dren.ch

Git on GoDaddy

2011-11-05T00:00:00-05:00

"Could you help me with my web site?"

"Where's it hosted?"

"GoDaddy! Here's the FTP login."

Don't get depressed. It's possible to make even GoDaddy's entry-level Linux shared hosting tolerable by enabling ssh and installing git, even though they seem to go out of their way to make it difficult.

The first thing to do is activate ssh for the account. It's not on by default, and you have to jump through some hoops to activate it. Log in to the GoDaddy hosting control panel for the domain. Currently, that means log in at the top of GoDaddy's home page, and then click My Account. From this page, find the My Products section and click on Web Hosting. You should soon see a list of hosted domains, with a LAUNCH button for each. Click the LAUNCH button for the domain you're working with and you will soon arrive at the "Hosting Dashboard". Locate the "Settings" tab and find the section labeled "SSH". Jump through the hoops to enable it (I needed to provide a phone number) and wait.

Take a break. It may be 10 minutes before ssh is actually working.

Remember that FTP login information? That username and password will work for ssh and sftp. You'll need to use it once, when you log in to put your ssh public key in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. I'm going to assume you're familiar with ssh keys and won't go into how to generate them, manage them, work with ~/.ssh/config, ssh-agent, etc.

There is one twist: you need to add a command= section to the line containing your public key so it looks something like this (all on one line):

command="if [[ \"x${SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND}x\" == \"xx\" ]]; then /bin/bash; else source ~/.bashrc; eval \"${SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND}\"; fi; " ssh-rsa AAAAAAA+YOUR+KEY+GOES+HERE...

You need this for your .bashrc to have any effect on non-interactive shells (as you do when using git remotely). Your account probably doesn't even have a .bashrc yet, but it will soon.

So yes, you'll be using bash, the MSIE of shells, and probably a fairly old version as well. Considering the crippled environment (they even took which away from you, to make it even more difficult to know what you're missing) you're going to want to spend as little time in this shell as possible anyway.

Now let's get git.

Find out what Linux distribution GoDaddy gave you. uname -a says I'm on an i386 machine, and /etc/redhat-release says I'm on CentOS 5.5. If you're on something else (like a Debian derivative), you're on your own. Sorry!

Point your browser at RepoForge's collection of git RPMs and download the most up-to-date version of git available for your account's OS version and architecture. In my case, that was git-1.7.6.4-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm. GoDaddy may have given you wget so either use that to grab it, or fetch the package some other way and sftp it to your $HOME directory on the GoDaddy server.

Time to unpack. Fortunately, GoDaddy gives us rpm2cpio and cpio. I'm going to put things under ~/opt/:

% mkdir ~/opt && cd ~/opt
% rpm2cpio ~/git-1.7.6.4-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm | cpio -id
% ~/opt/usr/bin/git --version
git version 1.7.6.4

Hooray. We're almost there. Add this to your ~/.bashrc (or create one; this account I used didn't have one):

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/opt/usr/bin
export PATH

GIT_EXEC_PATH=$HOME/opt/usr/libexec/git-core
export GIT_EXEC_PATH

We need to set GIT_EXEC_PATH, otherwise git (the version I installed, anyway) will expect to find its 'core programs' under /usr/libexec/git-core.

Log back in with ssh to verify that git is working:

% mkdir ~/testrepo
% cd ~/testrepo
% echo 'This is a test' > README.txt
% git init
warning: templates not found /usr/share/git-core/templates
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/content/XX/YYYYYYY/testrepo/.git/
% git add README.txt
% git commit -m 'initial version'
[master (root-commit) 5214f3b] initial version
 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 README.txt

Ignore the warning about templates not being found. Git should work fine without them, and if you want them, they're under ~/opt/usr/share/git-core/templates.

Open a new shell locally and verify that you can work with git remotely over ssh:

% git clone godaddy-host.example.com:~/testrepo
Cloning into testrepo...
remote: Counting objects: 3, done.
remote: Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
Receiving objects: 100% (3/3), done.

