mapleman's Code & Stuff

Get your free Microsoft SQL Server while its hot!. Another
alternative for small websites.

SQL Server Express is an ideal choice for independent software vendors (ISVs),
server users, non-professional developers, Web application developers,
Web site hosters, and hobbyists building client applications."

file: Microsoft SQL Server Express 2005

The Buzzword of the year. It seems to be on everyone's mouth.
Specially since GMail and
other Google services started using it. So I jumped on the bandwagon,
and wrote my menus using this technique.
Totally unnecesary? Definitely. Entertaining? You bet. It turns the
dullness of writing webpages into something interesting.

Well this project involves a lot of things that definitely are
entertaining. It started as a Audio Playing DLL. Vague? You bet.
Anyway, this DLL is nothing more than an MP3 player or was. I started
writing and got more excited everytime and eventually I decided to make
it compatible with XPCOM, and use it to play audio through mozilla.
I actually wrote that piece of code and its stashed somewhere!

Closures are one of the most fascinating constructs ever IMHO.
Not many people know about their existence, let alone in Javascript.
However the knowledge of them can seriously leverage your designs.

So what is a closure? A function that keeps an environment.
The best way to explain a closure is with an example, so
thats what I will show you.


var globalVariable = 20;

function createClosure(arg)
{
var env = 10;
return function(x) { alert ( arg + env + x ); }
}

I recently bought a few books. One of them is Essential COM by Don Box.
I can only be in awe, what a fantastic book. COM is the component object
model and is a way to enhance Object Oriented programming through the use of
interfaces. It is similar to Java's implements keyword in that sense.
However, describing what COM exactly is would require a few hundred of pages.

I guess I finally (reluctantly) got myself into writing my own blog.
I'm not particularly a fan of web development which was one of the main
reasons to put this off. Besides having http://www.resynthesize.com/code
I felt pretty much covered web wise. But that site is definately outdated.
So I decided to put up a blog; In python. Anything BUT PHP works, right? :D

(2011 and look what is running the site)