I’ve signed up my blog’s feed to feedburner yesterday, to give me better control of my subscriptions in case I ever need to make changes to the site and also to get some better statistical information ;) .
I got repeatedly annoyed today by what I consider typical behavior for Microsoft products. Windows has the option to perform automatic updates – and recommends to do so in the Security Center (no one wants to see red lights in their Security Center. Does CODE RED mean anything to you? Also, everybody just LOVES updates. Unless it’s from Adobe).
After automatic updates does its thing, it promptly suggests to restart the computer. Two options are given – Restart now and Restart later. What ‘Restart now’ does should be obvious, however ‘Restart later’ is apparently open to interpretation – as Windows will constantly remind you to restart every 10 minutes or so, and will forcibly restart the computer itself if left unattended.
Internet Explorer 6 (abbr. IE6) is the biggest thorne in a web developer’s behind at current times. This legacy browser, released almost 7 years ago, is known for its multitude of offenses on security and standards compliance and still has a sizeable user base to this day. Its market share makes it impossible for us developers to ignore it still, despite how much we would want to do just that.
I had believed I figured out most of the conventions used in the jQuery source code, however a recent addition has been bugging me and I could not find a reasonable explanation for it – I’m talking about the mysterious semi-colons appearing at the beginning of some of the source files in the library. What is its purpose? Does it make the closure invisible to giant robots from outer space? I had no leads to go on.
This blog post by the jQuery.rule team however, reveals the truth about the semi-colon debacle – apparently they’re used for safe file concatenation (string join). Well that’s a load off my chest. You learn something new every day.
In related news, jQuery UI 1.5 has been officially released, says the jQuery enquirer. jQuery 1.5 is an extensive UI oriented extension to jQuery, and version 1.5 bring forth many improvements such as a tighter API, an effects library called enchant, a skinning mechanism and plenty of bug fixes. I’m just excited they finally updated their documentation, as I’ve been using it for a while going only by source code.
jQuery 1.2.6 was released recently, with plenty of bug-fixes and speed improvements. Most notably event handling was sped up 103% and the dimensions plugin was integrated into the framework (the dimensions plugin is an API to calculate elements sizes in a cross-browser and reliable way).
In addition, jQuery UI has recently reached release-candidate status, which means all non minor or trivial issues were solved and it’s getting to the point that it will production ready shortly. I have been using its components for a while in anticipation of such release, and hopefully they will have their documentation up soon.