opensearch

Never heard of this before, never knew how I got along without it. OpenSearch is a way to describe how to make queries on a website. It's supported by IE7 and FF2, it was written by a9(search engine owned by amazon). On browsers it's used to give you an add now button on the built-in search function.

speed up Javascript

As it turns out, .innerHTML and .firstChild.nodeValue both do almost the same thing, however .innerHTML is not w3c standard and takes 2x as long to run on all the major browsers.

The differences: innerHTML works in IE 4, however using nodeValue, it seems you need IE6 or newer. This shouldn't be a problem. Certain special charters print differently with the two, so test your code before switching.

preg_replace, my new best friend

Sometimes regular rexpressions aren't the right tool when you are trying to edit a string. When you want to do a bunch of find/replace that are not related, preg_replace is the right tool. You give it a matrix of the strings you are looking for, another matrix of the strings you want to change them to, and the string.

javascript annoyance

Type Array in JavaScript needs to be defined. A two dimensional array requires each secondary dimension to be defined as well. That means you need to do a new Array() for each element in the first dimension. While there are plenty of examples showing you how to do this with a for loop; that's still a pain.

I hope some future version of ECMA(the basis for javascript) 'fixes' this. Though I'm not going to be holding my breath.

Netflix again?

While this old PPC mac will not be playing streaming movies, I enjoy just getting my DVD's in the mail. I have the 1-at-a-time rental, that works fine for me. So far, I have only twice been told my movie was being delayed. Most recent was yesterday. I am a little worried that I saw this story on problems at netflix shipping centers make it on yahoo news.

According to the article, fewer than normal DVD's have been shipped out for 3 days now. “About a third of the company's 8.4 million subscribers are currently waiting for DVDs”Says the pice by the AP.

gdata

I wandered if I could use blogger from my own site. It looks like that will be no problem. I can do some neat stuff with

http://www.blogger.com/feeds/blogID/posts/default

Like Min-max date ranges, tags, and other sorting techniques to fine the post you are looking for. That won't require gdata. If you do authenticate with gdata you get modifying posts and create new posts as simple XML POST data.

cups weirdness

Has anyone else used CUPS to print a document on a mac? The URI for my printer was listed as file://dev/null. I never did find the URI; but auto discovery found it.

The CUPS page for my computer had the wrong URL? How is that possible?