A couple of techie followups

[prog]

Research, including asking y'all earlier, has led me to believe that if there is a way to have MSIE 6 and 7 running independently on a single Windows machine, it's almost certainly not worth the tremendous effort involved. Nor is it worth the questionable level of stability that this level of DLL and registry contortion would no doubt leave the machine in.

I will instead take mr_choronzon's advice and carve out a second, file-based VMWare machine on my Mac, expressly for running 7. This is a sad sacrifice of hard disk space for running a single test-target application, but I really see no other reasonable way.

---

Had a comment thread a while ago about maintainability versus size in client-code that has to be sent over the wire (most commonly, JavaScript in web pages). Since then I've encountered a happy medium that many perfectly clueful entities employ.

It's apparently SOP for organizations that deal with tremendous amounts of traffic to code in a nice clean fashion with as much whitespace and as many long variable names as you please, but before going into active duty each such piece of code is pseudo-compiled (really, obfuscated) down to an ultra-compact size, making it as small as possible without any loss of meaning. These files are then treated like compiled binaries, even though they're still interpreted scripts: the developers never touch them directly, instead making further changes by editing the long-form scripts and then re-compressing them.

Comments

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

+1 for VMWare. It is rad.

[misuba.livejournal.com]

It's apparently SOP for organizations that deal with tremendous amounts of traffic to code in a nice clean fashion with as much whitespace and as many long variable names as you please, but before going into active duty each such piece of code is pseudo-compiled (really, obfuscated) down to an ultra-compact size, making it as small as possible without any loss of meaning. These files are then treated like compiled binaries, even though they're still interpreted scripts: the developers never touch them directly, instead making further changes by editing the long-form scripts and then re-compressing them.

This is indeed what I was trying (and apparently failing) to communicate in that other thread.

Someday soon I may get time for volitizing again. (Soon as in, like, this week. Exciting!)

another option

[xach.livejournal.com]

jwacs at http://chumsley.org/jwacs/ takes an interesting approach. It adds full continuation support syntax to JavaScript, then processes and compiles that augmented language to standard JavaScript for inclusion on web pages. It doesn't exactly compress the output, but it's fairly compact compared to human-generated code.

It's all written in Lisp, but runs like almost any other compiler (it's not Lisp-nerd-only-ware).

vmware fusion / parallels 3.0

[poetgeek.livejournal.com]

FYI, vmware fusion (for os x) has pre-release ordering at half off (~$40) the mspr until they start shipping a production version (end of August).

If you recently purchased parallels 2.x, they'll give you a free upgrade to 3.0 if you ask support.

It is apparently possible to use the guest os level vmware converter to convert a parallels vm to vmware... parallels supports converting vmware's [documented!] disk image files directly.

Re: vmware fusion / parallels 3.0

[prog.livejournal.com]

I'm using a legit free beta of VMWare Fusion that I downloaded a while ago (probably in April). Dunno if it's still available.