Gary Haran.com

If you can’t afford to pay yourself a salary during the bootstrap process you will not be eligible for R&D money.

It might be advantageous to accept VC money earlier than you thought.

Here was a javascript question I saw through the twittersphere from a programmer friend of mine:

in JavaScript [2253] < [288] is TRUE (!) … any suggestion to sort an array of arrays?

I fired off an answer saying that he could use a comparison function:

my_array.sort(function(a,b){ return -1, 0 or 1 depending on need })

Then it dawned on me that there was an explanation for why the returned value of the original comparison was true rather than false.

>>> [2253] < [288]
true
>>> [2253] - [288]
1965
>>> 2253 < 288
false

Javascript converts the array to numerical values and then assesses wether that result is truth. Unfortunately when inside an array it converts only once and then sees wether the result is true. In Javascript any number is treated as true unless it is 0.

I guess for this my friend will have to write his own comparison function but at least we can understand how the types get switched around on us with this example.

In the late 1800s in France (and many parts of the world) coal miners had perhaps the worse job one could have. One novel captured the soul of coal mining during that period and showed how hard those times were.

It was the worse job in the world for multiple reasons.

Lowering Salary

Your salary was lowering and there was nothing you could do about it. Times kept going from bad to worse. The market forces were partly to blame but greed exacerbated the problem. One of the biggest complaints was the disregard for security by “the company” as upholding structures took time away from more lucrative endeavors. “The company” wouldn’t pay specialized workers to secure tunnels.

Your skill set was limited with no chance to grow

You had a company issued lamp and pickaxe. The hours were too long to get a second job where you could learn a new skill set or improve your tools.

You didn’t own your house

Permatemp company barracks were setup to lower costs for everyone. You paid rent to “the company” and it would give priority to someone working at the mine. If you lost your job you didn’t have any guarantee you could stay in the same house.

In this day and age wielding a LAMP or a Pickaxe means more control over your future. You can change your tools because they are (mostly) open and free. You can innovate because of the meritocracy culture where good code is adopted and simpler methods are promoted. No one can pull the rug from under you because you have control over your tools.

For these reasons I prefer using open source platforms over proprietary ones. Having to beg “the company” to do the right thing is a rotten situation I don’t want to live through again. I don’t expect that a very large company with a history of disregard for web standards will want to uphold the openness of our series of tubes. With my pickaxe and my keyboard I’ll help move the web away from mining industry standards.

There was a story about Opera doing a big marketing push of its web browser. I was kindly asked my opinion on the browser war subject at the time. I said some good about Opera and some bad about Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Gary Haran, an Internet user interface developer in Montreal, says that while Opera is a fine browser, it’s not as versatile as Firefox, at least for developers. The latter allows users to add extra functionalities with plug-ins that anyone can program.

However, Haran, like many Web designers, holds a deep resentment for Microsoft. The giant uses its own technology to interpret sites instead of using open standards like everyone else. This forces designers to spend extra time making sure websites render properly on Explorer.

“Opera deserves the success that Firefox had,” he said. “As long as good browsers gain ground (on Internet Explorer), it’s good for everyone.”

Source: Montreal Gazette