Monthly Archives: February 2006

Dynamic Languages Day

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I almost forgot to blog about it, but I went to the Dynamic Languages day at the VUB on Monday, together with Yves.

I was always interested in learning new programming languages, and getting to know their unique features and viewpoints. After learning Python and Ruby, I became curious after the roots of these languages (being amongst others Lisp and Smalltalk). Since there were introductions and tutorials for these languages at the DLD, it was too good to miss.

The day started with a nice introduction to Scheme by Viviane Jonckers, explaining why they used it as a first programming language for their students.

Then there was a introduction to and demo of Smalltalk by Roel Wuyts and Johan Brichau. The afternoon ended with an Self tutorial by Ellen Van Paesschen.

In the afternoon Pascal Costanza delved into the internals of CLOS, the Common Lisp Object System.

Afterwards at the reception, I had a nice chat with the other attendants and organizers. I also met someone who I had seen before at the anti-software patents manifestations.

All in all, it was a interesting day, and I learned a lot about the presented languages. The list of Lisp links in my del.icio.us account also keeps growing. The organizers said they were planning to upload videos of the presentations at the website, so I’ll keep an eye on the website for updates.


Edit: the movies are now available at the event’s website

Cassowary.net 0.2.1

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I uploaded a new release of the Cassowary.net constraint solver today.

What has changed:

0.2.1 -- 2006-02-16:
  * Added debian/ directory, which is used to easily create an Ubuntu
    Breezy package. Contributed by Panagiotis Issaris
    <takis.issaris@uhasselt.be>.

As you can see, after debianizing Uiml.net, Takis did the same with Cassowary.net. Packages are available in his repository, as usual.

I’ll probably also upload Visual Studio solutions, the Compact .NET binaries and the Debian package itself in the next couple of days.

I can’t think of much to add to the solver. It is feature complete by now, and in my experience also very stable. The only thing that’s missing is more extensive documentation. That will be the target for the next release.

IE7 worse than IE6?

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Well, let me explain this provocing title. I tried to render my homepage with Internet Explorer 7, and the result is even worse than with Internet Explorer 6.

Here are some pictures to prove my point. First the correct rendering with Firefox:

[img:97858251,medium]

Then Internet Explorer 6:

[img:97858249,medium]

And finally, Internet Explorer 7:

[img:97858250,medium]

Please note that my homepage is valid XHTML 1.1 and valid CSS.

It seems IE7 is nothing more than IE6 with some trivial fixes, such as alpha transparency for PNG images. Of course, supporting modern web standards would lead to Microsoft breaking its own websites. Furthermore it would break all HTML that depends on IE’s non-standard rendering, such as the HTML generated by FrontPage or ASP.NET.