Disqus - Latest Comments for alexch

Re: Twitch app arrives on LG TVs - FlatpanelsHD

Alex Chaffee — Sun, 21 Jun 2020 13:33:04 -0000

They forgot to implement login and chat, making it a useless broken toy with no purpose other than to check a box on some marketing list. They also made the mistake of letting the navigation interface *override and interrupt* the currently running stream, like the PS4 and Xbox apps. It's a TV, guys, let me keep watching while I mess with the settings or browse the channel list!

Re: The clickjacking attack El ataque clickjacking

Alex Chaffee — Thu, 14 Mar 2019 11:37:36 -0000

`let i = 1` does more than declare the variable i. It also sets its value to 1. That happens every time the function is called, so every 1000 msec, you set i to 1 before putting it on the page.

Re: The clickjacking attack El ataque clickjacking

Alex Chaffee — Thu, 14 Mar 2019 11:34:45 -0000

In func2 you are not passing in the alert function. You are *calling* the alert function and then passing it its return value (which is always `undefined`). In func1 you are defining an "inline fat arrow function" and passing it in, so setTimeout will return immediately, then add that timer function to its task queue; after func1 returns control back to the system, the task happens after 0 more msec -- that is, immediately, but not *as* immediately as in func2.

Re: FormData

Alex Chaffee — Thu, 14 Mar 2019 11:30:15 -0000

"internal" in this context means "part of the JavaScript runtime implementation". It's a form of hand-waving -- your browser, or NodeJS interpreter, or V8 engine, or whatever program is actually parsing and compiling and running your JS program, has implemented a scheduler somehow. This scheduler is guaranteed to call your timer function after `delay` msec. The details of exactly how JS implements the scheduler don't matter, and in fact the important part is how it behaves.

Re: Differences in Defining ES6 Class Methods | cmichel

Alex Chaffee — Tue, 18 Dec 2018 13:54:20 -0000

Those are not class methods. They are all instance methods; some of them rebind this so they can be used in callbacks. A class method is invokable directly from the class without using new. In ES6, class methods are defined with the static keyword.

Re: Following Crash, All F-35s Temporarily Grounded For Inspections

Alex Chaffee — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 16:19:47 -0000

correction: "Lightening II" => "Lightning II"

Re: Refactoring with Visual Studio Code

Alex Chaffee — Sun, 01 Apr 2018 11:11:15 -0000

Refactoring is changing the design of code without changing its behavior. It's not reformatting (doesn't change the design), and it's not text-search-and-replace (doesn't respect the design, e.g. two different variables with the same name in two different functions). In fact, of these nine items, only one is a refactoring (Rename symbols in all files). Does VSCode have Extract Method? Extract Variable? Inline Variable? Inline Method? Seems so: https://code.visualstudio.c... ... My advice is to either rewrite or rename this article. It's not honestly titled as is.

Re: Learn To Code: Arrays

Alex Chaffee — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 14:33:26 -0000

here's a hint: reverse the subject and the object, like Yoda

Re: Business Group Builds Case For Carbon Tax In Vermont

Alex Chaffee — Sun, 29 Oct 2017 13:32:35 -0000

What is your definition of chemicals? Most people realize that chemicals compose all matter, including your body and all the flora and fauna in nature. For instance, water is a chemical.

Also, there's a chicken-and-egg problem with waiting around for people to get off fossil fuels. One of the points of a carbon tax is that it will make climate-friendly fuels and improvements more affordable, which will cause more people to use them. And yes, they are "willing to take that tax revenue and help homeowners upgrade their homes" -- most carbon tax proposals I've seen plow the new revenue either into subsidizing cleaner alternatives, or refunding the money back to the consumers somehow.

Re: Business Group Builds Case For Carbon Tax In Vermont

Alex Chaffee — Sun, 29 Oct 2017 13:26:01 -0000

Sounds like you are engaging in a lot of mind-reading here. If it's an organization made up of businesses, then it's a business organization. Imputing their motives as based solely on PR and anti-growth is pretty disingenuous. They provide several reasons why they think a carbon tax would be pro-growth and pro-business. Why not engage those predictions on their merits?

Re: Could we drop Symbols from Ruby?

Alex Chaffee — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 08:54:22 -0000

How's this? :foo would still be a symbol. It's just that things like == and hashing would work interchangeably if a symbol were implemented as a frozen string.

Re: Could we drop Symbols from Ruby?

Alex Chaffee — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 08:50:37 -0000

Rails introduced things like "HashWithIndifferentAccess" to solve a problem. For better or worse, Ruby lives in an ecosystem where it's the only player who cares about the distinction. If symbols were read-only strings then we could use JSON and HTTP/CGI and SQL all the other stuff without hassle.

Changing the *superclass* of Symbol so that it *extends* String would not hurt performance, and it would decrease confusion. You can still keep the symbol syntax -- :foo would just be the short syntax for "foo".freeze (or .intern or whatever).