Don't you feel relieved now? If you're like me, you're going to want to use the rpm2cpio technique to install other missing essentials like rsync and make (to install CPAN modules, which could be, and may become, a whole new posting).

phemca, a JavaScript-to-PHP5 compiler (written in Ruby)

2010-08-10T00:00:00-05:00

Why am I writing a JavaScript-to-PHP5 compliler (in Ruby)?

PHP is everywhere and is inescapable these days.

A typical hosting plan includes PHP. Maybe not PHP 5.3 yet, but definitely some version. And "regular people" like PHP, or more accurately, they like stuff written in PHP: Wordpress, Drupal, Magento, SugarCRM, and just about every other common CMS, shopping cart, and bulletin board system.

Irregular people (programmers) typically aren't as keen on PHP. Programmers may not agree on many things, but they do tend to think JavaScript is not too bad, and that's high praise. It's everybody's 2nd favorite language.

I don't know about you, but when given a task to, say, write a plugin for some PHP app, I would love to write it in a language I enjoy using. Sure, I could always throw out the entire codebase and start over in node.js or something, but I don't have time for that.

Or maybe I do, but I doubt my clients would pay me to do that. And even if they did, they won't necessarily be happy clients when they find out that their "Wordpress" site won't let them use any Wordpress plugins, because they're not actually running Wordpress anymore, but some incompatible custom blog engine running on a strange new platform.

Ideally, this compiler I'm calling phecma could be part of a piecemeal transition to a better place. No need to throw out the entire codebase and platform. Boil that PHP frog slowly. Eventually, it's all ECMAScript. When that happens, this is like the Wordpress Singularity or something.

Intrigued? Phecma is on Github.

Backing up MySQL: The Last Resort Method

2010-02-20T00:00:00-06:00

One of the first things I do when taking on maintenance for a web site is to do my own backups. This usually means database snapshots, and that database is usually MySQL. Unfortunately I am rarely allowed a shell login to the server, and sometimes not allowed to connect to MySQL from outside the host's network either. But one thing I can always expect is access to PhpMyAdmin, the virtually-standard web frontend for MySQL administration.

That's fine, but I need my backups automated. I found a Python program that screen-scraped PhpMyAdmin, but I ran into a big problem: the PhpMyAdmin installation for one site had a robots.txt file at its root that excluded everything. Python's urllib2 honored the robots.txt rules and I was not finding anything in its documentation on how to override it. It was time to fall back to something that would bend to my will: Perl 5 with WWW::Mechanize.

I gave it the imaginative name phpmyadmin-backup and added it to my 'futilities' collection on github. It works like this:


% phpmyadmin-backup \
    --url=http://URL_of_your_PhpMyAdmin/ \
    --dbname=database \
    --username=username \
    --password=password   > BACKUP.sql.gz

If you're backing up a Wordpress site, point phpmyadmin-backup at a copy of the site's wp-config.php file and it will derive the dbname, username, and password from it:


% phpmyadmin-backup \
    --url=http://URL_of_your_PhpMyAdmin/ \
    --wp_conf=/path/to/wp-config.php       > BACKUP.sql.gz

Your prerequisites (system requirements, if you will) are just Perl 5 with WWW::Mechanize. Also, php must be in your $PATH if you want to use the --wp_conf option.

Enjoy, but remember: this is a last resort for cases where mysqldump isn't an option. I genuinely hope you never have to use this program.

coordinate.js adds interesting properties to boring HTML tables

2009-12-20T00:00:00-06:00

Did you ever wish you could address HTML table cells by X and Y coordinates?

var table = document.getElementsByTagName('table')[0];
coordinate(table);

// The origin (0,0) is the top, leftmost cell
table.coordinates[3][2].innerHTML = '(3,2)';

Did you ever wish you could, given a table cell, easily address its neighbors?

var table = document.getElementsByTagName('table')[0];
coordinate(table);

var cell = table.coordinates[3][2];

