Debugging JavaScript With IE

Debugging JavaScript code in Firefox is easy, but what to do with poor old Internet Explorer? Well here’s your answer.  To debug JavaScript in MSIE follow these steps:

1. Install Visual Web Developer Express Edition from Microsoft. It’s free!
2. Set IE to be your default browser.
3. Run Visual Web Developer Express.
4. Create a new empty Website.
5. Start debugging by either pressing the “Play” button, the F5 key or the menu options.
6. Use the browser window that opens up as a result of the debug starting to navigate to the site you wish to debug.

Is that too much to ask? Yes, but it works! You can then debug from within the Visual Web Developer Express application. Enjoy!

Considering The Super Buick

I was researching DXM in combination with THC when I came across a rather intruiging sentance:

Recently, a new product has appeared on the streets containing heroin, scopolamine, dextromethorphan, cocaine, and thiamine. Called “Homicide” or “Super Buick”, it presents extraordinary problems due to its high toxicity.

Super Buick? … I just love the name! Super Buick! But consider the contents? Heroin and coke? OK, people have been doing that one for a long time. Then Scopolamine and dextromethorphan? This one is intruiging. Both have dissociative qualities. However would there be synergy? The problem with the DXM is that you need a good amount of the stuff, especially compared to the scopolamine. The thiamine just seems excessive, but then again so does the entire concept of The Super Buick. How would it be taken? An injection maybe? I’ve not heard of anyone taking coke or heroin as a pill. Also, you couldn’t sniff up enough DXM to do anything at all. Not at once anyway. It seems an IV injection would be the way to go on this one. However, you’d have to be out of your mind to try such a dose. Plain and simple.

Benadryl And Time Wasted

I recently heard that you can get high on Benadryl, and being the kind of nut job that I am, I was bored, had very little money, and so I decided to try it. It’s supposed to be a “delusional drunken state”. I inquired with erowid.org about dosage, and decided to shoot for the 300mg – 400mg range. I started off with a 200mg dose deciding to increment up to 400mg after an hour. I expected (based on user reports) the stuff to start kicking a little after an hour, but it didn’t happen. In fact even an hour after taking a second 200mg dose I still felt nothing. So, being the genius/moron that I am I took a third 200mg dose. This I feel was a big mistake, but try and convince an avid drug abuser of that when he’s frustrated that the drug isn’t working!

About 90 minutes after taking my third 200mg dose it started to kick in. It actually came on pretty fast, and quite soon I was horribly uncomfortable. I felt it most heavily in my head and chest. It felt like waves of panic were washing over me, and I couldn’t sit still to save my life! I tried watching a movie, no way! I tried listening to music. No way in hell! No matter what I did I felt like I was going crazy. I had to pace around my room just to feel in control. So, I decided to take a walk around the neighborhood for a while. The problem with that was that the weather was so hot and muggy, and I already felt extremely warm and sweaty. When I got back home I was drenched in sweat and was twice as uncomfortable as before.

I soaked a washcloth in cold water to use on my head and neck, but I still could not sit still for more than a couple of seconds, because I felt like I was going crazy. I kept pacing around the house trying to relax my mind which was lit up like a Christmas tree. This went on for a couple of hours. I was so jacked up! I kept needing to take forced deep breaths otherwise I would start to feel (once again!) like I was going insane!

It was like a six hour panic attack with slight distortions in the visual field. It kept me up until like 9 AM even though I got started at 8:30 PM. Another strange thing it did was made me retain water. I didn’t urinate for hours even though I was constantly drinking water. Eventually when the peak wore off and I was coming down I needed to urinate, and I went like six times in 30 minutes! The come down was one of the worst rides I’ve ever had. So, jacked up, and anxious. It’s terrible! Just dreadful!

Long story short: FUCK BENADRYL! This is not a good party substance at all. Stay away. You’ve been warned!

AJAX And Sessions

I came across an unusual situation in a PHP based shopping cart where the normal page loads would have different session data than the AJAX callbacks. I came up with a simple solution but I don’t really like it because it seems inherently insecure. But I’ll post it here, and let the world decide.

The shopping cart used Smarty for its templates so what I did is set a Smarty template variable to hold the session ID which will then be used to initialize a JavaScript variable that will be used in AJAX as part of the post data to be used by the server side script to initialize the session.

Code for adding the Smarty template variable.

$_page = array(
  'sid' => session_id(),
  // Add other page variables here.
);
$smarty->assign('page', $_page);
...

The session ID is then assigned to a JavaScript variable in the template file like so.

var SESSION_ID = "{$page.sid}";

Then in the AJAX call the session ID can be included in the request data like this jQuery example.

var post_data = 'sid=' + SESSION_ID;
// Append other post variables as needed...
$.ajax({
  async: true,
  cache: false,
  data: post_data,
  dataType: 'xml',
  success: function(data, status, req) {
    // Process the returned data here.
  },
  type: 'POST',
  url: 'ajax_callback_example.php
});

Then finally on the server side the POSTed session ID to initialize the session before calling session_start().

// Call session_id() with the POSTed session ID.
session_id($_POST['sid']);
// Start the specified session.
session_start();

There you have it. It works. The server side AJAX processing scripts will be able to use the same session data. Thoughts?

