Another quality LOLCAT. This image has been re-captioned a few times but this is my favorite version.

Thanks to icanhascheezburger.com for the image - here’s the source.

True, the economy is not hot - but why would a company with $7.22 billion in revenue want or need to by acquired by another? Is it the stock price?

I confess I may not understand the entire context of why Jerry Yang made his statement and Yahoo!’s financial situation. But despite Yahoo!’s issues or problems, I wanted to express the fact that I don’t want Yahoo! to go anywhere or get acquired by anyone.

Yahoo! offers a unique, valuable set of services to the Web that I would hate to see be changed or modified if Yahoo! was acquired. Here are 4 services that Yahoo! offers that make it a cool company in my book:

Flickr

Flickr is a site everyone has heard of, and for good reason: it makes a strong case for being the best photo site on the Web. It is a fun site to browse and I am occasionally surprised by the quality of pictures to be found there. According to Wikipedia,

“Flickr is an image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community platform. It was one of the earliest Web 2.0 applications. In addition to being a popular Web site for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. Its popularity has been fueled by its organization tools, which allow photos to be tagged and browsed by folksonomic means. As of November 2008, it claims to host more than 3 billion images.”

Delicious

Delicious is another site everyone has heard about. Delicious was the first social bookmarking company I heard about - also my favorite site that offers the service. I am a latecomer to Delicious but I am already enjoying its browser plug-ins and other features. In fact, next time I redesign my blog I plan on tight integration with Delicious and its API. Here is Wikipedia on Delicious:

“Delicious (formerly del.icio.us, pronounced “delicious”) is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. It has more than five million users and 150 million bookmarked URLs. It is headquartered in Santa Clara, California.”

Pipes

Pipes is great and its concept is brilliant. As explained in pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/:

“Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.”

Basically, it lets you create custom syndication feeds from filters and other criteria from around the Internet.

As a developer, one of things I have noticed from Pipes is the amazing technical execution in its UI. When you are using the Pipes interface, that’s not Flash you are using - its JavaScript. Incredibly cool. Which brings me to the next thing I like a about Yahoo!:

YUI and Developer Resources

YUI is the one the earliest JavaScript frameworks I remember which gained traction. It also seems to be one of the more in depth. I highly encourage anyone interested in JavaScript to look at YUI - it is one of the “big players” in world of JavaScript frameworks.

YUI has been good to JavaScript - and Yahoo! gives additional love to developers with its awesome developer center. And as a JavaScript developer, I have found the YUI Theater to be considerably awesome. It features lectures from some interesting names in JavaScript development including Nicholas Zakas, Peter-Paul Koch, and Douglas Crockford - who is also known as the “the man” when it comes to JavaScript.

So Yahoo!, I hope you make it. You offer many unique and cool things to Web. Please, make it happen…

While doing some development work recently and running Opera 9.62 on Ubuntu 8.10, I noticed the Opera’s handling of RSS (and Atom too, I would guess…) has been vastly improved. Not only is the new formating of RSS a vast improvement of Opera’s generic display of the feed in a string, it is also a nifty feature itself, offering an excerpt of the feed item, as well as pictures if they are available. Check it out:

for (var i=0; i<5; i++) {
	//Do something five times
}

The first line of the for-loop is called the header, and the header in this example has three parts:

1. The “initializer” or “initial expression” - “var i=0″. In the first part of this loop we initialize a variable for the loop for counting, simply setting “i” to the integer value of 0.
2. The “expression” or “condition” - “i<5". The code in the body of the loop will execute as long as this expression evaluates to true - in this example, this statement evaluates to true as long as "i" is less then 5.
3. The “iterator” or “increment expression - “i++”. This statement is evaluated after the “body” of the loop is executed. In this example it increases “i” by 1.

98% of for-loops (unless maybe if you are iterating over an object’s members - but that’s a different blogpost) look like this in JavaScript. But they don’t need too.

Here are some ways you can add some spice and variety to your for-loops in JavaScript.

Declare Your Initializer Before The Loop

The initializer does not need to be in the header of the loop - perhaps your initializer needs to be referenced beyond the scope of the loop. If so, your loop will still act the way you would expect:

var j=0
for (; j<5; j++) {
	//Do something five times
}

Drop The Expression

You can drop the expression parameter in the header, too. The loop still needs to check against a condition, however, otherwise the code will get stuck in an infinite loop. The condition can be added to the body of the loop:

for (var i=0;; i++) {
	if (i<5) {
		//Do something five times
	} else {
		break;
	}
}

Forget the Iterator

And yes, the iterator may also be excluded from the header of the loop:

for (var i=0; i<5;) {
	//Do something five times  
	i++;
}

Remember to add to the initializer variable - or the code will be stuck in an infinite loop.

