mochazone

Be part of the solution, not part of the problem

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:04:00 GMT

In 2006, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation published a report, confirming that the amount of greenhouse gas emissions generated by just the farm animals which are raised for meat production are higher than the entire CO2 emissions generated by all forms of transportation.

Last week, the Swiss Federal Government published the results of a study conducted by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich. A study, which was commissioned by the Federal Office for Agriculture, the Federal Office for the Environment and the Swiss Farmers Union, the powerful conservative lobby of the swiss farmers. A study, which was to find ways to help reduce those greenhouse gas emissions.

The result of the study: The way to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions is to eat less meat. Nothing can reduce greenhouse gas emissions as effectively as reducing the amount of livestock, and that is only possible if the meat consumption is also reduced. There are no technical or conceptual means to effectively reduce these emissions any other way. No surprise to me, but it is nice to see the hardcore lobby that is fighting against this change, having to officially confirm the negative impact of its own policies.

This means the single measure of replacing the beef consumption with a vegetarian diet would essentially fix the global warming problem. As a minor nice little side effect, it would mean that we would no longer waste over half of the world's fishing catch as feed for livestock. We would free up 70% of all agricultural land - that is almost 30% of the earth's land surface - in order to grow vegetables, nuts and grains, which would easily yield a 50 fold increase in global food production. Since we wouldn't need that much food, we could convert large amounts of land back to forests, which would provide a huge amount of CO2 neutral fuel and construction material. The rainforest could thrive again, providing increasing natural habitat for exotic, some un-known, many almost extinct animals and insects. Plus, this would further improve the CO2 balance, since these forests would massively absorbe CO2 and produce oxygen. Plus, we could combine these advantages by growing our fruits, vegetables and nuts in edible forest gardens. Switching to farming for a vegetarian diet would conserve 70% of the earth's clean water, since farming animals requires over 10 times the amount of water. With the energy required to produce 1 kilogram of beef, you could easily run your Macbook for 100 years. Switching to a vegetarian diet, our life expectancy would increase by 15 years, and we would live not only longer but healthier, reducing the cost of our health care system. Should I go on?

Clearly, we should try to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Every time we consume animal products, we directly and actively lower the quality of life on planet earth. Most drastically that of the animals who were used for that production, but also the quality of life of everyone else - and our own.

Living life without consuming animal products actively and directly improves the quality of life on planet earth. Yours and everyone else's.

23.6.2009, 13:04

Surrender by Cheap Trick

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 15:52:00 GMT

Thank you Conan for using this track to kick off your very first Tonight Show. That reminder catapulted it from a dusty vinyl in the book shelves to a spanking fresh track on the top of my playlist.

7.6.2009, 15:52

A car has nothing to do with a carpet

Thu, 28 May 2009 09:39:00 GMT

On comp.lang.javascript:


rf wrote:
> boss wrote:
>>  
>> I am using java language
>
> In that case you are in the wrong newsgroup.
> 
> Java has nothing at all to do with javascript, just as 
> a car has nothing to do with a carpet.

Except that you can use one inside the other, like when you are going the helmatic route :-)

28.5.2009, 9:39

ES5 Candidate Specification

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 23:31:00 GMT

The fifth edition of ECMA-262, the industrial standard scripting language specification, which should later become the fifth edition of ISO-16262, has now reached the "Final Draft" state and will enter the testing and validation phase, on target for approval later this years.

In case you missed it, ES5 is the effort formerly known as ES3.1, and got renamed to ES5 in order to clean up the confusion with the version numbers of the different proposals, skipping the ES4 version. "ES Harmony" would therefore one day be called ES6, not ES4.

8.4.2009, 23:31

ReverseHttp and RelayHttp

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 10:07:00 GMT

"This document describes a dynamic, ReST-style means of enrolment and participation in an HTTP network. The message/http and application/http MIME types defined by RFC 2616 are used to build a dynamically-configurable "Remote CGI" service.

Joining the World Wide Web as an HTTP server has been an ad-hoc, manual process. By using the protocol defined here, programs can provide services to the Web just as easily as they request services from the Web."