Evolution of Intelligence

I have been thinking quite a bit about the evolution of the human race, and our intelligence. Seems to me that our success as a species is due to our intelligence. So, what does that mean for us, and our future as a race?

One day our sun will die and there will be no more fuel for our biological environment to run. In fact, we will be engulfed by the dying star. However, I think it may be possible for all of us to survive this cataclysmic event.

The thing is that our biology cannot survive the death of the sun. Also, it is unlikely that our soft and squishy parts will make it into deep space with any success. So, what does that leave us with? The answer is simple. Our intelligence.

Perhaps artificial intelligence is not something that will be invented, but rather something that we as a race will evolve into. Things that think require no arms and legs or any soft, squishy parts. We need only our minds. And isn’t that the one part of humanity worth keeping, our minds?

Envision a world full of stacked boxes. Each box contains a brain that is connected with every other brain in the universe through some sort of universal wi-fi. We are all one already, so why not make it stick, and let us evolve into something that does not die. Biological systems eventually fail; they die. But Intelligence doesn’t have to.

There must be some way to persist the state of intelligence of a biological organism. I’m aware that intelligence can be the result of a biological system (and yes, that totally freaks me out!), but there must be some way for our brains to persist. What about physical resources? What if we could create an infrastructure to support the persistence of human consciousness? Move our entire being into something artificial. Eventually living solely through artificial means.

Everyone could live forever. There would be no end to life, but what about enjoyment? We would have to be able to mimic a dopamine/serotonine response so that the artificial intelligence could be “happy”.

That would create a strange model for addiction wouldn’t it? In that system an addicted member of society would be viewed as broken and would probably just be removed from the network. Unplugged. Disconnected.
…

Apollo 11

Did we land on the moon in 1969? That is a question of hot debate. There has been a lot of conspiracy theory surrounding the issue, as well as legitimate scientific debate. I have to say that I do not know for sure. I’m not on the side of the conspiracy theorists nor the others. I do however have some thoughts on the matter which I will share with you now.

JFK said we will get to the moon by 1970 despite having any supporting technology to actually do it, and then we finally made it one year before JFK’s “deadline”. How is it that the space race could make leaps in the 60′s then take another 35 years to get a robot to Mars? That doesn’t make sense to me. I’m thinking that if we had the technology to put man on the moon in 1969 then we would have gotten a robot on Mars a whole lot sooner.

Why did the space race die? It seems impossible that our supposed trip to the moon revealed no scientific discovery whatsoever. How is it that we landed on the moon 40 years ago, but didn’t find anything there? Why haven ‘t we gone back since the early 70′s? Probably because we can’t even get there in the first place. It just seems so unlikely that we would find our way to a celestial body, but find nothing there to study.

Could the footage of the lunar walks be faked? Quite probably. For one thing how in the hell did they even get a camera on the moon, in the perfect spot to view their landing and footsteps?

I have to say that if the lunar landing was faked, which I’m leaning towards, my heart would be broken. I am fascinated by our universe, and I hope that mankind experiences the space outside of our planet. So, if the lunar landing was faked, then that would truly suck for mankind.

oDesk Sucks

I have been a Web applications developer for five years. I’ve worked on enormous projects, small projects and everything in between for the likes of NBC, and MTV as well as small companies and freelance work. Anyone familiar with this sort of work knows quite well that the earnings can be quite significant, and rewarding.

I recently made a switch from corporate cube farms to solely doing freelance work. I found a lot of jobs through odesk.com, however I’ve only made a small fraction of what I would be earning with corporate gigs.

The problem is that buyers on odesk are people that have no money and are just getting started with their business. They have a totally ridiculous idea of what Web developers are worth, and don’t have any appreciation for the complexity of the work involved to get their Web presence online and working according to their own requirements.

Budgets for jobs on odesk are typically beneath $300. And these buyers expect you to work for one or more weeks for that price, and they typically only give you a small amount of detail for what their needs are when they hire you; piling on the requirements after you already agreed to the cheapest work you’ve ever done.

The final straw for me was when I was burned by this dickhead redneck hick named Jack Carrier from some trailer park in North Carolina. He hired me to do what he presented as a very simple job for some bumb ass rate, and then after I already started the job for the agreed upon price he started adding more and more requirements.

This is the best part: He told me to keep track of my time and he would compensate me. My posted hourly rate on odesk was $30. Then when it came time to pay up he laughed at me, and refused to pay anymore than the original price, even though a great deal amount of additional work had been performed.

Any programmer out there reading this that is looking to make a respectable earning should be well advised to avoid the headache of odesk.

DXM, Reflections on the Fourth Plateau

I have taken DXM pretty far before, and even experienced dissociative sedation. However yesterday I took it further than ever before and the experience was one for the record books, and I would like to share that with the world.

