Monday, 12th January 2009
instanceof considered harmful (or how to write a robust isArray. JavaScript’s instanceof operator breaks when dealing with objects that may have been created in a different document or frame, since constructors are unique to each frame. Instead, you can check for arrays using the default Object.toString method which the JS spec guarantees will return [object Array].
Powering a Google search. I thought the recent estimate of each Google search producing 7g of CO2 was a little high—Google have responded with a claim that the amount is 0.2g instead.
Leo Hickman on the carbon cost of Googling. Alex Wissner-Gross (who published the 7g/search figures) appears to be including Google’s extra capacity, so total CO2 output divided by number of searches. Google’s 0.2g/search estimate includes just the energy used by the servers processing your query.
A Snapshot of The Yahoo! Photos Beta (from 2006). Scott Schiller shares an internal retrospective on the Yahoo! Photos interface from 2006, which was years ahead of its time (they started building it before the term Ajax had even been coined). The material on memory management and event delegation is particularly interesting.
“By installing Java, you will be able to experience the power of Java”. Wow, that’s some bad copy.