// 'edge' cells have 1 undefined direction
// corner cells have 2 undefined directions
// a cell in a 1x1 table would have all 4 directions undefined
// (but why would you do that?)

if (cell.north) cell.north.innerHTML = 'up';
if (cell.south) cell.south.innerHTML = 'down';
if (cell.west)  cell.west.innerHTML  = 'left';
if (cell.east)  cell.east.innerHTML  = 'right';

Did you wish you could, given a table cell, know its X and Y coordinates?

var table = document.getElementsByTagName('table')[0];
coordinate(table);

var cells = table.getElementsByTagName('td');

for (var i=0,td; td=cells[i]; ++i)
    td.onclick = function () {
        console.log('You just clicked on the cell at ' + this.x + ',' + this.y);
    };

Try the demo!

Of course it's on github

Shebang: What?

2009-11-04T00:00:00-06:00


% /usr/local/php5/bin/php --version
PHP 5.2.6 (cli) (built: May 11 2008 13:09:39) 
Copyright (c) 1997-2008 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2008 Zend Technologies
    with Zend Extension Manager v1.2.2, Copyright (c) 2003-2007, by Zend Technologies
    with Zend Optimizer v3.3.3, Copyright (c) 1998-2007, by Zend Technologies

% echo '<?= phpversion() ?>' | /usr/local/php5/bin/php
5.2.6

% printf '#!/usr/local/php5/bin/php\n<?= phpversion() ?>' > version
% chmod +x version
% ./version
5.2.6

% mv version x.php
% ./x.php
4.4.9

In case you're wondering, this machine is running Linux, not Windows.

November 6, 2009 update: I asked and got a quick answer on serverfault: somebody changed /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/php.

modiff: The Perl Module Differ

2009-01-08T00:00:00-06:00

Here's something else I wrote (like acuff) for working on Apache/Perl installations, particularly unfamiliar ones: modiff, the Perl module differ.

Say you need to update a certain Perl module. You check out the latest version, make your edits, "make install", and everything's great. Usually. Only this time you've just overwritten a hack that guy who got laid off never committed 6 months ago, and now everything's broken. Even rolling back to the previous svn revision can't save you now.

You should have run modiff first:

% cd ~/project/Really-Important-Module && svn update && modiff
U    lib/Really/Important/Module.pm
Updated to revision 32767.
*** /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7/Really/Important/Module.pm   Tue Apr  1 16:59:59 2008
--- lib/Really/Important/Module.pm    Wed Jan  7 20:35:37 2009
***************
*** 2,9 ****

  sub init {
        my $self = shift;
!       # $self->{conf} = parse_config('/etc/x.conf');
!       # This always bombs. Comment out until I figure out why
        return 1;
  }

--- 2,8 ----

  sub init {
        my $self = shift;
!       $self->{conf} = parse_config('/etc/x.conf');
        return 1;
  }

I first wrote modiff in Ruby but I eventually needed to use it on a server that did not have Ruby, and you probably will too. The version here is the sensible Perl rewrite.

Note that modiff works only if your module's source is in CPAN-style where *.pm files are under lib/. For nonstandard directory layouts or detecting changes to other files like *.pod or anything XS-related, you're on your own.

October 5, 2009 update: modiff is now part of my "futilities" collection on github.

acuff: Apache Configuration File Finder

2008-07-16T00:00:00-05:00

If you've ever worked on an unfamiliar Apache installation you know how it is trying to follow all the includes (which may in turn include more files) to track down the source of a mysterious rewrite rule or LocationMatch. So I wrote acuff. It searches for an Apache executable in your $PATH and typical locations like /usr/local/apache2/bin and spits out its config filenames (with full paths) to standard output. My typical usage goes something like this:

% acuff | xargs grep -il '<location /logout'
/usr/local/etc/apache22/conf/app.conf

It's in Perl, and anything running Apache is bound to have Perl on it. It uses no extra CPAN modules but it does need Perl 5 (this being 2008 it's completely reasonable to ignore Perl 4 and earlier, I hope). Enjoy.

