It's time for a political entry again! Recently I have been involved in some strong discussions on a very good Dutch muslim weblog called wijblijvenhier.nl. A web address that would translate into English as something like 'we're going to stay'. And yes, this is the reality some people can't seem to accept. Islamic people are all over Europe and they aren't going to leave unless one day some 4th Reich emerges that will brutally eliminate anyone with a religion or beliefs that don't suit the government.

Let's assume (and hope) the above scenario will never actually become a reality and take a look at what's currently going on in the Netherlands, and probably in many other European countries. I fear we have an enormously long road ahead. Yet I hope we'll be able to work things out in order to create an environment in which people with different cultures and religions can live together in peace without the hatred, fear and continuous bickering that's plagueing society at this very moment.

First let's take a look at what different 'parties' are currently part of the ongoing debate on Islam in Western Europe.

Today I got a mail from Dreamhost telling me they had to temporarily shut down this website because it was eating up way too much CPU time. I wondered why that could be because it had been running fine for months already and I hadn't made any recent changes that could result in an unusual CPU load. A quick tail -f on my http access log told me what was causing it.

Some pathetic moron with a botnet was totally HAMMERING my site with POST requests. As a matter of fact, at the moment I'm writing this post, he still is. This particular asshole was quite easy to detect and stop because I found he's flooding my site with POST requests on regular PHP pages. Of course those aren't supposed to be POSTed to at all which is why I could quickly bring my CPU usage back to an acceptable level by adding the following to all relevant PHP files:

if($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == 'POST'){
  die();
}

Note that I wish this whole die(); thing could be implemented literally this time. What a bloody moron. What a waste of time and resources. This whole thing made me wonder where this travesty that comment spamming is will end. This particular spammer already caused my site to be taken down. This time there was an easy way to get rid of most of the load. But what if there isn't anymore?

I feel really restless... alone. I just felt like sending you a message to let you know I miss you... x

Imagine receiving the above SMS message. Out of the blue. Just like that. From a number you've never seen before. A person who never contacted you before. You'd probably wonder what the hell it's all about. If you're in a relationship you'll probably want to get rid of it as soon as you can before your SO starts getting the wrong idea. You might even decide to reply to the message in order to find out who this person is and whether the message really was meant to be received by you. Not knowing you're just about to open a door to hell, you send a reply asking what that message was all about. After that, the horror begins...

Yesterday my girlfriend actually received a message similar to the one I used as an example. Fortunately she's clever enough to not send a reply. In fact she got herself added to a block-list by her mobile provider immediately. No harm done, hopefully. A quick survey on the internet however told me a lot of people do fall for this trick. Some people are even a tad less smart and actually subscribe to 'services' such as the one my girlfriend got SMS spammed by. That's when the real proverbial shit hits the fan.

This article is about Prototype.js it's Ajax.Updater and the onComplete property. We all know we can use something like oncomplete:someFunction to happily execute a function someFunction() defined somewhere in our Javascript code. But what if someFunction() likes to receive some arguments? onComplete.someOtherFunction(arg1, arg2) isn't going to make us happy as we're about to see. But dear browser... I really, REALLY need to be able to throw some arguments at the functions I call after the Ajax.Updater has finished loading! Anonymous functions to the rescue! In this article I'll explain what I learned about those recently and how they helped me solve the above problem. The article might or might not be usable for you. I'm not only writing it to push some fresh content onto my weblog but most importantly I'm writing it in order to consolidate my knowledge. Wanna join me? Read on...

In the past six months I've been digging deeper and deeper into Javascript and particularly Prototype.js. While on one hand a library such as Prototype.js is really great, it might sometimes obscure things a bit, resulting in a developer being able to use it but not fully understand all aspects of advanced Javascript programming. One thing I completely failed to understand was why using anything besides a reference to a function in onComplete on Prototype.js' Ajax.Updater failed so miserably. Let's take a look at the original problem first.

A lot has already been written by various influential authors in the field of web development when it comes to the importance of accessibility and degradability in the age of Web 2.0 and AJAX. After reading this entry on Roger Johansson's weblog and joining the discussion that followed I figured it would be nice to jot down my personal thoughts on these matters in a posting on my own blog.

I consider myself to be a modern, standards aware web developer who loves clean code and cross-browser web development like any other serious web developer. However, I feel that the accessibility card is sometimes played too often, and too heavily. So, Should a website / web application be 100% accessible and 100% functional without Javascript being enabled? My answer would be: "It depends.".