"This document describes a protocol for tunnelling HTTP traffic over HTTP, with the goal of providing portable, general, securable access to the World Wide Web for programs running in restricted environments, including Javascript programs running in browsers.

The defined protocol is similar to the widely used HTTP proxying protocol, but differs in that the proxied traffic is carried over an ordinary HTTP connection; the special syntax used by an HTTP proxy is avoided here."

24.3.2009, 10:07

The best solution is that one isn't needed

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:34:00 GMT

Nuff said.

20.3.2009, 19:34

New Eclipse Helma plugin project

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 10:08:00 GMT

The helma4eclipse project provides a set of plugins for Eclipse, building a perspective for Helma 1.x based web app development. The features implemented so far by Franz Philipp Moser include a preferences pane, the ability to start/stop Helma from Eclipse, logging to the Eclipse console (you need to set "logdir = console" in server.properties) and the ability to browse the running apps, including their prototypes and skins, in a live outline. You can grab that very first version here.

1.3.2009, 10:08

Is the Bespin web-based code editor the ideal future ServerJS IDE?

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 14:50:00 GMT

Bespin is currently running on a python based backend, but I can see this project as a likely candidate for a backend implemented using the future standard library that the ServerJS group is attempting to build. Bespin together with Firebug and an integrated remote Rhino-Debugger seems capable of turning the web browser into the perfect Client-/Server-JavaScript IDE.

13.2.2009, 14:50

Server-Side Javascript Standard Library

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 19:58:00 GMT

Kevin Dangoor asks what Server Side JavaScript needs and launches more talk about a standard library for Javascript on the server-side.

Having a unified API for libraries in different environments would in my opinion be nice especially because it would allow higher level modules to be shared between different server-side javascript environments. One problem that has slowed this from happening in the past has been that in Java-based environments like Helma, Sling and Xjs, Rhino makes the direct scripting of Java packages so easy, that some stakeholders don't believe the added burden of maintaining an additional API layer in javascript is reasonable for the benefit they would get from it.

Some pointers to current server-side javascript library projects in the realm of the Helma project and to other efforts for a standard library for JS:

The current Helma 1 versions come with two libraries containing several modules. The HelmaLib provides modules for core functionality such as Database, File, Ftp, Http, Smtp and SSH, some that extend built-in prototypes, and a few others. The Jala library adds further modules such as DNS, MP3 and XML-RPC and utility modules such as i18n, image manipulation, captcha, HtmlDocument, RemoteContent, Podcast, Rss and other XML related modules.

Modules are included either via a configuration file or at runtime via a method call. A module is only loaded once, even if included multiple times. In the context of Helma 1, modules are loaded into the global scope and they need to be nice and restrict themselves to a save namespace.

For Helma NG, the way modules are included is changed to eliminate any possible namespace conflicts. Each module in Helma NG lives in its own scope and can selectively import other modules or portions thereof into its scope. Here again, when modules are imported in different scopes, each module is only actually loaded once.

There has been some discussion with the goal of a unified library/ modules architecture between different projects over in the Helma NG group. One of the major goals in Peter Michaux's xjs project is to provide a standard library and a shared module loading mechanism.

29.1.2009, 19:58

First Soleil on Mont-Soleil

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 17:38:00 GMT

Le premier Soleil sur le Mont-Soleil dans le soleil de soir�e: "The Twins" - a siamese warrior or siamese warriors?

30.12.2008, 17:38

Helma turns 1.6.3

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 09:38:00 GMT

Helma is 1.6.3 and ready to be downloaded! With over 10 years of development history, she is now more mature and more stable than ever. The latest list of refinements is a testament to that. The release isn't as minor as it sounds. Helma is just very conservative about her version numbers. This is really more like a 6.3 release than a 1.6.3. She is ready for your projects! For those of you that haven't already, it is now time to get serious about Javascript on the server-side.

