Rev’s Thought Dump

I ran into this little bundle of awesome while trying to work with JSON and jQuery. In FireFox (as always) everything worked wonderfully. But as soon as I opened it up in IE it quickly turned into anything Microsoft is involved in, a huge cluster.

After hunting and hunting I found the issue with this bit of javascript:

for(item in ResultsArray.items){….

Turns out in IE ‘item’ is a reserved word. So watch out for that.

Ugg I hate IE. I hate how it makes me scream and complain.

Damn you MS!

Thanks for the pointer from Johannes Fahrenkrug’s site.

Update: this little bit comes from Bill in the comments. Makes a world of difference and no, I hadn’t tried this. =)

for (var item in ResultsArray.items) {….

Note the ‘var’ statement.

The reason I ask is that I use the variable ‘item’ all over in my IE code and never have a problem *unless* I forget to ‘var’ a local variable named ‘item’.

Thanks, Bill.

Okay, this one made me want to smash my head with a brick.  I’m working along on a web site using C# and ASP.NET 1.1 when I suddenly get this error.  I’m getting a DataTable from a DataSet so it makes sense.

I start by checking the query. Nope, still returns data just fine.  I test and make sure the DataSet isn’t null.  I make sure the table isn’t null.  Nothing seems to be wrong.  So I say, okay, fuck it and I choose a different way of getting my DataTable.  Then suddenly it’s saying assign “” to the value of a string is an array out of bounds exception.

By this time I’m losing my ever loving mind.  Finally I google it up and find that for what ever reason ASP.NET will flag the first line of a method for that exception even though it happens later in the method.

Completely blew my mind. I mean, I had other errors and exceptions come up that pointed to the right line of code.  But not that one.  VERY furstrating.

So, keep an eye out for that one.

Okay, I posted earlier about having issues logging into your gmail account on the iPhone or via Pidgin for google chat.  I started running into this problem again only on the iPhone and only when I was on edge/3G. Here’s how I got it working again.

Recently I got my phone replaced and synched with my computer.  For what ever reason the accounts that synched back were faulty.  So what I did was to delete each account from the phone and then recreate it.  But first, for each gmail account I went to this link: https://www.google.com/accounts/UnlockCaptcha and unlocked it.

You might recall in the previous post I had a link to a similar page on google’s site that could prompt with a captcha if locked.  But this takes you right there and get’s the job done.  Again, just search Google’s site for UnlockCaptcha.

After unlocking and recreating the accounts everything seems to be working perfectly again.  Go figure.

I’m getting this occasionally.  Where I can’t log into my gmail in the mail client on the iphone or into google chat with pidgin.  Though, oddly enough I’m still perfectly capable of logging into my gmail account via the browser. I believe it most often occurs when I have something set incorrectly and it repeatedly tries the incorrect password for an account.

In this case I had just restored my iPhone backup to the new phone I got over the weekend ( had dust behind the screen so they gave me a new one). When it restores it doesn’t fill in your passwords for you and apprently this can result in several failed attempts to connect.  I don’t know why it didn’t prompt me for the correct password, even though my Exchange account at work popped up an invalid password notice.

Anywho, like I said I’ve had this happen a few times now and it’s always really annoying and I tend to forget how to clear the issue. But since, like I said, this just happened.  I’m going to go ahead and post the solution here. For you. And for myself.

Simply go to https://www.google.com/accounts and log into your account.  It should prompt you again to login but this time present you with a captcha.  Login one more time, filling in the captcha, and tada!  All done!

In a time of phising attacks and the like, I wouldn’t blame you for not wanting to just follow my link.  So here is the link to the Google knowledge base article.

And if that doesn’t make you feel secure, just google for “How do I unlock my Google Account”

Good, now let’s hope I remember to look here first next time.

You know, as good an idea as that sounds, I think by definition it wouldn’t work. It’s like the apocryphal “Anarchists meeting”

And really, isn’t every personal tech blog out there a journal of tech and ADD, for the most part?

So we sat down last night and decided to stream some tv to ourly newly hobbled together “media center”. We watch some house flipping on TLC and eventually found our way to Extreme Make Over: Home Editon. Which, as far as I know, is now the ONLY edition having realized that there are just some wrecks you CAN’T save.

We used to watch this show way back in the first season or two. Back when it was a glamourised ‘This Old House’. They’d find some people whose home was just trashed for one reason or another and they’d come in and fix it up. It was always full of technical detail and discussions about the design of the house and rooms. Interesting stuff.

