News

I've been a little quiet lately, but there's some interesting news out in JavaScript world. The first is that ES 3.1 and ES4 are merging (for the time being) to ES Harmony

The second bit of news is that Mozilla is working on some IE Plug-ins to bring IE into the fold of web standards, as well as the Canvas element. One plug-in is called Screaming Monkey and would basically replace IE's javascript implementation with Geko. The second would be to add the Canvas element functionality to IE.

Future of JavaScript

Brendan Eich discusses the future of JavaScript, JavaScript 2, etc.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/06/23/eich-javascript-interview_1.html

Track Attack Beta

I think I've got Track Attack ready for what I would call a beta. It's mostly feature complete now. Here's a list of the features I wanted and their status:

Random level generator - Done

Sounds and music - Done

Train is animated and follows the tracks - Done

Points system - Done

Minimum distance for track level requirement - Done

Switch the music to "fast" music when there is less than 4 tracks left - Done

Path markers to show where you've gone - Done

Pick up Passengers - To do

Show piece statistics (display how many of each pieces have been populated) - To do

Finish the style and make it look pretty - To do

There's not a whole lot left that I wanted to accomplish. I've been putting off the styling of the game until last, because I'm not the best designer in the world and I have to put more effort into that than the coding. Contact me through my website with any bugs or suggestions.

Go play and Enjoy!

Enterprise?

I've been using PHP for a number of years now, and the most common issue I hear about it (and other languages) is that it's not "enterprise". I've often wondered what that really means. I got a new position at a hospital with somewhere over 1,000 employees, and I think I've come to a personal conclusion.

I always thought that the word "enterprise" meant that the software was supposed to be of high quality, look polished, be very efficient, etc. I work with several "enterprise" grade software packages (to remain unnamed), and I've come to the conclusion that "enterprise" software doesn't have to be any of these. All you need to have "enterprise" software is a good marketing department and a good salesman. Oh, you're also going to need a lot of support people too, because "enterprise" software means the client will be calling a lot.

I suppose maybe I'm being a little unfair. The goals of these software packages are the Does-Everything type. Which of course means that they do everything, but nothing well. Maintaining these behemoths is a huge undertaking, which is why there needs to be a support department.

Calling software "enterprise" is really just a trick to get people to pay exorbitant amounts of money for software that will only solve some of your problems out of the box. The rest of the problems are going to cost you even more large sums of money, and the support costs for all this will all cost even more. The language of the software really doesn't matter. There are issues with any language. After seeing some VB6 "enterprise" software, I don't think that any language should be said it's not enterprise. The language is only a tool to create the end means. It's the same with other tools. If you try to build a boat with only a hammer, then you'll get a crappy boat with a lot of leaks. Remember, use the right tools for your job.

Another Track Attack Update

I've updated the interface a bit. The preview and clock work much better on the left than on the right. I also made it so that the piece you have to place shows up under the mouse cursor. It's a lot easier to see what you're doing that way. I also made sure that the images are pre-loaded so you don't loose the train during turns.

Jaguar XF

I think I found my next car. Jaguar XF It's such a beautiful car, and according to reviews on Youtube it handles quite well too. It's still a bit spendy for my price range at the moment unfortunately :(

Track Attack Update

Hey everyone. I finally put in some time and got Track Attack to work with IE. IE doesn't support the table* CSS display types and there were some other issues with floating, but it works. IE6 doesn't support transparency though, so the train image is a big white square with the train on top.