Drop Them All

You may also drop any combination for the header statements – and you can also drop them all:

var m=0;
for (;;) {
	if (m<5) {
		//Do something five times  
	} else {
		break;
	}
	m++;
}

The Last Word

These techniques allow for-loops to be utilized in ways sometimes not commonly considered by developers and programmers. Although they can be used to impress your friends coworkers, they can also unneeded complexity to your code. I always try use all three expressions in the headers of my for-loops when possible and only deviate when the solution to the problem I am working on requires it.

An awesome LOLCAT worthy of everyone’s enjoyment. Here’s the source.

Thanks to icanhascheezburger.com for the image.

Three true-type fonts are currently available for use in typeface.js on the project’s Web site - but anyone has the ability to upload and convert other fonts for use, giving designers and developers incredible flexibility.

Typeface.js is one of the more creative (read: smart) uses of browser-based drawing (canvas tag, SVG, VML) I’ve seen in a while. Hats off to its creator, David Chester.

The Future of Web Interfaces

Typeface.js and similar techniques utilizing browser-based drawing excite me because it implies an upcoming, future evolution of how Web interfaces are constructed. I think the growth of browser-based drawing technologies in the browser will be as explosive and revolutionary as Ajax after the term was first made popular by Jesse James Garrett. I really think it will be that big.

The capabilities of what can be done with browser-based drawing techniques in the browser are amazing. I also believe increased use of browser-based drawing will also accelerate DHTML as a replacement for Flash.

It is a good time to learn how browser-based drawing - it may the next revolutionary technique for creating interfaces on the Web. We just need someone to give a cool buzzword.

In my commitment to bring my readers the best of LOLCATS, I present Monorail Cat. Monorail Cat is an awesome LOLCAT - a classic, in fact. I found Monorail Cat at icanhazcheeseburger.com (which is also the source of the image), but it is possible its origins predate its appearance there.

Kudos to icanhazcheezburger.com for the image!

Animals are significant in Chinese martial arts. Throughout its history, many styles of Kung Fu found inspiration in the animals around China. For example, there actually is a Monkey style of Kung Fu - and many of its moves really do get inspiration from how monkeys move.

I am a student of a lineage in the Praying Mantis style of Kung Fu. Getting inspiration from a praying mantis for a martial art is not random: an early figure in the lineage was inspired to create the style after watching a praying mantis fight off a bird many times its size.

So naturally, I probably think about the insect more often than most people. They are fierce insects and hungry predators. Here is a video of a praying mantis eating a cat; you see the cat’s paw enter from the left…

Okay, we don’t really know how it turned out, but my money is the praying mantis. The video actually is a good example of the demeanor and bravery the insect is known for.

Here’s another video of a praying mantis eating a mouse. Be warned before you click, however - that video isn’t as cute as the one posted above. And don’t click through if you like mice.

I enjoy LOLCATS often. In the same way my exposure to many wines has made me appreciate intricate points of detail on what constitutes a quality wine, I also feel comfortable with my opinions on LOLCATS. And just like opinions on wine, opinions on LOLCATS are entirely subjective and probably shouldn’t mean squat to your own opinions on the subject.

However … here’s my beef with many of the LOLCATS out there: as the meme has grown in popularity and exposure, the focus on those things that made LOLCATS great in the first place sometimes get muddled. The stuff that makes LOLCATS great can’t really be explained - it only be experienced - but the best description I can come up with is “LOL-ness”. More and more LOLCATS are focusing on “cute” - which is okay sometimes, but it’s not what made LOLCATs great in the first place.

So I’ve decided that as I find great LOLCATs scattered across the internet I’ll share them here. And in my own subjective opinion, they will be great LOLCATS. I hope you enjoy them too.

I see merits in both points of view, but I think a blog without comments is just that – a blog without comments. I am not against comments for my own site - its just that I’m not into them enough to add them just yet. Once I have or make time to manage them, I will. But until then, ryanpeterson.net is just a blog without comments.

Yet, if are one of those veteran bloggers and you disagree or think I am really missing out by not having comments, feel free to let me know at @ryanpeterson on Twitter or email - my email is myfirstname AT myfirstnamemylastname DOT net. And yes, I realize the irony that if comments where enabled it would be very easy to shoot me your opinion on the issue.