Day 57

So apparently driving for 24 hours straight can get you sick. I got back from my vacation to Florida, where I visited Panama City Beach (Amazing!), and Miami for the Ultra Music Festival, and the drive back was a grand total of about 1,400 miles and 24 hours of driving. Since we wanted to get back on Monday at a decent time, we drove straight through the night with scattered chunks of restless sleep as me and Tomato switched off. 5 monster energy drinks and a bunch of Oreos later I was home.

Unfortunately I must have caught something in Florida, and the lack of sleep mixed with a lack of nutrition and the overall unsanitary environment which is my car, my immune system was crashed.

Tuesday I felt under the weather, but was still able to get a lot of reading done. Colin, I finished the Java Script book, which was excellent by the way, and I can get it to you tomorrow. If you don't mind, I might want to keep it for reference though because I am going to do my 8th Light blog post on turning a Classical Object Oriented/Class driven batch of code into the true Prototypal nature which is Java Script.

Wednesday I was in bed for nearly the whole day, my body completely stripped of energy and trying to over come whatever it was I had/have. A soar throat, relentless coughing, wavering headaches, and a complete lack of energy left me almost completely worthless. I did still manage to mess around with getting some basic JavaScript and HTML interaction going. I was pleased to find out that it is actually exceedingly easy, but that was after I angrily grouched about trying to find out why certain things weren't working only to find out that there was a typo in the book! A simple little mistake, very illusive and sneaky. The book was defining a literal with one attribute and one function like so:

var myObject = {
        value: 0;
        increment: function (inc) {
                this.value += typeof inc === 'number' ? inc : 1;
        }
};

myObject.increment();
document.writeln(myObject.value); // 1

Can you spot it? The actual code chunk was a little bit larger, but this is where the error lies.

Having no real JScript experience, I was completely baffled why my very first test program (after some other simpler stuff like 'Hello World' and such) wasn't working.

See it yet?

Its the semicolon after the         value: 0;

It is supposed to be a comma... Blast you editors not catching publish mistakes!!

When defining attributes of a literal you use the format
{ name: value,
name2: value2,
name2: value3
}

Oh well...

Today, although I still felt kinda crappy, I was able to get a lot done. After playing around a bit longer, getting a better feel for the relationship between JavaScript and HTML, I spiked out a complete TicTacToe interface which was totally playable and such, but no AI. Now I am working on the real interface using TDD and JSUnit. JSUnit is a lot like JUnit, but I am making my own test page thingy, which is pretty sweet.

I have a LOT to do yet, so tomorrow and this weekend are going to be packed tight!