Stephen Belanger - Latest Comments

Re: You are not lean, stop pretending.

Stephen Belanger — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:56:22 -0000

It's the curse of over-funded startups. Their impatience leads them to throw manpower at every "problem" they encounter, even if it's just a minor delay. They don't seem to get that, just like the system they are building; the more points of required communication between entities, the greater the latency will be per request.

Adding a new person to a project slows everyone else down almost as much cumulatively as that person adds value.

Re: A simple explanation of “new” in Javascript.

Jon H — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 08:36:53 -0000

See this:
http://stackoverflow.com/quest...

Re: You are not lean, stop pretending.

Jon H — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 08:32:23 -0000

Heck of a post...I agree 100%. I've seen large branded companies with 100s of developers and designers with horrible products. It doesn't matter how much money or resources you have. If you don't get it right with 1 person how are you ever going to get it right with 100s.

Re: How to make Socket.IO work behind nginx (mostly)

Stephen Belanger — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 12:52:25 -0000

It goes wherever your Socket.IO code is defined. I like to put it right after io.attach().

Re: How to make Socket.IO work behind nginx (mostly)

hosam.ebrahim — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 09:12:22 -0000

Can anyone please tell me exactly the file name I should update it, I don't know where to override this function?

Re: The Infinite Genies Paradox

picko — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 23:50:40 -0000

The disney's genie is a little different from some of the other genies. Unlike the genie from aladdin, most genies seem to be tricky. From what I remember when you wish a genie free, in exchange of that genie you are trapped and become a genie to take his/her place.(Or if the genie said a genie can only grant you three wishes would mean that it didn't matter which genie you asked the wish for. Kind of like an ATM machine where it doesn't matter which ATM you go to, you would still have the same amount of money) Also wishes can be interpreted differently, like I wish I had trillion dollars and the genie would give you trillion dollars worth of coin which crushes on top of you. As for the wishing the third wish to not be granted. The genie could simply vanish your existence from the beginning. By doing so, your wish would come true because you would have never wished for the wish and so there is no wish to come true. At the same time your wish didn't come true because although you never wished it the wish was granted. So it's kind of answering a paradox with a paradox. haha

Re: How to make Socket.IO work behind nginx (mostly)

Stephen Belanger — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 04:00:58 -0000

Most of the "auto-scaling" cloud host type services can't give unique IPs though. Typically they are just a thin layer on top of AWS.

Re: How to make Socket.IO work behind nginx (mostly)

Srirangan — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 03:58:42 -0000

Umm .. it should work for vhosts if they have a dedicate IP. The problem was the clash of ports if both the tcp {} and http {} blocks were declared for all IPs.

Re: How to make Socket.IO work behind nginx (mostly)

Stephen Belanger — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 03:57:04 -0000

Yep, I've seen that fix too. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for vhosts. So cloud hosting services like dotcloud can't use that.

Re: How to make Socket.IO work behind nginx (mostly)

Srirangan — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 03:54:48 -0000

Hmm.. the way I got Socket.io to work with Nginx at Review19 -- http://review19.com -- was to compile Nginx with the TCP Proxy module (https://github.com/yaoweibin/n.... Didn't require any modifications of the Socket.io code but I needed to declare an additional tcp {} block in nginx.conf

Re: How to make Socket.IO work behind nginx (mostly)

jonathan youngblood — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 12:19:20 -0000

wow. i killed quite a bit of time trying to figure out why socket.io wasn't working on my server...and now i know. thanks so much for posting this.

Re: A simple explanation of “new” in Javascript.

Jonas Höglund — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 10:25:45 -0000

While we've already touched `instanceof` it might be worth mentioning that it's actually nothing more than a lookup in the prototype chain; basically, `a instanceof b` checks if the object a has b.prototype as its prototype, or if it's the "prototype of the prototype", and so on.

This could lead to subtle problems, as in the following:

function Test() {}
var test = new Test()
test instanceof Test // true

Test.prototype = {foo: 42};
test instanceof Test // false
test.foo // undefined (since Test.prototype doesn't refer to the [[Prototype]] of test)

Re: A simple explanation of “new” in Javascript.

Jonas Höglund — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 10:22:03 -0000

Not necessarily; if you attempt to return anything but an object (for example a number), it'll still evaluate to the newly constructed object. `function Foo() {return 42}; (new Foo) instanceof Foo` evaluates to true.

