Technology Review: Weather Engineering in China

Technology Review: Weather Engineering in China: "peasant farmers. . .on call to blast away at clouds with 7,113 anti-aircraft guns and 4,991 rocket launchers."

Record-High Ratio of Americans in Prison - washingtonpost.com

"One in nine black men age 20 to 34 is behind bars. For black women age 35 to 39, the figure is one in 100, compared with one in 355 white women in the same age group."

Yeah, there's no such thing as racism in US society anymore. How could there be--all the blacks are in prison!!

Record-High Ratio of Americans in Prison - washingtonpost.com

AJAX: Accidental (appearance of) cross site scripting caused great confusion.

So, I've working on an AJAX application and the thing works great for 99.9% of my users. Occasionally, a user reports that they click "save" and nothing happens. The "save" in this case is a link that will use AJAX to send the data entered to my server and then the part of the page the user is changing updates after the server successfully updates the DB.

Now, usually, when someone tells me that "nothing happens" I get a little condescending. It's rarely the case that "nothing" happens. Rather, something does happen that, if the user would describe accurately, I might be able to use to analyze and resolve the problem.

In this case, however, I witnessed the problem myself when a recent user shared his screen with me. Sure enough, nothing was happening. I immediately started debugging using FireBug in FireFox. The problem was the same for this user, regardless of which browser and, so far, regardless of which computer he used.

My debugging revealed a greater mystery. Javascript stopped processing every time right where I use the open() method of XMLHTTPRequest (XMLHTTPRequest.open() or, as many libraries do it, xhr.open()). This is even inside of a try/catch section and basically, NOTHING happens.

So, after a few days of dazed confusion, I remembered something that happened when I was still developing my application. If my AJAX call called a domain that was not the same as the domain the web page sits on, NOTHING would happen. No error, no warning, no AJAX call, no nothing. So, I got to thinking about how it might be possible that, for some users on my application, the AJAX call is going out to the wrong domain or something like that.

Finally, a colleague suggested trying, on my own computer, hitting the AJAX thingy while surfing at our domain without the WWW in the address. I tried it. I went to http://mydomain.com and clicked "save" and NOTHING happened. I changed the address in my address bar to http://www.mydomain.com and that fixed it.

Just thought I'd share and save others the trouble.

UPDATE: I use JSMX for my Ajax stuff. It turns out that this problem wouldn't have been so silent if I had noticed and changed the error handler thrown by the open() method. The original developer set up one case as completely silent--interpreting it as an incompatible browser. Without the try/catch, Firefox says "Uncaught exception: Permission denied to call method XMLHttpRequest.open()" when the cross-site scripting is attempted.

Being Overweight Isn't All Bad, Study Says - washingtonpost.com

Being Overweight Isn't All Bad, Study Says - washingtonpost.com: "data from decades of federal surveys concluded that people who were overweight -- but not obese -- had lower overall mortality rates than those of normal weight."

14886 Days till I die (if I'm lucky)

A colleague introduced me to this blog post today. I have placed a non-repeating appointment in my Google calendar for the day I die and will see, on a regular basis, how much time I have left to get my shit together and have a good time:

Conceptual Trends and Current Topics

Don't have TiVo? Want to know what you're missing on the web?

Couldn't help but to lift this chart from a good article over on Macworld.com
It's good for more than just the Mac too:

What’s streaming on the web

Site	Technology	Quality	What’s on
ABC	Move Video	Very good	Select prime-time shows including Lost, Desperate Housewives, and Ugly Betty; previous two to five episodes
BBC News	Windows Media, RealVideo	Very poor	Headline news updated 24 hours a day
CBS	RealVideo	Fair	Select prime-time and daytime shows, including the CSI franchises, The Unit, and As the World Turns; select episodes
Channelchooser	Windows Media, RealVideo	Poor	Live streams of television stations, including movie classics, cartoons
The CW	Move Video	Good	Select prime-time shows such as Supernatural and Everybody Hates Chris; four to six episodes per show
Dailymotion	Flash video	Fair to poor, depending on the source	Some television shows, including many classics from the 1940s and 1950s
Fox	Move Video	Good	Select prime-time shows, such as Bones, Prison Break, and Hell’s Kitchen; some with all episodes, some with select episodes
Google Video	Flash video	Fair to poor, depending on the source	Some television shows such as Charlie Rose, public domain films
Joost	P2P software	Very good to poor, depending on the source	Shows from a variety of content providers, including Babylon 5 and The Ben Stiller Show and movies such as Dragonslayer
MLB	Windows Media	Fair	Live baseball games, highlights
NBC	Flash video	Poor	Select prime-time shows such as Friday Night Lights and The Office; all episodes
NHL.com	Windows Media	Fair	Live hockey games, highlights
wwiTV	Windows Media, RealVideo	Poor	Live streams of stations from around the world, including movie classics, cartoons

Google Docs Is Inspiring

Kudos to the folks at Google for making this simple presentation on how to use Google Docs for simplifying the creation and sharing of and the collaboration on word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents.

Watch and listen to this video for more. Even if you're not into Google, the presentation technique alone is worth the time:

Official Google Blog: Our feature presentation