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I know what you mean. About thirty years ago, I was working on the VDT software for a Telecoms testing suite: there were four of us in the team doing the VDT, 10 or so doing the presentation stuff at the computer end (two mainframes: one DB, one test, with integration and control via the VDT), another dozen doing the hardware interfacing to the line test equipment. Gawd knows how many managers...
And the company it was all going to work for got a suggestion from a test department employee who was fed up with the manual system. Suggesting that a ZX Spectrum could handle it pretty easily, and he had a boy who could write the code... 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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OriginalGriff wrote: Suggesting that a ZX Spectrum could handle it pretty easily
And he probably was right about that part... 
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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My nostalgia[^] seems to be a lot better
I still enjoy those! (the actual good old ones, not (all of) the newer they have nowadays)...
My blog[ ^]
public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
}
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“Ya remember...when we were kids...how good the jellied bugs used to taste?
And there were those long rolls of paper with food stains on them.
(You could get two thousand yards for a nickel!)
And then there were those little round hard things that would explode in your mouth and blow your lips off...
Oh! And the cold pork fat bars with the carpet tacks!
Boy, they don’t make stuff like that any more...
These days it’s all goddamn chemicals!”
(In remembrance of Bernard Kliban)
(This message is programming you in ways you cannot detect. Be afraid.)
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Dare I show my age here 
What about ANSI C & ISO Pascal on a 32k BBC Model B Micro, using Wordstar as the text editor!!
Now that was real programming... unless you want to get down and dirty with 6502 & Z80 hex opcodes.
Shawty
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OriginalGriff wrote: 2) Only 21 lines of code on screen at any one time, and only 80 chars wide.
You can see 46 lines of code in 50-line mode (start with /h switch) ! No way round width limit. I still have this on my pc, runs under XP without needing Dosbox.
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I remember it very well, I still use CTRL+INS and SHIFT+INS for copying and pasting these days!
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For example:
When you start typing a link into Chrome (like, the first letter even!), if it can resolve from your history what that link is, it pre-loads the page behind the scenes so that when you select the link, in all likelihood, most, if not all of the page has already been loaded. Firefox doesn't do that. I have no idea what IE does.
Yes indeedy, because I'm logging the HTTP Get stuff (I'm using .NET HttpListener) you can in fact see this behavior of Chrome's.
You also learn other things, more on the mundane level, but it gives one a real appreciation of what tags and attributes like "form", "submit", and "name" do and their interaction with regards to actually emitting a POST HTTP method. Or, another example, responding with the correct encoding of images vs text files.
It's quite fun stuff, and while I know that there's been a lot of work that others have put into the finer devilish details of writing a web server, it sure is nice to do something at the bare metal level which doesn't depend on IIS, doesn't use the bloated dog slow crap that I discovered is MVC Razor, or, in the *nix world, isn't a morass of arcane configuration files (Apache, nginx, etc) or involves yucky ducky languages/frameworks like Ruby on Rails.
Oh, and after several hours of hair pulling and teeth gnashing last night, I also learned that you do not (I was using an example, so I sadly copy&pasted the code) create buttons with and id of "submit" because this breaks, not just jQuery but the DOM itself, with something like $('#form').submit(); Go figure.
And of course the bug I found the most amusing is that (and it may have been fixed now, but according to SO it has been like this for like, you know man, forever) in Firefox, you can't programmatically submit a form unless the form actually has a button of type "submit". Wow.
What a f***ed up world the web is. And I was just reading on LinkedIn on some group post where someone said that XAML is more complicated and desktop UI is moving towards web-forms, which is much simpler.
Marc
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That sounds like "seriously interesting article" material going on there! Are you going to write it up at some point?
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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OriginalGriff wrote: That sounds like "seriously interesting article" material going on there! Are you going to write it up at some point?
Eventually -- there's a lot of bare bones examples out there on writing a web server, I think what I would want to demonstrate are the nuances of browser behavior and data interaction. Though, putting together a functional but bare bones web-server would probably be useful too -- Sacha's Simple REST Framework[^] though is a good place to start.
Marc
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Agree-ing to Griff, and requesting for an article or the date of it! 
The sh*t I complain about
It's like there ain't a cloud in the sky and it's raining out - Eminem
~! Firewall !~
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Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan wrote: and requesting for an article or the date of it!
OK, OK, give me a few weeks. 
Marc
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Hopefully weeks aren't Integral multiples of 52!
The sh*t I complain about
It's like there ain't a cloud in the sky and it's raining out - Eminem
~! Firewall !~
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Yes, looking forward to the article(s), thanks !
Merry Xmas, Bill
«OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. » Alan Kay's clarification on what he meant by the term "Object" in "Object-Oriented Programming."
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I've experienced the same insights after learning most of my web dev skills from that "yucky ducky" framework you mentioned - Ruby on Rails. The affordances and speed gains you get from things like Rails or .NET MVC are definitely advantageous, but they definitely give you a lot of "magic" to really abstract what's going on. I've found that learning the bare metal technologies that power something such as Rails help me to be a more efficient coder...it's too bad that many people never take that next step and are happy to take on the technical debt and overhead of all that "magic" much too easily.
Happy Coding!
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You also get problems submitting forms when you make your own javascript function called submit(), and try to set the form to call it on submission.