26.11.2008, 9:38

Helma 1.6.3-rc3 ready for testing

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 10:16:00 GMT

The third release candidate can be taken for a spin. Again, see the Helma 1.6.3 Changelog for an updated list ofchanges included in the new version.

Release Candidate 3 contains some additional important changes, such as the totalUploadLimit value now being applied also to ordinary form post requests, as well as preventing a potential problem with the insertion order and making it easier to run Helma in other servlet containers.

14.11.2008, 10:16

Helma 1.6.3 Release Candidate 2

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 07:40:00 GMT

A second release candidate is ready to download. Please take a moment to check for any remaining problems with these packages.

See the Helma 1.6.3 Changelog for detailed information about the changes included in this new version.

5.11.2008, 7:40

Release Candidate 1 of Helma 1.6.3

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 19:18:00 GMT

The Helma 1.6.3rc1 release candidate contains numerous bug fixes and many minor improvements, such as support for secure HttpOnly session cookies, logging improvements, several changes to the way file paths to different resources are resolved, and Helma is now again backwards compatible with Java 1.4, to mention just a few.

Our bugzilla has a list of bugs fixed in Helma 1.6.3.

Relative repository paths now resolve relative to Helma home directory, fixing bug 639.
Introduced hopdir servlet parameter to be able to set the helma directory.
The location of db.properties is now customizable using the dbPropFile server property, fixing bug 640
Fixed bug with closed database connections in very long running requests by making sure connections are re-checked every 10 seconds.
Changed HopObject.getOrderedView() to return a transient HopObject instead of a ListViewWrapper.
Fixed bug in request handling when incoming requests are attached to an existing response and the response is generated by directly accessing the res.servletResponse HttpServletResponse instance.
Go back to Java 1.4 compatibility. The few generics uses aren't worth it to require Java 1.5.
Made sub-properties updateable.
Logging improvements, such as an additional log message when a request starts evaluating, making commit log messages look nicer and easier to parse, and improved thread naming including thread ids in helma log messages.
Unified macro error handling, no longer dumping stack traces for macro errors.
Ampersand is no longer encoded as entity when encountered in macro tags.
Added support for secure and HttpOnly session cookies, with HttpOnly being enabled by default. The features are controlled through the httpOnlySessionCookie and secureSessionCookie app properties. We now compose and set the session cookie ourselves as this is the only reliable way to do it in a cross-servlet-container compatible way and without adding dependencies to the servlet container.
Fixed a problem with the code evaluation order of repositories added via app.addRepository().
Fixed app.xmlrpcCount to be increased for "new style" XML-RPC requests served by Jetty, fixing bug 629.
Changed code to not track unset() on non-persitable properties, fixing bug 633.
Fixed serialization for transient HopObjects.
Synchronize more methods in TypeManager as well as app.addRepository() to avoid memory race conditions.
Use LinkedHashMap for dirty node tracking to preserve insertion order.
Made checkXmlRpc work with content-types containing a charset subheader, fixing bug 628.
Continue parsing macro tags even if it is a comment. This is the only way we can correctly catch embedded macros. Fixes bug 588.
Only resolve direct prototype matches in parent chain, fixing bug 617.

Now, please go download Helma 1.6.3rc1 and let us know in case something in these packages isn't ready for prime time!

27.10.2008, 19:18

Helma at the 2008 OpenExpo in Zurich

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 21:54:00 GMT

Last week I presented Helma at the OpenExpo in Zurich, where Helma and FreeBSD happened to be neighbors, which reminds me to point out that there is now a FreeBSD port of Helma thanks to decke's efforts.

28.9.2008, 21:54

Large Hadron Collider

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 09:24:00 GMT

A few more minutes, and CERN, which already was the coolest place on the planet because it's where the Web was born, will be literally the coolest place on the planet when they switch on the Large Hadron Collider and start pumping out those man made black holes.

10.9.2008, 9:24

Ecmascript Harmony

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 16:09:00 GMT

Ecmascript Harmony maybe really brings the split in the TG1 TC-39 to an end. More and more has gone into the 3.1 proposals over recent months while more and more has been taken out of the ES4 proposals. Looks like the gap became small enough to shift position TC-39 in a way where I think "3.1" will eventually probably be standardized as ES4, with what was still on the table for ES4 going into a future ES5 standard.

