In a move that could have a huge impact on the future of the web, the EcmaScript language standards body has killed the draught version of EcmaScript 4.0.

This draught version was widely recognised as a great improvement for JavaScript and formed the basis of Flex and the current versions of Flash because EcmaScript 4.0 is known as ActionScript in the Adobe world.

Microsoft are once again at the forefront of this as they point blank refused to adopt the proposed standard, ensuring that IE 8 has absolutely no support for it at all.

The result of all this is quite astounding really. Adobe are no longer ahead of the game with ActionScript, instead they now have a proprietary Open Source scripting language. The rest of the industry has a watered down, much less useful and far less innovative version.

Well done Microsoft! once again thinking of your own bank account over the benefits to the user.

I have really started to get my teeth into Flex and I for one am a big supporter of ActionScript. Coming from a JavaScript developers perspective I felt that it was a HUGE improvement and defenitely the way things should have gone.

I think this is just more proof that Microsoft’s new open initiative is all spin and no substance, they sure like to appear more open and part of the Open Source crowd then they go do something stupid like this.

It’s the same old story all over again, if it isn’t done the way Microsoft want it done then it gets stomped on.

You can read Brendan Eich’s announcement here. Feel free to go all slackjawed and rant.

The basic points are that we will get 2 interoperable implementations of EcmaScript 3.1 by early next year.
There will be a collaboration on post ES3.1 and i need to quote this because I can’t bring myself to justifyingly paraphrase it:

2. Collaborate on the next step beyond ES3.1, which will include
syntactic extensions but which will be more modest than ES4 in both
semantic and syntactic innovation.

They actually put it out in black and white that they are going to be less innovative… deliberately.

Apparently Packages, namespaces and early binding are off the table for good, these will never be part of EcmaScript because they have been

deemed unsound for the Web

There will also be some rephrasing of other goals and ideas to keep concensus in the committee including the notion of classes based on ES3 concepts combined with proposed ES3.1 extensions.

I wanted to find out what Douglas Crockford had to say about all this and as usual his blog has a typical crockfordian response. You’ll be wanting the entry titled harmony.

I haven’t been able to find any official comment from Adobe on this yet. I assume they are going to have a few big decisions to make in the next few weeks and months. I for one hope that they don’t water down ActionScript though I’m sure from a business perspective, going it alone with a proprietary solution is exactly what they tried to avoid in the first place.

Hank Williams has a great blog entry on this that sparked me off on the trail to find out more.

Valve are at it again, details for the next big update to Team Fortress 2 are already sneaking out. this time the big man himself gets an update. The Heavy is the next class to be tweaked and you can get some of the details here.

With ove 8 Million downloads Mozilla officially own the Guiness World record for browser downloads in a singe 24 hour period. Firefox 3 is already a great browser, now it’s an official bona fide record breaker.

Dedication oh, oh, dedication oh, oh , dedication, that’s what you need.

If you want to be the best, soar above the rest.

Who-oh Dedication’s what you need

If you want to be a record breaker, yeah.

- from the theme tune that Roy Castle Sang at the end of the show

I got caught out by a very strange issue the other day. I posted a short entry about Bill Gates having a spot of bother with Windows. The entry I posted was copied out of an email I was composing to my brother in-law and this was my mistake. Of course I was using Outlook to compose the email, Outlook in this case is using word to compose the body of the email and add in the fancy rich text effects. What I did not realise was that when you copy and paste from word, you don’t just get the text but all the background XML and styling info as well.

Initially this might not sound too alarming, unfortunately when you paste that into Wordpress, without using the ‘paste from word’ option in the WSYWIG editor provided within Wordpress, the tags and style info becomes active.

The result of the cock-up was that over the weekend I has a blog with the ugliest colour scheme know to man (what you don’t like orange? ;0) All the links were blue, the default styling for most browsers, and IE refused to load the site at all :0(

Thankfully my pal Lummie did a quick search and found out what the problem was while I was trying to figure out how the frack I got all these crappy tags into my site without touching it.

Once the offending article was cleaned up, the universe was returned to it’s previous state and all is well.

There are several plugins available out there to help you clean up if you need to but I advise you either copy into notepad first then copy from there to ensure you don’t get the crud or use the paste from word function in Wordpress.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress, Paste from Word

…In response to complaints… From BT!?

I’m pretty sure that if you look at Broadband forums as well as many sites and blogs on the web, you’ll find many consumers who have complained about Virgin Media’s appalling service and the never ending changes to their ‘traffic shaping’ policy. maybe those complaints aren’t being made in the right way to the right people?

At least someone finally agreed that Virgin’s latest advertising campaign is a total crock of shit. The BBC is carrying a good article outlining the problems and corrections Virgin will have to make. There are a couple of interesting statements from a Virgin Media Spokesperson too.

One comment made me chuckle

“Our traffic management policy helps ensure the majority of customers receive the quality of service they expect from our fibre-optic broadband product by managing demand from the heaviest users at certain times of the day,”

Considering VM cap ALL users when they hit a download limit meaning

“Customers on its L 4Mbps package could download 60 songs and or two TV shows before reaching caps while those on the XL 20Mbps package could download 614 songs or nine TV shows before their speeds would be subject to caps”

I fail to see how anyone using Virgin Media’s Broadband service can be said to receive great value for money. Basically so long as you pay VM your money and don’t do anything at all with the service they are happy. Try using it and somehow you are breaking the rules and causing much upset in the universe so you must be restricted and policed. (using it would mean, emails with photo’s from family members, video’s shared with family members, Windows Updates, Buying Software online, Buying Games online, Playing online games…).

