with the DOM's document.cookie property, and no other way will do. Fine, whatever.

It took all day Sunday to get the MSIEs in line. They are turds and I hate them. Their only redeeming feature in this matter is the surprising fact that both 6 and 7 had the same problems, and I got both to work simultaneously.

The IE problems, each of which took far too long to isolate:

• IE silently ignores requests to add <tr>s to <table>s via the DOM appendChild method. You must instead add them to a <tbody> which is itself a child of the table. Seriously, what the fuck; who uses <tbody> normally?


• IE caches the result of each AJAX call, and subsequent calls to that same URL (a very common polling pattern) will result in no request at all being made, but instead a silent return of the old value, so it looks like it made a request. You can get around this by (meaninglessly) adding the current time to the URL's query string, or adding a bogus If-Modified-Since header to the request. (On the plus side, this made me finally add decent logging to my server-side daemon, since I couldn't figure out what was going wrong without it.)


• For the life of me, I couldn't use any Prototype.js methods to refer to elements that had been added to the DOM tree since the document's original rendering. I finally punted, adding such elements to some global arrays upon creation (with apologetic code comments noting how fucking stupid MSIE is) and just accessing those instead later on.

Working with Microsoft software as a developer makes me so angry. It makes me angrier than thinking about the current American government and its foreign policy, because I usually burn through that in a few minutes. But working with Microsoft means wading around waist-deep in a vat of pure shit for hours. It gives me a hate that can last for days afterwards. I really hope I can minimize exposure to it as the web client project moves forward.

Developer's Notebook addendum

This blog is now on the first page of Google hits for [fuck msie]. (It is also the number-one hit for [msie fuck]. Ha.)

In more positive news

chocorisu recently linked to Nifflas' Knytt games, and I too endorse these. Last night I played Knytt Stories at classicaljunkie's house with a glass of wine, and it was like relaxing into a mental sauna. Pure charm and fun. (Shame about them being Windows-only, but they ran fine under VMWare.)

Eatin breakfast.

On a whim, I just registered for a breakfast meeting of the Cambridge Chamber of Commerce tomorrow so I can network with local businessfolk as a service provider. It's a little pricey, but not too pricey to rise out of what-have-I-got-to-lose range. (Plus, it's a write-off. I now make the write-off gesture, to demonstrate.)

I attended another such breakfast around two years ago, when I was starting to look for Volity funding and while my business ignorance was profound. It was entirely the wrong place for that, but I was impressed by how nice the people were. Several gave me tips on more appropriate groups to join. Now, I represent a different business that actually does offer a service they might be interested in. It feels a little topsy-turvy, talking about my programming prowess to random flower-shop owners and insurance-firm partners, but the idea to attend hit me the other day and the idea feels right in my gut. Why not?



I just threw together this business card. It's not meant to be a permanent design for me; just something decent-looking that I can print onto cardstock tonight and hand to people tomorrow. The URL doesn't exist yet but I'll make it happen presently. What do you think?

Is it fair to refer to myself as a consultant, at this point? I get the impression that a consultant is best defined as the person who points at themselves and says "I'm a consultant." It sounds a little more, eh, business-cardy than "freelance programmer". Would you agree?

In other news, the usual client just asked if they can assign me some more stuff. Things are gonna be OK, on the money pillar.

Sound effects: [chainsaw] [creamed corn falling into a toilet bowl]

Okaaaay. So I just got Resident Evil 4 for Wii, after discovering that (a) it was $30 ($20 less than the Amazon coupon I had), and (b) reviewers seemed to be very pleased with how it uses the Wiimote/nunchuk controls.

Annnd, I'm not sure I'm psychologically prepared to play this.

Seriously, the sound and graphics in the "survival horror" genre have gotten... awfully... detailed, since I last looked. (Circa Silent Hill 3.)

I have died more times in video games than I can count, but that just now was the first time that doing so made me throw up in my mouth a little.

I am not convinced this is a good thing.