October 5, 2009 update: acuff is now part of my "futilities" collection on github.

Javascript (and Perl and Ruby) Bloom Filters

2007-08-11T00:00:00-05:00

I've never seen a Javascript Bloom filter implementation so I had to write one, and then had to port it to Perl and Ruby. You'll understand why soon if you don't already.

Quick aside: more than half of "my" bloomfilter.js is somebody else's BSD-licensed Javascript MD5 library but you could pretty easily replace it with some other hash library if you felt the compulsion.

I don't think this one would be practical for really large input sets (like a spell check dictionary built from /usr/dict/words), but I'm sure you'll think of something if you work at it. Get moving on that.

To get your brain in gear, here's a small demonstration.

First, I put the text of a really excellent Wire song (I won't say which), one word per line (minus punctuation) in a file. Then using the Ruby version I ran the file through this:

require 'bloomfilter'

bf = BloomFilter.new({ 'bits' => 0xff, 'salts' => %w(z A) })

STDIN.each_line { |l| l.chomp!; bf.add(l.downcase) }

print(b.to_json)

Or maybe I used the Perl one and ran it through this:

require 'bloomfilter.pl'; # what is this, 1994?

my $bf = BloomFilter->new({ bits => 0xff, salts => [qw(z A)] });

while(<>) { chomp; $bf->add(lc $_); }
print $bf->as_JSON();

Doesn't matter. Both give the same output (though I changed the formatting to make it a little easier to read):

{
 "buckets":[1509645767,990260715,1062483727,150062916,551224088,354022058,1818090233,1463314593,110],
 "bucketsize":31,
 "bits":255,
 "salts":["z","A"]
};

Type some Wire lyrics into the box below and smell the magic:

The filter check code runs 'onchange' for that text box. Just type (or paste in) some text, then click outside the box and you should get some feedback.

I encourage you to view the source of this page to see what's really going on but here's a quick example of the Javascript interface for the impatient:

// choose an appropriate number of bits and salts
// (don't ask me; you can figure it out)

var bf = new BloomFilter({ bits: 0xffff, salts: ['x','y','z','!'] });

bf.add('one');
bf.add('two');
bf.add('three');

bf.test('one'); // will definitely return true
bf.test('two'); // will definitely return true
bf.test('three'); // will definitely return true

bf.test('eins'); // will probably return false
bf.test('zwei'); // will probably return false
bf.test('drei'); // will probably return false

If you find bugs in this, please let me know. Also I'd really like to hear from anyone who finds other cool uses for this (aside from Wire lyric guessing games). And just to get this out of the way, I have no idea if this code can interoperate with the Bloom::Filter module on the CPAN but I should probably find out.

Hash::Server: a (mostly) memcached-compatible network interface to Perl hashes

2007-06-01T00:00:00-05:00

You can download Hash::Server here until I get it on the CPAN (after a decade with Perl as my primary programming language I've finally signed up for a PAUSE account, so it could happen). Maybe you'll find this useful.

April 29, 2009 update: this code is now on github.

SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
CAVEATS
SEE ALSO
AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

SYNOPSIS

        use Hash::Server ();
        use DB_File (); # for example

        tie(my %db, 'DB_File', './hash.db') or die $!;

        Hash::Server->new({ hash => \%db, localport => 11211 })->Bind();

DESCRIPTION

While memcached's original purpose was as a networked Memoize, it's also a simple way to distribute key/value hashes. But the official memcached (as the name implies) stores its data in memory, and is temporary. Given there are so many memcached clients for so many languages, it seemed a shame that there were no other ``backing stores'' available.

This module allows you to distribute any Perl hash structure you like with the memcached protocol. Typical use would probably involve a tied hash (as in the DB_File example above); if you want to serve a straight untied hash, you might as well use the real memcached, especially given the limitations of this module...