What I saw last night (three episodes worth) was terrible. It’s gone from the entertaining show we once knew to this publicity engine for sponsers. Sears, Ford, etc etc all getting their plugs in and intermingled with that are emotinal bombs of truly news center proportins.

For example, they’re going to build a house for a family whose husband is deployed. Lot’s of emotion there. They bring him back for the week while they build the house. Okay. During the prebuild interview with the wife they drop this nice emoti-bomb.

Host: “oh, it’s going to be fabulous. We’ll fix it all up and we’ll finally finish this house your family always wanted.”

Wife: (smiling and nodding): “Yes, it’ll be wonderful. A great releif of stress….”

Host: (suddenly serious) : “But, you know your husband won’t be able to stay, will he?”

(dead air with the camera pointed at the wife for what seems minutes until she finally gets it and breaks down into a crying fit and let’s the guy console her. )

WTF?! That was pretty pointless. Here’s another good one.

Brother fire fighters are getting their house in New Orleans rebuilt after the tragedy. At one point one of the brothers is talking about serving the community and then breaks down and leaves the room. The cameras are of course waiting in the hall to capture it. When Ty asks what’s up his brother tells him it’s been really bad lately. Bad calls and recently there was a fire where they couldn’t rescue the people inside and Ty whips out this heartfelt one liner: “Oh, and he like had to she the babies burn?”

WTF is that?!

It’s so not abut the construction anymore either. The houses in all three shows were built in a 45 second music montoge in the last 15 minutes of the show. Just a quick “zip” and it’s built.

It used to be that the carpenters would take on a special project and you’d see how it was done and a special reveal to the family. Now the things they work on are hardly even mentioned. Almost under the breath. Sad.

I think it started to head south when it appeared the powers that be were starting to notice the show. I recall tuning in to find that they tacked an additional hour on to the show for a special “behind” the scenes. A show which might be cool if it focused on the people and the projects. But that actually talked about how the show was made from a production stand point. Things like highlighting how much showmanship goes into it all. The filming and refilming their approach to the “unsuspecting” family’s house. And how the people are alerted well in advance.

I’d rather they were a little more genuine rather than so over the top and disgustingly emotional.

It really has become the offspring of marrying the evening news with this old house and reality tv. Very sad.

(posted from iPhone)

So, the first thing it does upon restarting and reactivating is start another terribly long back up.  Didn’t we just back up about 5minutes ago when we started all this?  And.. where’s these supposed to be faster now?  Hrmm we’ll see how it goes.

So here we are at day two. More late rising and coming to work to find vista pooping itself. I had to just complain to the walls rather than twitter. I finally just IM’d some from twitter and let them know vista is full of crunchy fail.

I got the idea to do my own Mojave experiment and setup a cam to record all the problems I encounter with vista. But, I’m really good at that, coming up with new projects to not finish. If anyone else picks that up and runs with it let me know.

Opened OmniFocus a total of once today. Created a folder for work repeated tasks and that was it. They talk about people with ADD suffering from being unable to remember or know things that aren’t in the immediate moment. I completely understand that. I’ve been reminded three times this week that we’re supposed to have a garage sale this weekend. =\

Was talking the other day about how effective ADD folks could be if they came from money or just managed to hire an assistant. If I was riding on daddy’s money I’d start a company and hire people to follow through on all the ideas I have. And my assistant would remind me of the things I was supposed to be doing, besides zoning out.

Total change in direction I’m in the Seattle XCoder’s meeting. Listening to someone talk [insert name]. Funny he’s admitting he hadn’t really used a Mac before he wrote a 2000 page book on it. Interesting, I get that feeling about a lot of tech books.

In google in Fremont listening. He’s talking about getting his first Mac in 2003. This is turning out to be pretty interesting, but this is supposed to be blog and not a series of twitter posts. I’ll save the review for another post.

Okay, Gizmodo is CONSTANTLY posting about Legos. (That’s not all of them either.)  It’s quite apparent that it’s part of some paid advertising, like those annoying articles you see in magazine with the small print at the bottom “paid advertisement”.

I just want Gizmodo to admit it and disclose that fact.  Why does it bother me?  I don’t f’ing know.  I just know that every time I see a Lego article in my feeds I know it’s Gizmodo writing about it. And I just know that it’s obnoxious.  Lego’s are very loosely tech.  Sure there are Lego Mindstorms, and all of us nerds start with Legos.  But.. but.. leggo of the legos already.  Jeeez.