There have been no posts for a while now and none of the updates to AJAXed WordPress or my other plugins have been pushed out. There is a lot of stuff (of the good kind) that is going on in my life currently, so I’ve put everything else on the back burner.
Thank you for your understanding.
P.S. Don’t you hate posts like this? Me too!
I wanted to see how small you could make a fully functional AJAX script that worked cross-browser and degraded gracefully, so I went through an old custom AJAX script and made it as small as I possibly could. In the resulting AJAX scripts, the post version is 410 characters and the GET version is only 359 characters long. The scripts are fully functional and accept the following parameters: URL, DATA (in string form), and ELEMENT (to update).
The scripts could be a little smaller, but it would really kill readability.
“Get” AJAX Script
function a(l,d,u){try{r = new XMLHttpRequest();}catch(e){try {r = new ActiveXObject('Msxml2.XMLHTTP');}catch(e){r = new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP');}}if(r){r.onreadystatechange = function() {if (r.readyState == 4 && r.status == 200){document.getElementById(u).innerHTML = r.responseText;}}r.open('GET', l+'?'+d, true);r.send(d);}}
“Post” AJAX Script
function b(l,d,u){try{r = new XMLHttpRequest();} catch(e){try {r = new ActiveXObject('Msxml2.XMLHTTP');} catch(e){r = new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP');}}if(r){r.onreadystatechange = function() {if (r.readyState == 4 && r.status == 200){document.getElementById(u).innerHTML=r.responseText;}}r.open('POST', l, true);r.setRequestHeader('Content-type', 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded');r.send(d);}}
Combined AJAX Script
This combined script also accepts a fourth parameter ‘p’ that should evaluate true if the data is to be sent by post.
function a(l,d,u,p){try{r = new XMLHttpRequest();}catch(e){try {r = new ActiveXObject('Msxml2.XMLHTTP');}catch(e){r = new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP');}}if(r){r.onreadystatechange = function() {if (r.readyState == 4 && r.status == 200){document.getElementById(u).innerHTML = r.responseText;}}if(p){r.open('POST', l, true);r.setRequestHeader('Content-type', 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded');}else{r.open('GET', l+'?'+d, true);}}}
Demo: (Sorry but you will have to go to the full page so the JavaScript is loaded.)
The best thing to come out of YouTube since the Kiwi: the Gummy bear song.
Oder, ich bin ein gummi Bär; ich bin ein gummi Bär.
All right, all right. Back to your regularly scheduled broadcasting.
Equality, the goal not the signpost.
The United States of America has a long history of inequality, from its treatment of Native Americans to women’s rights, it has tended to favor one group over others, but it has attempted to repair the damage it caused. However, even though America is the “land of opportunity,” its formerly oppressed peoples are not equal, but what does it mean to be equal? Is equality the government saying you must have the same number of employees from each arbitrarily defined “race?” Does equality mean that people should be forced to be equal? In examining this issue, one must define equality itself.
There are three forms of equality: equality of outcome, of opportunity, and of perception. Equality of perception is the most basic: it dictates that for people to be equal, each person should be perceived as being of equal worth.
Modern Physics for the Layman: the 10 Dimensions.
This video that demonstrates the causes and consequences of the theory of 10 dimensions was released several years ago. However, it is still the best resource on the web for imagining the higher dimensions.
Imagining the Tenth Dimension
David Hume on Morality
David Hume, an 18th century philosopher, stated that morality is based on sentiments rather than reason. He concluded this after he developed his “theory” of knowledge which stated that everything we could know was observable by the senses — he was a naturalistic philosopher. He then looked at situations in which he thought that there was an obvious “wrong” and he tried to identify the “matter of fact” vice in the situation. He immediately found that he could not find the vice within the facts of the situations.
For example, let us examine a boy who steals a toy at a store. A matter of fact about this situation is that a young human male has taken an item from a store. This is what happened. The senses and reason tell us a few other things too: the toy was a plastic squirt gun; the boy used his hands to take the toy; it took only a second for the boy to do this.