With the namespaces proposals now being dropped from the Ecmascript roadmap, the module scope approach used in helma-ng becomes even more interesting.

16.8.2008, 16:09

The A-Z of Programming Languages jumps to Javascript

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:10:00 GMT

As part of Computerworld's series on "The A-Z of Programming Languages", Brendan Eich gave another interview on the state of Javascript and its history. It turned out to be one of the better ones.

Nothing new, except for the shifted timeline projection for ES3.1 and ES4, which Brendan now predicts to be Spring '09 for 3.1, with ES4 possibly being delayed until 2011. Since in the world of Javascript "implementation" comes before "standardization", this may not be as much of a change as it seems.

Anyway, if you haven't already, you may want to fly over it here.

31.7.2008, 21:10

Fresh Javascript IDE in Ganymede Eclipse release

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 10:46:00 GMT

I just tried the new Ganymede Eclipse release, which includes JSDT, the fresh JavaScript IDE as part of the new 3.0 version of the Web Tools Project. Previously, I have been using the JSEclipse plugin because it was much snappier than the Javascript support in the WTP. According to my first impression with Ganymede, Javascript editing seems snappier compare to previous WTP versions I've tried, but still slower then JSEclipse, so I'm not yet sure whether I will stick with the new JSDT or install the JSEclipse plugin again.

Unfortunately, the JSDT doesn't have E4X support yet, that would have been a big selling point for me. On the plus side, it offers some pretty nifty code validation capabilities, making sure that objects and properties are defined, and which works over multiple files, similar to IntelliJ. Bending the code validation and completion features to work right for Helma development would be no trivial task, I'm sure, which makes these cool features less attractive for server-side Javascript development.

28.6.2008, 10:46

Helma at the Linuxwochen in Linz

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:37:00 GMT

This weekend Anton Pirker will give a small introduction session to Helma at the Linuxwochen in Linz, Austria. The presentation will be tomorrow Saturday, June 28th at 12:00 at the Kunstuniversit�t Linz in Saal 1.

27.6.2008, 18:37

Brendan on the state of Javascript evolution

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:16:00 GMT

In this short interview, Brendan Eich repeats some of his comments regarding the positions of TC-39 TG1 members on ECMAScript 3.1 and ECMAScript 4, and the delivery of the latter in stealth mode to IE users via ScreamingMonkey and Adobe.

24.6.2008, 15:16

Is AppleScript done?

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:01:00 GMT

Daniel Jalkut sees the advent of SquirrelFish as an opportunity for Apple to dump AppleScript in favor of Javascript. The idea of using Javascript as a replacement for the AppleScript scripting language in OSX is nothing new. Late Night Software's Javascript OSA has offered that ability for many years already. Daniel's point is that Apple could do a better job at integrating Javascript with the Open Scripting Architecture.

I don't really see SquirrelFish as a factor in this, but certainly agree with the general sentiment. Yes, AppleScript may be more approachable for non-programmers, but Apple now has Automator for that purpose and fighting Javascript is a loosing battle anyway: Javascript will be the lingua franca for scripting purposes anywhere.

16.6.2008, 0:01

ES4 Draft 1 and ES3.1 Draft 1

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:48:00 GMT

In recent days, new partial drafts for the upcoming ECMAScript specs have become available. Parts of the ECMAScript 4 spec draft were previously spread all over the email archives. Nice to have them compiled in one place. The ECMAScript 3.1 spec draft wasn't available at all before, as far as I'm aware.

12.6.2008, 14:48

Want ES4 in Helma today?

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:30:00 GMT

Then take the just released Mascara Javascript 2 to Javascript 1 converter written in Python, run it using Jython on the Java Virtual Machine, and invoke it using Rhino inside of Helma, evaluating the results. Ok, now my head hurts.

11.6.2008, 23:30