I Love Javascript!

In case you were wondering, I have decided that I am opposed to the current proposal to tax internet sales transactions.

I am, generally, sympathetic to the problem of lost revenue and competitive advantage given to online vendors over bricks and mortar. It's a distortion in the market that could encourage a death spiral where anyone in my neighborhood has to be driven out of business because they have a structural price disadvantage - at least if you ignore shipping.

However, I note that sales tax is considered to be the most regressive way to get revenue. It makes me a little suspicious when we have Republican support for a tax increase. If they support it, I figure it's going to turn out badly for me.

But, more important is the part where it makes it so that we are all at risk of being involved with any tax authority in the country whenever we do business on the internet. This seems to me a little like searches at airports. Sure, there's a 'reason' but it is actually a checkpoint where you have to ask the government for permission to travel.

I suspect that adding sales tax to the internet will be another way that we put an instrument on the net that will put more of us in a position to be troubled by the government. Unlike a garage sale, the internet keeps a record. That means that the piece of Craig's list crap you sell to someone in Alabama, well, that means the Alabama Dept of Revenue owns a piece of your ass.

If the sums were huge, I might still be swayed in support but, this tax will produce something like $23 billion. That's 5% of the defense budget, not including wars.

That tells me that there is something else going on. I don't know what it is but, when the corporatists in Washington get together to add a tax that will affect everyone that ever wants to sell something using the internet, I am very suspicious.

Here's are the two bugs: The declaration of private was made one of the child classes but not in the parent.

Here's the behavior: A parent class makes an assignment to a property

when accessed by class A, it works fine, by class B, the assignment is not made.

It turns out that, I had tried doing this work in class B before I decided that the better strategy was to put it into the base class (for both A & B). When I abandoned that effort, I inadvertently left the property declaration (private $routeName) in class B. It never was in class A.

The base class already had a property of that name. What I did not know is that, despite the long list of declarations that prove my intention to declare all properties, $routeName was not, in fact, declared.

That means that, from the base class perspective, the property could not be assigned. Incredibly, though I have PHP set to complain about everything, it did not complain about this attempt to assign to a private property. It failed silently and, since I was focused on the base class, inscrutably.

Once I noticed that the property wasn't declared in the base, I did so and it worked.

I experimented and found that, if I removed the declaration from the child class B, it worked. If I changed the declaration to protected, it worked just fine, too. (Much to the consternation of a co-worker who considers it blasphemy to have a declaration in a child class be available to a parent.)

Of course, the correct solution was to remove the declaration from the child, add it to the parent, and get back to work.

(I usually focus on programming topics here but, having recently built a new computer and watched the miracle that is SpamSieve's Bayesian filtering, I wanted to make my enthusiasm available to the internet in the hopes that the SpamSieve people enjoy greater success and that some people will stop living in spam hell. It makes more sense here than on any of my other blogs.)

Macintosh using friends, if you are not using SpamSieve, your life can be better.

I have been using the same email address since the middle nineties. I have never concealed it either. I use it to sign up for stuff, on blog posts, everywhere. As a consequence, I get spam. Lots of it. Yesterday, I got 104 spam email messages and that's pretty much every day for me.

But, I use SpamSieve so I never see any of them. Well, almost never. I see one or two every couple of days. Then, I tell SpamSieve that I don't like them and they disappear. Actually, a whole other category of spam disappears. It's amazing.
 
It's kind of fun, actually. All of a sudden the spamsters will get a new idea and I will see a bunch of spam. Eeek! I say to myself and I will point out their spammyness to SpamSieve. The next day there might still be a couple. Then, none. I'll check the SpamSieve discard folder and, there they are, out of sight.

I review the discard folder every once in awhile to see if it is mad at anyone I like. It does happen. Well, by "does happen", I mean, I can recall some incidents. Like, five times in my life after the first few weeks of a new installation.

Here's another amazing thing. If you set up your email right (imap!), SpamSieve running on your main Mac will remove the spam from your iPhone, too. And your iPad. And you iPod Touch. And your other Macintosh. It is a miracle.

SpanSieve costs thirty bucks but it is the best thirty bucks you will ever spend. If you ever wanted to know if something was worth it, here's one occasion where you can actually know the answer: TQ White II, computer ace, has used this software for years and says, "It works like a miracle."

And that information, my friends, is a gift. Enjoy!

http://j.mp/UtDhdi

This makes no sense to me. 

I just spent an annoying hour dealing with the fact that Safari's Javascript engine does not correctly parse standard (ECMA-262) date strings.

My occupation is to create rich internet applications that access business databases. There is no advertising. Search engines are irrelevant. I make tools for business people to enter, examine and update data for various purposes. The results are usually supposed to resemble the dedicated client applications of yesteryear with immediate feedback for errors or lookup data, dynamic entry forms that change in response to user choices, etc. If this sounds like the modern world of AJAX websites, it should. Over the last couple of years, that has become my specialty.