The kind of ride you will have on DXM is completely dependent upon two factors: body weight, and dose. Basically you need x mg per kg of body weight to achieve one of four distinct plateaus. Erowid is a great source on stuff like that if you’re interested. I am a big man standing at 6 foot 6 inches tall, and weighing in at about 300 pounds. Normally I don’t exceed a second plateau dose of 600mg. Sometimes I’ll push it and do a second 600mg dose some time later if the mood should strike me but generally speaking I cut it at one dose. Yesterday I decided to push it further than ever before. 2400mg were consumed over some period of time. I can’t really remember.

So this is what happened. After the fourth 600mg dose went down I didn’t really feel any different than before but after an hour or so I began to think very differently. In fact the experience was not one of my body at all but rather entirely in my brain. In fact, I don’t think I had any physical awareness at all! That’s probably what they mean by “dissociative anesthetic”. Mind and body completely separate; ready for surgery! At first I just thought that I was completely losing my mind. I mean I was convinced that I was utterly insane. And time stood completely still. I thought that all time and space froze and the current “moment” was lasting an eternity.

About two hours after dosing. Things started to get a little confusing. To say the least! I started to feel like I was “going away” and I thought that maybe I could just sleep it off. No such luck! You try and sleep after taking 2400mg of DXM! I set to lay down on my bedroom floor. For some reason bed didn’t seem appropriate.

All I can say is that I thought that the universe was undergoing fundamental shifts, and that reality was changing. That the entire universe was changing and I was now going to be living on a different planet, with different people with a completely different life. I encountered people that I recognized from my previous life but they were in a completely new context. I could actually sense the changes in the universe’s fabric of space-time. I can’t remember what we talked about. I remember feeling like I was in outer space though and I could look “down” at planet Earth. I felt no fear, but incredibly startled.

At a couple of moments during all of this I came out of it briefly. Like once I got up to go to the bathroom, and at that moment I remember feeling like I had my “old” life back, but I was just insane and that I had put my brain into a state of permanent psychosis, and that’s when I felt afraid. But then I lied down again and went back into outer space for a while, and the fear subsided.

This went on for about two hours. The longest two hours imaginable. But when I finally came out of it to a point where I felt like I was back in my “old” life permanently I was greatly relieved, and knew that I only had to lie around and wait for the horrible shit to wear off. When I finally got to sleep around 5 AM I slept for about 15 hours solid, and never better.

The fourth plateau is not an experience to be engaged in without being mentally prepared for doing so. I’m not sure if I would recommend it to anyone. It’s one of those things that’s just so bizarre words cannot explain. No words would ever do it justice. The fascinating part for me is that I was completely inside of my head. No stimulation from my physical senses got through save for the occasional voices from the television but they didn’t amount to much inside my new world. The entire world was shut out, and my brain created a reality of its own invention. I wish I could have learned something profound, or met god or something like that, but frankly I just can’t remember any details that well. Maybe I did meet god, but I just don’t recall?

My advice to you is to proceed with caution down the path to the fourth plateau.

Web Application Debugging Technique

I’ve just thought of a cool Web application debugging technique that allows me to see the value of something on the server side conveniently on the client side. Wherever I want to see the value of a variable in my server side script I can print a line of javascript that alert()s  the value of the variable. Like so (PHP example):

    <?php print '<script type="text/javascript">alert("'
    . $variable_to_output
. '");</script>' ?>

I like this technique because I don't have to print the value to the page itself. Nifty I think. Surprised I never thought of it before.

Finding Jesus in 12 Easy Steps

I have the pleasure of being a hardcore psychonaut, and I wouldn’t really want life any other way. However I’ve had the great misfortune of being exposed to the subculture of recoveryism, and 12 step programs because of external pressures. I never wanted any of that but my family does and so do health professionals.

I am however of the opinion that a scientific, medical problem like addiction requires a scientific approach to healing. There is NOTHING scientific about prescribing Jesus for addiction and the so called “health care professionals” that work in substance abuse treatment are doing what is perhaps the greatest disservice to humanity by pushing this whole 12 step nonesense. Would the AMA be satisfied for prescribing Jesus in 12 steps for colon cancer or heart disease? Drug and alcohol counselors are nothing but modern day faith healers. It’s no wonder addicts relapse over and over again. There are no answers for them!

I was recently talking to my primary care doctor about getting off of dextromethorphan and she said, more or less, that unless I’m willing to “let go and let god” then she has no answers. WTF is that about? This whole subculture of recoveryism is the saddest, most pathetic example of humanity I’ve ever encountered outside of a church, and it needs to be stopped now!

Joomla and Seyret … no Just Seyret

Seyret is quite possibly the best argument against outsourcing programming jobs to India. I can’t think of a worse product on any market. The author of Seyret (who’s name is Mustafa something) should be publically humiliated for selling this piece of shit even when he versions it at 0.2.x. The thing is so far from stable and the code is impossible to read. Why the hell hasn’t Mustafa ever heard of CamelCase, underscores, and white space?

It just goes to show that if you can put up a good enough looking website you could sell coal as diamonds. But you can’t polish a terd, and not amount of magic fairy pixey dust could salvage anything more than a great headache from something as crappy and as embarrassing as Seyret for Joomla.

As for you Mustafa whoever the hell…just because you translated your site into English doesn’t give you the right to sell garbage to the Western World. If you want to write shit software go ahead, just keep it in Calcutta where it belongs!