Month: November 2006
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Disqualifications & Coverage
I am glad to see that there is an extensive article about the double disqualification of Amiel Tenenbaum and his opponent in Wizards’s coverage of Worlds 2006. I just had the discussion with another judge on #mtgjudge, whether this should be covered and how extensive. I think covering DQs has several advantages: It generates interest in the game. People…
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Gaia shut down by Google
Clint: Did you actually read the letter sent by Google? I actually consider this to be a perfect example of “don’t be evil.” There are no threats in that letter, Michael Jones, the writer, is just explaining why Gaia hurts Google and in what way he think the Gaia project is violating Google’s Terms of Service.…
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Java: Iterators are not Iterable
This is something I stumbled across multiple times now in Java: Iterators are not Iterable. Java 1.5 introduced the foreach statement, which allows easy iteration over collections like this: for (MyClass item: myCollection) { doStuffWithItem(item); } For this to work class MyClass must implement the Iterable interface. This interface defines just one method that returns an Iterator: Iterator<T> iterator(); This works fine in many cases.…
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JavaScript Includes Revisited
I’ve given in in the JavaScript and Modules matter. I’m doing now what all the cool kids are doing: Using XMLHttpRequest synchronously to load external JavaScript files. This has the advantage that it works synchronously, a very important thing for includes. Therefore I don’t need callback and moduleLoadedhackery anymore. Also I have sensible error checking, i.e. I can notice…
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Porting JavaScript to Internet Explorer
While porting a small AJAX application I wrote to Internet Explorer, I encountered a few problems: IE doesn’t like <script> tags without a matching closing tag. This is especially a problem if you use the src attribute and try to use an XHTML-like closing tag like this: <script src=”…”/> In this case IE doesn’t draw anything at all, since…
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Apache, cgi-bins, and the Authorization header
I had a problem: Server A runs a web service, which requires users to authenticate using the standard HTTP authentication mechanism. Server B should have web pages that use AJAX to query A’s web services. Server B’s web pages also require authentication, using the same scheme, backend and database as server A. There are two problems:…
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Loading Modules in JavaScript
One of the weaknesses of the JavaScript language is that it does not have the concept of “importing” or “including” other source files or modules. In client-side JavaScript as used in web browsers you have to include all JavaScript files you intend to use in the main HTML file like this: <html> <head> <title>…</title> <script…
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PTQ Geneva in Berlin
Yesterday the Pro Tour Qualifier Geneva in Berlin was held at FUNtainment. We had 110 players, a rather high turnout, among them many players from Poland. It’s always nice to have these guys around. One thing I noted, though, was that I stepped in multiple times when a player and a spectator were speaking in Polish. When players…
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PyUnit and Decorators
One of the shortcomings of the Python standard library is in my opinion that PyUnit doesn’t use decorators (as later versions of JUnit and NUnit do). Therefore I have written a sample implementation that adds decorator support. (unittest.py; diff to Python 2.5’s unittest.py) To do: Warn when old-style and new-style tests are mixed. Throw an exception when multiple setup or teardown methods exist. Ability…