The Fables of Aesop

I like to collect folk tales and old books - especially ones with good illustrations. Here are some scans from a book originally copyright in 1894 (the edition I have was printed in 1917).

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Kinetic

Making the Web faster - SPDY

Those crafty people at Google are doing some cool work to "make the Web faster". The first I had heard of this initiative it turned out to be how to make "pages" faster - a decent thing, but fairly well known. But recently some folks over there have started to look at the actual underlying issues with the gears grinding out the Web - mainly networking latency. Trying to improve the network protocol of the Web is a tricky thing - lots of people (and egos) can get involved. Surprisingly their effort seems to be off to a good start and everybody is taking it at face value and being supporting and questioning things in a positive way.

One really cool thing mentioned in their whitepaper isn't a direct 'latency' thing - it's about 'server push'. If they can really make this happen a whole knew world of application development would open up.

To enable the server to initiate communications with the client and push data to the client whenever possible.

IE and heinous "operation aborted" error

We ran into a heinous bug in IE regarding using Javascript to modify the DOM while the page is loading. It turns out that IE6 and IE7 will show a modal error dialog and then clear the page when the user dismisses the error message. On IE8 it was fixed to merely stop rendering the page at that point. How helpful.

You can find out more here on an MDSN blog

If you are unable to defer Javascript execution until after the page finishes loading, the following snippet may work in your use case.

var tags = document.getElementsByTagName("*");
tags[tags.length-1].parentNode.appendChild(n);