Archive for May, 2006

I’ve been plugging away at an initial sketching-out of the “New in JavaScript 1.7″ document, which is amusing since I don’t think the syntax has been fully nailed down yet, judging by the latest comments in the assorted Bugzilla entries related to JS1.7.

Some of the new features in JS1.7 are going to be really handy. Others will be useful in certain cases but are mostly just cool. I can see myself using array comprehensions, and definitely expect to use let. On the other hand, generators and iterators aren’t something I expect I’ll personally use a lot, although they’re certainly neat.

It’s an interesting experience writing docs for something that’s not finished being designed yet. I’ve done it before — although on a grander scale; that time, it was the BeOS Media Kit, and it got completely redesigned after six months of documentation work, meaning I had to throw away about 175 pages of documentation and start over.

This time, the work is of a lesser scope, in that there are only a select number of new features being added to the JavaScript language, so even if my initial “this is what the proposals and comments seem to indicate we’ve got cooking” version of the document is completely wrong, it won’t be a huge deal to redo it from scratch.

And it can be very educational to write up something like this, even if you have to toss much or all of it out later.

The other fun thing going on is that Charter was out again today to look at our cable, which of course came back online about an hour before they arrived, and hasn’t failed since. I demanded, this morning, that they send someone today, despite their insistence (as usual) that they couldn’t until Monday. I fully expect it to die sometime during the night, or tomorrow morning. However, they claim they have a monitor watching our connection to see if anything happens.

Unfortunately, a watched link never fails.

Tonight, being Wednesday, was our Sophie-free night — she spends Wednesday nights with Sarah’s mom. So we decided to use a coupon that expires tomorrow and go to Red Lobster for dinner, over in Knoxville.

As we pulled into the lot, I noticed a red pickup that’s halfway hanging out into the aisle and is parked crosswise across two spaces at a diagonal. I pointed it out to Sarah, grumbling about the incredibly lousy parking job.

Just then, the car backed up a couple of inches, changing my griping from, “What a lousy parking job!” to “That guy’s backing out and doesn’t even have his lights on!”

It seems to be stopped, so I drive around it and pull into a parking space a couple of slots over. That’s when I look over at it and say, “There’s nobody in that truck!”

Sarah got out of the car and ran inside to find the owner of the truck, and I ran over to the truck, put my hands on the vertical post behind the driver’s seat, and pushed, to keep it from rolling backward any more, since in about six more feet it would have been on its way out onto Kingston Pike, one of the busiest streets in Knoxville.

I held the truck there, feeling the brakes giving and catching, but keeping it from rolling, until the owner came running out, fumbling around for his keys.

He was pretty grateful for my help. I bet his insurance company is relieved too.

Whew!

What got into you, man?

Just finished watching tonight’s episode of Lost. Sarah thinks he’s become one of Them. I think he’s doing what he’s doing because they’ve promised he can see Walt again if he does it.

At any rate, tonight’s episode was one of those where we sat there going, “Whoa!” for a couple minutes after it was over.

I knew Anna Lucia was going to be killed off, probably thanks to her whole drunk driving thing, but I wasn’t expecting quite so… intriguing… an ending.

To my utter lack of amazement, our cable failed again this afternoon. Charter is due to come out again tomorrow morning to take yet another crack at it.

This time, the girl on the phone tried to sell me their business cable modem service, under the pretense that it includes quicker response time for service calls.

I think it may be about time to go postal.

They think they’ve figured out why our connection keeps going up and down, even though the cable modem continues to say it’s working. There’s noise on the line, coming from somewhere outside our house — and probably outside our neighborhood.

They’re working on finding it so they can fix it now. The guy that was here this morning says he’ll call once they figure out where it is, to give an estimate for how long it’ll take to fix. We’ll see.

I’ve finally managed to get the revised samples uploaded, as well as the required modest tweaks made to the articles. I think they’re all in pretty good shape now.

I’m still having terrible connectivity problems; in fact, right now, I’m sitting at a table at my mother-in-law’s house because her broadband is working while mine isn’t. Charter’s coming out again tomorrow to take another whack at fixing things. They better get it right this time.

Now it’s time to start pulling together information for the JavaScript docs I’ll be working on.