Zsh, where have you been all my life?

So it turns out Struct actually runs on the TouchPad. More surprising is the fact that it runs on Node 0.4.x.

TouchPad & webOS, day 1

The Good

• Cards. Android and iOS’s multitasking can suck it.
• Form factor. Looks smaller and thinner that the iPad. It’s neither, but that’s by the by.
• The built in apps. Mail and Facebook are top-notch.
• Synergy. Like Android’s contact syncing, but actually works, and lets you manually merge them. Also works with, say, calendar events.
• “Rooting” is a matter of typing “webos20090606” into the universal search bar.
• Universal search (I refuse to call it HP’s marketingese “Just type”).
• The Touchstone wireless charging dock, and Exhibition mode.

The Bad

• The dearth of apps, especially free, second-party apps for things like Tumblr, Google+ and Google Reader.
• It’s slow. But that can be fixed…
• Sometimes after installing an app, the tablet needs rebooting before it will work. This happened once when updating the App Catalog(ue. Learn to localise, HP).
• Navigation with the bluetooth keyboard is frustrating. Scrolling and switching cards must be done with the screen.

The Ugly

• The volume and power buttons shake and rattle nastily. They feel like they could come straight off with the slightest of sideways force. They’re also far too easily pressed when resting the TouchPad on its side.

Final thoughts

I wish I could get the Novacom drivers working on my laptop so I can install Preware.

My hobby: putting occasionally adverbs in unusual places

Things people write in JavaScript that make me angry and probably indicate they daren’t look past their pre- and misconceptions about the language and just fucking program, part 1

if(typeof something !== 'undefined' && something !== null)

As “the” “correct” way to check for an undefined variable.

Argh.

First things first, nothing is ever null unless you’ve told it to be. If you’re setting something to null, you’re never going to want to check if it’s undefined. So we can remove that:

if(typeof something !== 'undefined')

Sure: this works as a catchall. But anyone with any shred of sense, self-decency and knowledge about the values being passed around doesn’t need this kind of generality.

In fact, most of the time you can get away with:

if(something)

All this trips up on is 0, false and the empty string.

For a Number, we can use isFinite:

> isFinite("hello");
false
> isFinite(5);
true
> isFinite(0);
true
> isFinite(undefined);
false

Booleans have the old “strictly equal to false” trick:

> undefined === false
false
> false === false
true

As for Strings, are you ever really going to need to differentiate between undefined and the empty string? How is passing in an empty string better than passing in nothing?

Dear internet,

Fitts’ Law is not the kind of law you can break. It does not say “put things near screen edges”. It says “the bigger an object is in the direction of mouse travel, the easier the object is to hit”. What you think is Fitts’ Law is an fact a corollary of Fitts’ actual Law: since the cursor stops at a screen edge, an object at that edge essentially has infinite size in that direction.

You know what? Fuck Rhino. I’m moving to Node. I don’t care about having JavaScript 1.8.5. I want a sensible API and to be able to debug the goddamn thing.