van-steenbeek.net

A few days ago, a coworker got the following BSOD while booting:

c000021a Fatal System Error
The Session Manager Initialization system process terminated unexpecedly with a status of 0xc000026c

Known either as error c000021a or as error 0xc000026c (we will call it the latter, since c000021a is another problem when the status code is not the same), this can occur on Windows XP with SP2 installed (I don't think SP3 is affected). A little googling might teach you that a certain update is the culprit: KB925902.

Arme redactie van GeenStijl. Na de kruisigingsact van Paul de Leeuw op Symphonica in Rosso hadden ze natuurlijk alle hoop gevestigd op Christelijk Nederland. Niets is natuurlijk zo smeuig als fundamentalistische christenen die met een waarschuwend vingertje de nationale knuffelhomo terug proberen te fluiten.

De mening van een lid

De laatste maanden is er het nodige aan ophef geweest omtrent de ChristenUnie en "ons" standpunt rondom homoseksualiteit. Een voorbeeld hiervan is het opstappen van het enige fractielid voor de CU uit Wageningen nadat zij een relatie met een vrouw was aangegaan (CU-W, 27-09-07). Dit besluit nam zij nadat ze hierover had beraad met de steunfractie en het lokale bestuur. Een deel gaf aan moeite te hebben met de situatie, waarop zij haar conclusies trok.

There are many reasons to obfuscate JavaScript code, not the least of which is protecting your creation. One should remember though, that obfuscating does nothing more than discouraging users to use your code. Someone who really wants it can easily grab your code anyway, since they should still be able to obtain it for execution in the browser. Anyway, here are some of the techniques I use:

We all have heard the myth / fact that Firefox is a memory hog after extended usage. We also might have heard the reply that Explorer is no better. Both might be true, but part of the problem might be at our side, the web developers.

When someone programs an application, (s)he should be aware of memory management. It's a sort of rule, actually. So why not make that count for web developers too?

Another bit of JavaScript goodness. Gecko-based browsers (and some others) have a beautifull feature called DOMParser. With this function it is trivial to parse a string containing XML and handle it as a DOM object. This is extremely handy in a myriad of cases. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer does not support it. I've been told that older versions of Safari also won't eat it. So that might also be true for older Konqi's.

Not to worry. Both cases have some form of architecture which makes it possible. But we don't want repeating, obfuscating code. And we don't want browser-detects. Here is the deal:

In some webapplications and in more and more websites, there are multiple times where an AJAX call is placed. Since the implementation of XMLHttpRequest is slightly different in Internet Explorer than it is in all it's competitors, this requires multiple lines of code just to create the object. So here's a fix.

Even for die-hard PHP coders, pcntl_fork() can be quite daunting. The trouble is, most PHP users have learnt to code linear, and mostly only for outputting dynamic content, like webpages.

The pcntl-functions (and to some extent the posix-functions) are different: they provide methods to program interactive applications unsuitable to run in a webenviroment like Apache. It's quite possible to program your own webserver in PHP using these methods.

When you did some serious programming in languages like C, pcntl_fork() shouldn't have any secrets for you. It behaves almost identically like fork() does. However, for the novice application programmers amongst us (like I am), pcntl_fork() will appear highly illogical.