So I'm not surprised about the id thing
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Also, if you think the web is screwed up, try writing desktop applications for OS X, Linux, and Windows. Good luck with that. You won't even get to writing code before going mental just trying to decipher which APIs are considered current and what language to use. Have fun doing any of the following:
1. Using a single language in all cases, even if it is something like Java that's supposed just work everywhere.
2. Sorting out what menu shortcuts to use and quasi-standards on them.
3. Integrating with the various taskbars.
4. Working on past versions as well as newer versions of the OS.
5. Making an installer that doesn't suck.
6. Providing updates.
7. Working with/around some of the "features" of each system. Gotta love the way Win7 automatically makes dialogs show up behind the current window, that's just so awesome.
As much as the web may be frustrating as all hell, it pales in comparison to the wrist-slitting exercise of writing desktop applications of even the smallest semblance of quality.
Really, the only truly badass, "where's a cliff to fling myself off of?" part of web design is using CSS.
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bantling wrote: Really, the only truly badass, "where's a cliff to fling myself off of?" part of web design is using CSS
This. CSS is the offspring of a rabid Tasmanian Devil and Satan and it is no way a love child.
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Dude, you had me at "yucky ducky languages/frameworks like Ruby on Rails"!
Back in the early 2000’s I wrote a very thin "web server and client" that ran on a set of AS/400s. Certain events would send data to the AS/400s via HTTP and internal AS/400 events would shoot data out of the AS/400 over HTTP. Thankfully I didn’t have to be concerned with browser stupidity, but spent many days buried in HTTP’s rfc.
- great coders make code look easy
- When humans are doing things computers could be doing instead, the computers get together late at night and laugh at us. - ¿Neal Ford?
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You lot seriously crack me up sometimes
Marc: would this be the same server you've been on about over at Lidnug? if so, then I too think your write-up's going to be rather interesting (I might even contribute to it if you want )
For those of you who are down in the dumps about CSS, don't worry... I'll be starting to write CSS3 Succinctly this week, which should be out Q1 in the new year and I intend to try and make it fun even if it can be a painful subject.
for those of you who really want to get stuck in and learn the in's and out's of the various web server protocols, then may I suggest you spend a delightful evening reading the RFC's at
http://www.rfc-editor.org/[^]
you'll have such a delightful time
Shawty
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Peter Shaw wrote: Marc: would this be the same server you've been on about over at Lidnug?
No, that's a product called Interacx which I never went public with but have used for a client that was migrating from Clarion to .NET.
Long-winded story --
In this particular case, there was some synchronicity in the universe. My experiences with Ruby on Rails and Razor/MVC have left me very dissatisfied with writing web apps, especially with Razor/MVC performance (RoR can run circles around Razor). I also wanted to see what would be involved in writing a web server receptor and other pieces as a plug-in in the HOPE framework. Anyways, my client needed a simple and lightweight intranet server so I figured I could kill two birds (or more) with one piece of code. Sure, I could have gone the PHP route, or Nancy, or even RoR, but I wanted something ridiculously simple to configure and get running. So I've been learning a lot of cool stuff in the process that is really deepening my understanding, and I've got a decent web server with routing, session management and authentication working in about 500 lines of code -- no IIS, no bloat, no heavyweight EF or Rails or whatever ORM -- it's really nice to decouple all that from the job of serving html, css, js, and images.
Peter Shaw wrote: I'll be starting to write CSS3 Succinctly this week, which should be out Q1 in the new year and I intend to try and make it fun even if it can be a painful subject.
Awesome - I have O'Reilly's "CSS3 - the missing manual" but haven't cracked it open yet. I'll be looking forward to your book!
Peter Shaw wrote: for those of you who really want to get stuck in and learn the in's and out's of the various web server protocols, then may I suggest you spend a delightful evening reading the RFC's at
Well, HttpListener isolates me from some of the low level details.
Marc
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I do know of one server stack that's even simpler than what you where doing in .NET and just as fast.
NodeJS, but that's a discussion for another thread
We need to get together on Skype or something and have a pow-wow ...
Happy Xmas ya-awl
Shawty
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Peter Shaw wrote: NodeJS, but that's a discussion for another thread
Personally, I'm not particularly excited by anything javascript related.
Peter Shaw wrote: We need to get together on Skype or something and have a pow-wow ...
That would be great -- how about sometime early next year? (That sounds more ominous than it actually is).
Merry Christmas to you too!
Marc
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Marc Clifton wrote: When you start typing a link into Chrome (like, the first letter even!), if it can resolve from your history what that link is, it pre-loads the page behind the scene
I actually find this pretty annoying, but am glad that it can be disabled (Chrome has a setting for it). In fact, I take this into account when I create temporary import pages (for a web CMS)... I have seen coworkers write them so that when you visit the URL, the import is started. However, with this Chrome "feature", it can be inadvertently be kicked off without your knowledge. Because of this, I typically add a form to my imports so that I need to click a button to initiate the import process.
By the way, I too have been writing my own web server... kind of. I made a short Node.js app to serve up some markup. It's not much of a web server and it isn't exactly from scratch, but it's fun nonetheless.
Marc Clifton wrote: the bloated dog slow crap that I discovered is MVC Razor
Razor doesn't seem slow to me, unless you mean the compilation.
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As some of you have already read me about, I am working on a Menu-Ribbon all in one class for WPF!
Just to share the love, and as it is not quite article ready yet, here is the link:
http://github.com/superlloyd/MenuRibbon/[^]
Since last time, I now have a nice README page which show how to get started, better overall polishing, and the control behave "reasonably" well with the keyboard navigation (still working on that, realized I had a problem with split button and the fact that word ribbon doesn't do keyboard navigation).
If you are bored, have a look at the code and comments! 
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