Re: Could we drop Symbols from Ruby?

Alex Chaffee — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 08:48:47 -0000

Amen! I've been asking the same question for years: See https://stackoverflow.com/q... . The answer seems to be historical accident, and too many libraries to update. A major version release of Ruby would be a great time to fix this... is anything planned for 3.0?

Re: There Are 3,600 Airbnb Hosts In Vermont. Lawmakers Can't Agree On How To Regulate Them

Alex Chaffee — Wed, 04 Oct 2017 18:59:10 -0000

You'd pass any fee through to your guests, like a cleaning fee. AirBNB makes that really easy.

Re: There Are 3,600 Airbnb Hosts In Vermont. Lawmakers Can't Agree On How To Regulate Them

Alex Chaffee — Wed, 04 Oct 2017 18:57:05 -0000

"hosts rent out their spaces for about 24 nights" -- per year? per month? for all time? Also, does "on average" mean mean, or median, or what? Numbers matter, especially when they're used to support a claim about regulation by a business that would affect their profit.

For the record, I love AirBNB as both a host and a guest, and I think some regulation is necessary to protect guests and hosts from scammers as well as health and safety concerns. It's too bad we don't even have a straw man bill to debate. What are the "health codes that inns and hotels follow" that you mentioned? E.g. would a home kitchen need stainless steel sinks? Would a bedroom need a lit fire exit sign? Would smoking be banned? Etc.

Re: A step by step guide to bulletproof 404s on Rails

Alex Chaffee — Mon, 03 Oct 2016 11:20:23 -0000

may i also suggest... in spec/requests/not_found_route_spec.rb :


require 'rails_helper'
describe 'making a request to an unrecognised path' do
  context 'web' do
    it 'returns 404 and HTML' do
      get '/nowhere'
      expect(response.status).to eq(404)
      expect(response.body).to include("<html")
      expect(response.body).to include("not found")
    end
  end
end

Re: Debate: Democratic Treasurer Candidates

Alex Chaffee — Tue, 02 Aug 2016 12:57:51 -0000

Dunne sounds *way* in over his head in this debate...

Re: What Bernie Takes From Tuesday

Alex Chaffee — Wed, 08 Jun 2016 12:31:15 -0000

or even better... Hillary should make Bernie the Secretary of the Treasury! Or chair of the DNC!

Re: What Bernie Takes From Tuesday

Alex Chaffee — Wed, 08 Jun 2016 12:24:01 -0000

Bernie as Vice President? Nah... Secretary of State, baby!!!

By the way, for everyone saying "it's time to step aside", just relax, he'll get around to it. If someone behind me in traffic is honking at me to go faster, I put on my brakes just to spite them.

Re: English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet

Alex Chaffee — Thu, 24 Sep 2015 20:36:36 -0000

I mean on the second page of twitter search results for "because" I found

"WHEN SOMEONE TOLD YOU ONE DIRECTION CANT SING
SMASH THIS ON THEIR FACE BECAUSE DAMN VOCALS"

https://twitter.com/93xftho...

Re: English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet

Alex Chaffee — Thu, 24 Sep 2015 20:29:09 -0000

Has it? References, please.

Re: Ruby on Enums, Queries and Rails 4.1

Alex Chaffee — Tue, 28 Apr 2015 14:35:30 -0000

So basically, Enums -- which should be dead simple -- are actually complicated and fraught and broken in Rails 4. Maybe Rails should start again with stored-as-a-string enums, like this simple snippet I wrote (while teaching a team of junior developers that enums should be dead simple) a few months ago: https://gist.github.com/ale...

Re: Using Postgres Hstore with Rails 4

Alex Chaffee — Tue, 18 Nov 2014 12:24:20 -0000

Any way to store types other than string? After I reload, all my values are strings.

Re: Page-Specific Javascript in Rails

Alex Chaffee — Wed, 20 Aug 2014 07:54:15 -0000

Yeah, my solution is not perfect but works to get you up and running. It's using sprockets how it was designed. When Rails wrote the asset pipeline on top of sprockets they kind of broke it by making all JS appear on all pages by default. My trivial solution would be improved by making the javascript_include_tag be smarter and only appear if that file (foo.js for controller foo) exists, and then making sure that for every page you get at most 2 glommed JS files (global + specific) -- which should happen already via sprockets but you never know.

Re: http://rubydoc.info/github/defunkt/resque/Resque:enqueue

Alex Chaffee — Wed, 20 Aug 2014 07:45:48 -0000

The documentation for this method could be better :-) As https://devcenter.heroku.co... says: "In calling enqueue, the perform method of klass is called, with all the original enqueue arguments. These arguments are serialized as JSON, and therefore it is important to ensure that the arguments can in fact be serialized as JSON. Arguments like symbols, or entire ActiveRecord objects will not work. Try instead to send object IDs or as is the case in the example application, a AWS file token key is sent."