It’s like buying a car from a manufacturer and being told that you can only do 5 miles a day in it or you will be restricted to 1st gear for the next 50 miles then you get another 5 miles with the full 6 gears then… you get the picture.

It’s Complete Bollocks! If you can’t provide the service and are not prepared to invest in the infrastructure to guarantee the speeds and service at all times to all customers then you shouldn’t offer the damn service in the first place.

Let us not dwell on the negative though Virgin will soon be offering a blistering 50MB service (between 1 am and 1.10 am every day with a DL Limit of 5kb no doubt).

Technorati Tags: Virgin Media, Broadband Speeds

There’s a certain satisfaction in knowing that somehow, some place, someday even Bill Gates has hammered his desk in frustration brought on by a healthy dose of Windows. :0)

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/141821.asp

Well I finally have a running PC after a few days of pain and some sticky issues. I was going to take some build progess pictures but time and circumstances were against me and so there aren’t any.

To summarise, my PC failed to do anything useful shortly after plugging a USB device into the back, I then went through an ‘I can’t afford it but I need to upgrade’ moment and bought a full rebuild kit for £280. I was forced to change the mobo as I figured that had blown and it was Socket 939 with DDR ram and an AGP GFX card.

So all the new kit arrives, gets fitted and wired up, all cables inserted in the correct orifices and turn on. At this point I was expecting a nice shiny BIOS post screen, but instead I got the exact same symptoms I had previously.

So unplug all cables except monitor - nothing, unplug al HDD’s - nothing. Damn at this point I figured that the new Jeantech Storm 700W PSU I have is the culprit.

PSU swapped, and plugged in all wired up and…… Nothing :0( at this point I’m crying. Last thing I considered was unplugging the RAM as I expected a beep of some sort to come from the speaker on the mainboard (yup I do have one, I plugged it in myself). So RAM removed turn on and…… BEEEEEEEP!

Crap, bad memory? Plug chip into Slot 1 - and machine starts, Plug another into Slot 2 - machine starts, Slot 3 - OK, Slot 4 - no boot. Remove first 3 chips place the last ‘offending chip into slot 1 - machine boots.

So bad mainboard. At this point I’ve nothing left to do but figure on swapping the mainboard. So I continued with repairing windows so it would boot and as part of my auto rebuild mode I updated the BIOS - bit of a silly thing to do if I’m swapping the mainboard but hey at this point I’m tired, have wiped the wrong drive during partition maintenence (luckily only an extra storage drive) and I’m tired.

So windows spent the night updating it’s patches again and during a reboot I decided to verify the issue with Slot 4 and note the exact symptoms so I can rant at some poor schmuck at the store. So plug chip 4 into slot 4 and….. machine boots 80;

It figures that a Bios update fixed something and it figures i just spent 3 days trying to get a machine running when there was a really simple fix waiting there to be discovered by the intrepid explorer.

So I’m Back up and running again, busy re-activating Photoshop because My hardware changed - wasn’t expecting that. And I have also managed to run 3DMark06 and got a score of 7189. the actual results are here if you are interested in the detail.Technorati Tags: Cheap PC Upgrade

This weekend sees the next round of character updates for TF2. this Time the Pyro gets a small makeover and a tone of neat achievements to get your teeth into. The Pyro’s flame thrower has been slightly modded so it now has an alt fire option that will repel nearby ordnance and opponents when used. the idea behind this is that you set the unlucky victim alight then blast them with a shot of compressed air using the alt fire option thus enabling the nible legged gimp suited freak of a pyro that you are, to escape forthwith ;0)

As with the medic class there are 36 new achievements which will unlock new weapons when you reach the 12, 24 and 36 milestones.

2 New community maps are also included in this update and there’s another freeplay weekend so if you don’t already have TF2 in your game collection, you can download and play for free all weekend. Oh, as if that weren’t enough, theres a new TF2 blog too over at teamfortress.com

The Full details and some nice shiny pics are here, and I’ve included the new meet the sniper video below.

Have fun and maybe I’ll see you on a server, if you get fragged by StaticVenom <TWM> that’s me ;0)

Team Fortress 2 “Meet the Sniper” Trailer (HD)Technorati Tags: TF2, Team Fortress 2, Pyro

Looks like the Firefox download day may have produced a record after all. We’ll know in a week or so once the download logs have been purged and cleaned but the current stats are that over 8 million downloads occurred in the 24 hours allotted, and the count is currently at over 11 million so people are still downloading.

Looks like someone already found a security issue and there are a couple of bugs I’ve noticed and have been informed about. But, as is the mozilla way, we shall have an update for those in a week or so if not sooner :0)

The BBC website has a short article on the day’s success and SpreadFirefox has the current count and distribution map.Technorati Tags: Firefox 3, Download Day, World Record

The Firefox 3 record download attempt seems to be going well there are over 5 million downloads already and there’s still plenty of time left.  The download day finishes at 18:00 BST today so if you havent downloaded yet then get yourself over to SpreadFirefox download it and then you can select the Flaunt it link on the right panel to get yourself a nice custom certificate to brag about it ;0)