CAVEATS

This module is not a complete implementation of the memcached protocol.

It ignores any expiration times you provide; values are always assumed permanent.
It ignores any incoming ``flag'' value you provide when storing, and returns 0 by (default) when getting. Changing $Hash::Server::DEFAULT_FLAG to another value may help you on the client-side to differentiate a nonexistent key due to a server outage, or a nonexistent key because the key just does not exist.
With standard memcached (flags field aside, which you can't get with the Perl clients anyway), there is no difference between a nonexistent key and a down server. For pure caching, that's fine, but your application may need to know the difference. You can set $Hash::Server::UNDEFINED_KEY to some value that makes sense to you, such as 0 or q{} (empty string) and test for that, knowing that if your client returns 'undef', it means it didn't get that answer from the server.
The ``stats'' command is unimplemented.

AUTHOR

Daniel Rench, <citric@cubicone.tmetic.com>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.8.7 or, at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.

It might help somebody: Flash 9 with Firefox on a Mac

2007-04-04T00:00:00-05:00

When I install Firefox on a Mac, I always sudo chown -R 0:0 /Applications/Firefox.app after. What, you don't? But when trying to install Flash 9, I got this:

1008:5-5000 Access Denied Error
You do not have enough access privileges for this installation.

So I tried running the Flash install as root. Same error. Then I did this: sudo chown -R drench /Applications/Firefox.app and ran the install again, which worked, and it made me sad.

Element.getAttribute() doesn't get enough publicity

2007-04-03T00:00:00-05:00

For years I've been using hacks like overloading the title and class attributes of HTML elements because I didn't know any better. Now I know I can just make up attributes, like 'regex' here, which I defined as a pattern that a form field must match:

<html>
<head><title>attributes</title>
<script>

function make_validator (form) {

	return function () {
		var pat, r;

		for (var i=0, e; e = form[i]; ++i) {

			pat = e.getAttribute('regex');
			if (! pat) continue;

			r = RegExp(pat).exec(e.value);
			if (! r) {
				e.focus();
				alert("Bad value for " + e.name);
				return false;
			}
		}
		return true;
	};
}

window.onload = function () {

	for (var i=0, form; form=document.forms[i]; ++i)
		form.onsubmit = make_validator(form);

};

</script>
</head>

<body>
<form>
	Number: <input type="text" name="number" regex="^\d+$">
	<input type="submit">
</form>

<form>
	Username: <input type="text" name="username" regex="^\w{1,8}$">
	<input type="submit">
</form>

</body>
</html>

We are all bigots / So filled with hatred / We release our poisons

2007-03-27T00:00:00-05:00

... like the Bad R&R blog.

More like Rock & Roll Bigot if you ask me (who, "full disclosure" is a contributor to the site).

Yet another 'radical' idea in Unix file layout

2006-12-04T00:00:00-06:00

Long before this ImageMagick overflow bug I've been wanting to ditch it completely in favor of GraphicsMagick (still hasn't happened). Aside from the usual bugs, arbitrary API changes and other endearing quirks, ImageMagick's greatest offense is how its utility programs have incredibly generic names like display and identify. GraphicsMagick does away with those by running everything through the gm command, so there's less confusion about what happens when you type gm identify somefile.jpg as you so often do.

This kind of thing is very common; cvs, svn and openssl (to name a few that I use often) all fit this pattern. Decent shells are aware of these programs' "subcommands" and will tab-complete them for you. But the chances that your shell's tab completion is an exact match with whatever version of, say, svn you're running are low. Maybe svn added a new command, but your shell completion doesn't know about it yet. Or maybe your shell completion has all the latest updates but you're stuck running an old version of svn that doesn't have it, allowing your tab completion to taunt you.