The best way to understand how `new` works would be to read the spec, but it can be a bit difficult to understand sometimes. However, if you actually want to know for sure how it works, I'd suggest checking there: http://es5.github.com/#x13.2.2

8. Let result be the result of calling the [[Call]] internal property of F, providing obj as the this value and providing the argument list passed into [[Construct]] as args.
9. If Type(result) is Object then return result.
10. Return obj.

Re: jquery.flash – Who needs swfobject when you have this?

Stephen Belanger — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 23:59:02 -0000

No, you'd have to do that in the swf itself. Javascript doesn't have any control of the playback of a swf file unless you explicitly expose that access in the swf itself. In which case, you might as well just use a container swf that loads other swfs as a sort of playlist.

Re: jquery.flash – Who needs swfobject when you have this?

Zibeo — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 23:26:55 -0000

Is it possible for this to monitor when the swf has completed and then start up a different swf file?

Re: A simple explanation of “new” in Javascript.

chadams — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 00:12:17 -0000

I have been thinking about this a little. Perhaps an even simpler way to explain...
using the "new" keyword before a function automatically adds "return this;" at the end of the function if no return already exists. This way of thinking helps eliminate the confusing weird behavior "new" seems to have.

Re: jquery.flash v1.3.1 – Squashing IE-related bugs.

Stephen Belanger — Tue, 03 May 2011 22:14:40 -0000

Good to know.

Re: jquery.flash v1.3.1 – Squashing IE-related bugs.

PaulCormier — Tue, 03 May 2011 21:15:32 -0000

I did some more testing. It appears to be bug in FireFox. IE & Chrome do not exhibit this behavior. See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...

Re: jquery.flash v1.3.1 – Squashing IE-related bugs.

Stephen Belanger — Tue, 03 May 2011 20:00:16 -0000

Sorry, have been busy with other things. I looked at it a bit but couldn't find anything. I might have some time to take another look at it this weekend. I wasn't able to reproduce the bug in Chrome, so it's possible that it is a Firefox issue.

Re: jquery.flash v1.3.1 – Squashing IE-related bugs.

PaulCormier — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 11:29:18 -0000

Any progress on this bug?

Re: jquery.flash v1.3.1 – Squashing IE-related bugs.

Uwe Jakobs — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 09:08:32 -0000

Hi Stephen,

thank you very much for this plugin. I'm using it for displaying Flash-Banners on a Typo3-Site. It's working great!

Nevertheless, I had some problems to create a proper count on Flash-Banner-Clicks. This is a general problem with the Flash-Technology, so the only chance you have is using an EVENT inside the surrounding Tag. Because each banner has to have an unique count, you will want to work with parameters to guarantee a valid identification.

Therefore, I added an onmousedown-Event for the Object-Tag in your plugin-code. Now, it's quite easy to call another javascript-function, that does the job (in my case, it's an AJAX-driven MySQL-Insert).

You may download the zipped files here, if you like:
http://imageco.de/jquery.flash...

HTML-Snippet to give you an idea what I'm talking about:

######## jquery.flash ########
<script>
$(document).ready(
function () {
$(\'#add_'.$row["UID_PL"].'\').flash(
{
\'src\':\''.$img_pfad.$row["file"].'\',
\'id\': \'flash_'.$row["UID_PL"].'\',
\'onmousedown\': \'javascript: bannerCount('.$row["UID_PL"].')\',
\'width\': \'160\',
\'height\': \'600\',
\'wmode\': \'transparent\'
}
);
}
);
</script>

<div id="add_'.$row[" uid_pl"].'"="">You need to install flash.</div>';

######## jquery.flash end ########

I hope, my solution can help other people too.
Please excuse my bad english, I'm still learning :)

Cheers

Uwe

Re: A simple explanation of “new” in Javascript.

Andrew — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 19:03:23 -0000

One small tweak - if the constructor returns an object then it will be returned instead of 'this'.

e.g. change "return name" to "return {a:12}" and you will find:

var test = new Test('test');
test instanceof Test; // returns false

Re: JSGame – Game development in Javascript!

phobius — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 01:55:59 -0000

cool animated background - very impressive :)

very distracting when you're reading though...

good luck with JSGame, I found you whilst doing research for my own similar project.

Re: The Infinite Genies Paradox

Stephen Belanger — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 02:20:05 -0000

Impossible, yes. But what I'm demonstrating is what SHOULD have been impossible but isn't.

Re: The Infinite Genies Paradox

Blop386 — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 02:09:38 -0000

"For my third wish, I ask that you not grant my third wish."
This could be used, even if you are only given 1 wish. Less intricate, more impossible than the model above.