Alex @ Net

Andrii Nikitin is one of the MySQL support engineers located in Ukraine has asked for help. His son Ivan, who is 2 1/2, is in need of a bone marrow transplant operation.

More details:

http://www.mysql.com/about/help-ivan.html
http://www.phpcult.com/blog/andrii-nikitis-son-needs-our-help/
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Andrii+Nikitin%22+Ivan+MySQL

Even the small amount can help.

I've created the banner, maybe you can add and link to that page:
http://www.mysql.com/about/help-ivan.html

Just to make some fun at weekend: a nice animation that was created with CANVAS tag and JavaScript. Just view source to investigate how it is created. Will post a source with a little more details soon.

JavaScript is a trademark of Sun Microsystems and it was used for technology implemented by Netscape Communications and introduced in the Netscape Communicator Web browser in December 1995.

The first JavaScript language specification, described in ECMA-262 standard, was adopted by the ECMA General Assembly of June 1997 and the “ECMAScript” name means this standard. There are three editions of this standard, known as ES1, ES2 and ES3, and fourth edition is currently under development. The fourth edition is known as JavaScript 2 or ES4 and it describes several very important language enhancements such as classes, packages and namespaces and other features that aid developers in their work. ES4 is expected to be finished by October 2008.

New release of FireFox have inspired a lot of FireFox-related news and predictions. While I'm quite sceptical about the prediction made by Shayne Tilley about IE disappearing in 2013 it is interesting to see how many Alex@Net visitors use IE and FireFox during last year. What I can say... Viva FireFox!

FireFox 3 is great but there are a few minor issues that are frequently asked:

• Where is FireBug?
• How to run different versions of FireFox in the same time?

Answers are below.

Here is a cross-browser implementation of image rotation. The code uses IE filters and Mozilla/Opera/Safari Canvas object:

In the interesting blog post Greg Jorgensen have written about getters and setters and why using them is not a good practice.

"Do not use getters and setters" looks like a hastily advise, but its meaning is very important and it is "do not break encapsulation", which moves us to the question what the encapsulation is.

Continuing collecting system tweaks that are suitable for software developers, I've decided to create a registry patch that turning off IE's friendly errors (the messages that IE shows instead of actual error). Just create file fix.ie.friendly.error.reg with the following content and run it when you want to disable them:

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main]
"Friendly http errors"="no"

My collection of BAT File tips was updated - I've just added two more tips: String Replace and String Split.

In Microsoft JScript file system operations may throw exception with code -2146828218. So there is a challenge for you: write a program that will convert the -2146828218 to hex error number 0x800a0046.

The best solution I've found you can read in comments in two hours.