A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

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.

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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.

I spent the morning finishing up this little contract job, creating a Minti tag for Johnny's Selected Seeds. Minti is the system I helped create back at MINT for building Apache/MySQL/Perl-based dynamic websites, and JSS is one of the many companies that absorbed pieces of MINT's human resources.

It sure took me back to work with all my old, kooky method names again, and see that Minti is still broken (or, rather, very easy to break) in the same ways it was when I last worked with it, a year and a half ago, despite the fact that Arcus has continued to develop it over this time. I got to talk to Alisa, our old webmaster, again after I accidentally blew away her test site's config by forgetting about one of the many chicken-waving ceremonies one must perform when updating some server information. So that was nice.

Now I am grappling with SourceForge's kooky UI again, as I attempt to update one of my bits of software there, a shopping cart Perl module that I wrote at MINT in 2000, and to which Andy has made a few bugfixes since I left. Once I figured out what he did, I declared it the new version. It's still almost completely undocumented, but after functioning for about two years in a production envrionment, it's stable enough to deserve a link from my homepage or something... yet another thing to throw on the "Stuff that I worked on a lot when I was paid to be interested in them but then I left that job so I don't care that much about them anymore: enjoy!" pile.

Geek geek geek Oh yeah, yesterday I turned my whole personal website, hosted on a PC at Arcus, into a CVS module, which I then checked out onto my iBook. In theory, I now have a fully-functional test platform. Pretty good! Maybe I'll actually do something about updating that silly site now.