Javascript as Universal Scripting Language

Russell Beattie thinks we are moving in the right direction: More Javascript on the server-side and the rest of the universe.

Javascript is the UNIX of scripting languages.

So, what's up with World Radio Switzerland?

On November 1st, World Radio Geneva will become World Radio Switzerland. For many years, World Radio Geneva has served yours truly as the "official sound track". This site has linked to their live audio stream and my better bits of code have all been written under the influence of "88.4 FM WRG".

Over the past years, WRG has been operating as a privat local radio station. With the change to WRS, it will become a national public radio station. The new WRS station will have had a turbulent history, if you count all the different bits together.

The swiss public service broadcaster SRG SSR has statutes very similar to Britain's BBC and originally applied for an FM license for WRG with the intention of mainly re-using content produced by Swiss Radio International. However, the license it finally received from the federal government mandated that the station had to be commercial, limiting the ability to re-use Swiss Radio International content.

Swiss Radio International was later forced to focus on internet content, becoming swissinfo , and the SRG SSR made its Radio Suisse Romande (RSR) subsidiary the principal shareholder together with Reuters and the BBC. Recent changes in swiss law made the involvement of the SRG SSR in a commercial radio station again more troublesome and the SRG SSR was forced to either sell WRG entirely or absorb it into its public service structure. The latter is what has happened and as a result WRG will go national as WRS with the blessing of the federal government.

World Radio Switzerland could become a small but important puzzle piece moving us closer towards an anglo-professional and one day maybe an anglo-official future. Switzerland has a unique opportunity in this regard since it does not have to protect its current official languages to the extent necessary in nations like France, Germany and Italy for cultural reasons. Lifting the status of English in Switzerland will have a unifying effect and will re-energize the evolution of our political principals.

Now, on one hand, I'm really excited about the potential of what World Radio Switzerland could become. A WRG-FM equivalent for all of Switzerland would be a fantastic thing to have. It would be the radio channel of my dreams and, more importantly, it would be exactly the medicine Switzerland needs to move its collective consciousness forward in the right direction.

On the other hand, I'm really worried that they'll screw it up and miss that opportunity, because I don't know if they understand themselves what it is that makes WRG-FM tick and whether they can properly translate and scale that to a national level. Assuming the current management of WRG does in fact "get" it, will they be able to defend the genetic code of WRG against the infectious influences that they will be exposed to from other interest groups inside and outside of the SRG SSR?

With the start of World Radio Switzerland, Switzerland is at a cross-roads between ...ehm... no change, and leveraging that media to develop a higher level of self-awareness. Will we miss that opportunity?

Helma Conspiracy Theory

For crying out loud! ...so, Helma is a conspiracy now? ;-)

A comment about helma on reddit : "It is a neocon conspiracy to consolidate power on centralized authoritarian servers rather than on democratically used browsers where it should be. Helma is the "New World Order" cryptically referenced in numerous GHWB speeches and various Neocon vision statements."

I don't think so :-)

JSONPath and CouchDB

More ingredients for the Mocha pie: the new version of CouchDB leverages JSON and Javascript . I wonder what happens if you throw JSONPath at it .

Hold the whole program in your head, and you can manipulate it at will

Paul Graham, Holding a Program in One's Head :

"Your code is your understanding of the problem you're exploring. So it's only when you have your code in your head that you really understand the problem."

"Distractions are bad for many types of work, but especially bad for programming, because programmers tend to operate at the limit of the detail they can handle. The danger of a distraction depends not on how long it is, but on how much it scrambles your brain. A programmer can leave the office and go and get a sandwich without losing the code in his head. But the wrong kind of interruption can wipe your brain in 30 seconds."

"The more succinct the language, the shorter the program, and the easier it is to load and keep in your head. You can magnify the effect of a powerful language by using a style called bottom-up programming, where you write programs in multiple layers, the lower ones acting as programming languages for those above."

Yep.

Keeping track of localhost:8080

Apparently delicious: http://localhost:8080/

Rhino 1.6R6 with E4X fix and patches for Helma

Rhino 1.6R6 has now been released . The older Rhino jar that is part of the current Helma 1.6 package contains a E4X bug that prevents attribute support from working properly. To use E4X with Helma, you therefore need to replace that jar with the newer version.

While all Helma related patches that were pending at the time have been committed to Rhino 1.6R6 in June, there since has been one more Helma related patch that didn't make it into the Rhino 1.6R6 release version.

So, here's a version of the Rhino 1.6R6 containing that E4X fix and the pending Helma related patch:

http://helma.zumbrunn.net/downloads/rhino16r6patched/rhino.jar

With that patched version placed at ./lib/rhino.jar of your Helma installation, you can now enjoy E4X in your server-side Javascript and for example turn your skins into XML objects. With the code below, you could then access a skin "foo.skin" as XML object using this syntax: this.views.foo

/**
 * Object containing the collection of available views
 * 
 * @type Object
 */
Mocha.prototype.__defineGetter__('views',function() {
    var views = {};
    var protos = this.getPrototypeChainAsNames();
    var that = this;
    for (var proto in protos) {
        for (var skin in app.skinfiles[protos[proto]]) {
            if (!views[skin]) {
                views.__defineGetter__(skin,
                function(){ 
                    var s = skin; 
                    var obj = that; 
                    return function(){ 
                        return new XML(obj.renderSkinAsString(s)); 
                    }; 
                }());
            }
        }
    }
    return views;
})

/**
 * Returns the prototype chain as a string array of prototype names
 * 
 * @return Array
 */
function getPrototypeChainAsNames(){
    return this.getPrototypeChain().map(
                function(proto){ 
                    return / (\w+)\]$/(proto.toString())[1];
                });
}

/**
 * Returns the prototype chain as an array
 * 
 * @return Array
 */
function getPrototypeChain(){
    var protoChain = [];
    var proto = this.__proto__;
    do {
        protoChain.push(proto);
        proto = proto.__proto__;
    }
    while (proto != Object.prototype)
    return protoChain;
}

>>> Helma 1.6 is ready!