Imagine then if your shell was smart enough to detect directories in $PATH entries and gave them special treatment, looking for "subcommands" under them. Then svn could install itself under a directory called /usr/local/bin/svn/, where you'd have /usr/local/bin/svn/checkout, /usr/local/bin/svn/commit, /usr/local/bin/svn/log, etc. Instead of svn checkout you would run svn/checkout. And with a link from checkout to co you would still have your svn co shortcut. The commands themselves wouldn't necessarily need to look different; the shell could automatically translate svn co to svn/co for you and you might not even realize anything changed.

Update: Anonymous commentor made all kinds of good points (particularly about just using something like "gm-whatever") so this is a "nevermind".

The inexplicable popularity differences of two photos

2006-10-30T00:00:00-06:00

I realize that by linking to this photo I'm only making things worse, but why is the photo above among my top-viewed flickr pictures? And why is the one below one of the very least popular? It's among my favorites, but not yours? What's your problem?

Excitement Has A New Name: Tmetic::Feed::Manager

2006-10-25T00:00:00-05:00

For a while I've been using the RSS reader built into the Thunderbird mail client. I thought it was kind of cool how it made blog posts look like e-mail messages. But why settle for kind of like e-mail when you can have the real thing?

So I wrote a Perl module: Tmetic::Feed::Manager. Just download it, untar it, then do the usual perl Makefile.PL && make && make test && make install. You may need to install some prerequisite modules like DBD::SQLite, Text::Template, and XML::RSS::Parser; the build process will let you know what you're missing. Except sendmail. If you don't have a working sendmail in your $PATH (whether it's actually qmail or postfix or the real thing) you will run into trouble.

This is an initial release and has some limitations, the biggest being it can only deal with RSS 2.0 feeds; no RSS 0.9x or Atom yet. Enjoy if possible and applicable, and send your thoughts (all of them) to me.

Because nobody has ever put the phrase "print to STDERR in PHP" on a web page

2006-10-06T00:00:00-05:00

I once thought I needed to write to STDERR in some PHP code. This particular phrase (quoted) returned zero documents on well-known search engines, so I felt compelled to do something about it.

PHP provides STDERR (and STDOUT and STDIN) but not when running under a web server. Since that's the environment virtually all PHP code runs, they may as well not be there at all.

Thanks to Andy Bakun, I learned about PHP's error_log() function. When called with one argument (a message string), it sends the string to the web server's error log (when running under a web server), or to STDERR (when running from the command line). So I think it's safe to say error_log() is PHP's do-what-I-mean equivalent of writing to STDERR in any other language. Usually.

Depending on your php.ini settings, error_log() may be going to your syslog, or some log file, which has thrown me a few times. While debugging a Roundcube plugin, I was wondering why none of my error_log() output was making it to the web server's log. Then I noticed this:

    ini_set('error_log', $this->prop['log_dir'].'/errors');

It looks like maybe at one time STDERR, etc. worked as programmers would expect but the last word on that was "Not PHP problem -> bogus." So if you're really, really determined to print to STDERR no matter what the environment or the ini settings, you have to open it yourself:

	$STDERR = fopen('php://stderr', 'w+');
	fwrite($STDERR, "some debug info\n");

Excitement Has a New Name: Excessively Strong Typing in Perl

2006-10-02T00:00:00-05:00

I haven't used this in "serious" code but that's only because I'm not a freak about strong typing. Don't you worry, it works fine.

package Typed;

sub TIESCALAR {
    my $class = shift;
    my $test_function = shift;
    bless [ undef, $test_function ], $class;
}

sub FETCH {
    my $self = shift;
    $self->[0];
}

sub STORE {
    my $self = shift;
    my $v = shift;
    if ($self->[1]->($v)) {
        $self->[0] = $v;
    } else {
        die "'$v' is an illegal value for " . ref($self) . "\n";
    }
}

package Typed::Integer;

our @ISA = 'Typed';

sub TIESCALAR {
    my $class = shift;
    Typed::TIESCALAR($class, sub { my $n = shift; $n =~ /^[\+-]?\d+$/ });
}

package Typed::Number::Natural;

