“I think the presidency ought to be held at a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman.” - Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

Romney took special exception to a question about global warming, posed by a snowman in one of the video questions. “I don’t know that it makes sense to have people running for president answering questions posed from snowmen.” - Washington Post.

It probably makes perfect sense to take vote and campaign contribution from a snowman, right?

I spent last 2 hours debugging a page that loads orders from an XML stream and displays them on screen in a DOJO Content Pane widget. Page works (worked) perfectly fine but was broken in Internet Explorer. For anyone who has had the pleasure of debugging:
“DEBUG: Error running scripts from content:Expected identifier, string or number“, here is something that might help -make sure your strings / string object propertiesare really strings in Internet Explorer. As an example of a broken piece of code, see this:

 var orderTab = dojo.widget.createWidget( "dojo:ContentPane",

 {

 class:'tabContainer',

 "closable": true,

 "label": "Order # " + intStoreOrderId,

 "href": "index.popup.php"

 }

 );

This can easily be fixed, simply by ensuring that class property isreferred as string “class”. Here is the version that works (both, Firefox and Internet Explorer).

 var orderTab = dojo.widget.createWidget( "dojo:ContentPane",

 {

 "class":'tabContainer',

 "closable": true,

 "label": "Order # " + intStoreOrderId,

 "href": "index.popup.php"

 }

 );

Between, above code works unaltered in Firefox. Not having good JavaScript debugger in Internet Explorer make it all the more difficult to debug these nasty bugs.

The Great Wall of China
The Great Wall is the world’s longest human-made structure, stretching over approximately 6,400 km from Shanhai Pass in the east to Lop Nur in the west of China, along an arc that roughly delineates the southern edge of Inner Mongolia. It is also the largest human-made structure ever built in terms of surface area and mass.

The statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro
Christ the Redeemer is a statue of Jesus Christ in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The statue stands 32 meters tall, weighs 700 tons and is located at the peak of the 700-meter Corcovado mountain in the Tijuca Forest National Park, overlooking the city.

The Incan ruins of Machu Picchu
Machu Picchu, a pre-Columbian city created by the Inca, is located above the Urubamba Valley in Peru, about 70 km northwest of Cusco. Forgotten for centuries by the outside world, although not by locals, it was brought back to international attention by archaeologist Hiram Bingham in 1911, who made the first scientific confirmation of the site and wrote a best-selling work about it.

The ancient Mayan city of Chichen Itza in Mexico
Chichen Itza is a large pre-Columbian archaeological site built by the Maya civilization, located in the northern center of the Yucatan Peninsula, present-day Mexico.

The pink ruins of Petra in Jordan
Petra is an archaeological site in Jordan, lying in a basin among the mountains that form the eastern flank of Arabah (Wadi Araba), the large valley running from the Dead Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba. It is famous for having many stone structures carved into the rock. The long-hidden site was revealed to the Western world by Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt in 1812.

The Coliseum in Rome
The Coliseum, originally the Flavian Amphitheater, is a giant amphitheater in the center of the city of Rome, Italy. Originally capable of seating around 50,000 spectators, it was used for gladiatorial contests and public spectacles. The amphitheater, the largest ever built in the Roman Empire, was completed in 80 A.D. under Titus, with further modifications being made during Domitian’s reign.

The Taj Mahal mausoleum
The Taj Mahal is a mausoleum located in Agra, India. The Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan commissioned it as a mausoleum for his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal. Construction began in 1632 and was completed in approximately 1648.

I guess, if you buy “a picture is worth thousand words”, these are 4 thousand words for your reading pleasure. Is this a bug? If it is, it should be rather straightforward to fix. Why don’t you fix it, Mr. Developer?

A few weeks ago, I bought this Asus Laptop from Newegg.com. For folks who like to know configuration, it is a ASUS F3 Series F3JP-AP035C-A NoteBook Intel Core 2 Duo T7200(2.00GHz) 15.4″ Wide XGA 1GB DDR2 667 120GB 5400rpm DVD Super Multi ATI Mobility Radeon X1700 - Retail. I also bought 1 GB of Corsair memory and upgraded this baby to its maximum capacity of 2GB RAM. It comes pre-loaded with Windows Vista. There are far too many posts in the blogosphere about how “great” and “secure”Windows Vista really is, so I will just put my 2 cents - it isn’t.

Microsoft Windows Vistaprovides not one iota of productivity, speed, security or anything else that a next generation operating system ought to provide - a whole lotta nothing is what it is.Apart from eye-candy, which some users might appreciate,I did not see anything that would improve my computing experience.

I wish my experience was different; I expect a lot more from Microsoft.

Making an Operating System secure doesn’t mean you have to make it difficult to use - I am failing to understand how User Account Control changes anything whatsoever from the previous paradigm of all users being Administrators? Secondly, why should UAC ask if I wanted to launch an application or operating system function? Didn’t I just launched it - using the keyboard and mouse that was attached to the PC; not remotely, mind you or by using some internal function call (think, source of event)? I am sure there is a reason for it, but at the end of the day, even if the user said launch the application, if the application code itself is not secure, it will be exploited.

Anyway, I have given up on Windows Vista. I am now a OpenSuse 10.2 user :-). Installation was a breeze, no hardware incompatibilities; sound, wireless lan, display etc. all worked from the ground up!