our @ISA = 'Typed'; # could say 'Typed::Integer' but it makes no difference here

sub TIESCALAR {
    my $class = shift;
    Typed::TIESCALAR(
            $class,
            sub {
                my $n = shift;
                ($n !~ /\D/) && ($n > 0);
            }
        );
}

package Typed::VarChar;

our @ISA = 'Typed';

sub TIESCALAR {
    my $class = shift;
    tie my $n, 'Typed::Number::Natural';
    $n = shift;
    my $r = Typed::TIESCALAR(
            $class,
            sub {
                my $s = shift;
                defined($s) && (length($s) <= $n);
            }
        );
}

package main; # "where the action is"

tie my $x, 'Typed::Integer';
$x = 100; # OK
$x = -12; # OK
$x = 1.1; # dies, uh I mean "throws an exception"
$x = 'stuff'; # dies

tie my $z, 'Typed::VarChar', 5;
$z = 'chars'; # OK
$z = ''; # OK
$z = 'Fairly long string'; # dies

Since the Knockoff Project seems dead

2006-09-22T00:00:00-05:00

[ref: The Knockoff Project]

Agitating for green shopping bags

2006-09-11T00:00:00-05:00

The shirts are cute and I suppose it's sad to see a "beloved institution" go, but what sort of person gets emotional over corporate name changes I ask rhetorically? I thought it was lame when International Harvester changed its name and clever logo but I got over it. It's not like when Lounge Ax closed or anything. Actually even that event was probably less culturally significant than the Kots and Derogatises made it out to be. By the time Lounge Ax closed in 2000, the Empty Bottle had held the Cool Underground Chicago Rock Saloon torch at least 4 years and still does for all I know.

arguments.callee: A dren.ch Endorsement

2006-09-11T00:00:00-05:00

I mostly agree with Mr. JSON's ECMAScript recommendations but not this:

The following features should be depreciated.

[...]

arguments.callee.

It might have a goofy name but arguments.callee is way too useful (inside a Javascript function, this is a reference to the function itself). I don't mean anonymous recursive functions, though that's still kind of cool. Say you wanted a "sequence" function. With arguments.callee:

function sequence () {
	var me = arguments.callee;
	if (! me.n) me.n = 0;
	return me.n++;
}

Without:

var sequence = (function () {
		var n = 0;
		return function () { return n++ };
	})();

You can argue that the "without" version is better but I'm not going to agree with you.

9/12/2006 update: This works and is probably clearer than either of the above:

var sequence = function () { return sequence.n++ };
sequence.n = 0;

It manages to avoid arguments.callee and function-within-a-function closure. It also fixes the (for me) biggest problem with the arguments.callee version: the test for undefined n on every call. But there are a couple minor downsides: the function needs to know its name, and it's not self-contained. Maybe you don't care.

8/15/2007 update: A Canadian named Peter discusses similar problems though he's into using the term "pattern".

dren.ch

Git on GoDaddy

phemca, a JavaScript-to-PHP5 compiler (written in Ruby)

Backing up MySQL: The Last Resort Method

coordinate.js adds interesting properties to boring HTML tables

Shebang: What?

modiff: The Perl Module Differ

acuff: Apache Configuration File Finder

Javascript (and Perl and Ruby) Bloom Filters

Hash::Server: a (mostly) memcached-compatible network interface to Perl hashes

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

CAVEATS

SEE ALSO

AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

It might help somebody: Flash 9 with Firefox on a Mac

Element.getAttribute() doesn't get enough publicity

We are all bigots / So filled with hatred / We release our poisons

Yet another 'radical' idea in Unix file layout

The inexplicable popularity differences of two photos

Excitement Has A New Name: Tmetic::Feed::Manager

Because nobody has ever put the phrase "print to STDERR in PHP" on a web page

Excitement Has a New Name: Excessively Strong Typing in Perl

Since the Knockoff Project seems dead

Agitating for green shopping bags

arguments.callee: A dren.ch Endorsement