Planet JavaScript

Lucy had a sleep test a couple of weeks ago and they found that she has what they call moderate sleep apnea. She is supposed to go back Monday night to find out if, and at what level, a CPAP machine might help. She is concerned about how difficult it is to wear the device, how much noise it makes and how much it costs. Also, what the results are likely to be. People have told her that it's very noisy and uncomfortable. Can you shed any light on the issue?

When I learned about CPAP, I couldn't wait to get one. The clinic had a long waiting list, so I went out and bought a unit myself. I didn't wait to find out if insurance would pay for it. I needed it and was willing to pay for it. I took it with me when I traveled. The idea of sleeping without it was horrifying. It made a huge difference in the way I felt.

Keeping a CPAP machine is a chore. You need to keep it really clean. I discovered that you can't let cats near it because they love to claw the hoses. I got a big sterilite box to keep the gear in. I kept spare filters and hoses.

The hardest part is living with the facegear. I recommend getting at least two different brands of silicone nose masks. It is really important to find one that fits well. An ill-fitting mask will leak, blowing air in your eyes, which makes sleeping even more uncomfortable.

A humidifier is essential. I used a cool unit that worked well. I also got a data cable that let me hook the unit up to my computer. That let me read the performance data that the machine collected, and it let me adjust the pressure myself. I went through this some years ago, but I imagine that the equipment hasn't changed much, except that the computer features should be better now.

It took a while to learn to get used to it. It is weirdly like something from a science fiction movie at first. Early on I somehow wrapped the hose around my neck. But with practice it became easy. The machines are pretty quiet. From a roommate's perspective, it makes a whole lot less noise than snoring.

For a while I went to meetings of CPAP users. They were all dedicated to their machines. Some of them even developed battery systems that allowed them to take them camping. They were prepared to use CPAP every night for the rest of their lives. Life was terrible without it.

I was a candidate for surgery, so I got my airway widened. I don't need CPAP any more. But surgery doesn't work for everybody so it is a very good thing that CPAP is available.

Mario Heiderich has released qUIpt, a library that uses the window.name property to store away useful data, in this case JavaScript. How does it work? It checks for the contents of window.name while your page is being loaded. If there’s nothing inside the window.name cache the JS files defined by you are fetched via XHR The [...]

Microsoft has come out with a road map for the Ajax side of ASP.NET, which has been simplified to be just: Framework and tools in one versioned package; Ajax components will be released separately on Codeplex. There is a bold goal at the beginning of the document (why is the doc a PDF/.doc and not just [...]

What does your CEO do? Paul Colton, CEO of Aptana, gets his fingers dirty. He just wrote a post about accessing COM objects from JavaScript with Jaxer. This is possible as the JavaScript is running on the server, and this server is running on Windows. You can download the source code to check it all out. PLAIN [...]

What if you could encode a Jar file as an image and trick the browser to run it? This is what Ben Lorica reported from a black hat briefing webinar: During a recent webinar to promote the upcoming Black Hat briefings in Las Vegas, a group of hackers announced the creation of a hybrid file that [...]

This post announces an update to Graded Browser Support. The GBS page on the YUI site always has the most current information. This post includes a list of primary changes, the updated chart of browsers that receive A-grade support, the GBS forecast, and notes specific to the YUI Library. Primary Changes These changes are included in this [...]

Firefox 3 has a bug. It's somewhat obscure, and it probably doesn't affect you, but it did affect me. It also affected the Microsoft Virtual Earth MapControl, so if you use the VE MapControl for a mashup, your Firefox 3 users are going to be affected by this issue. The issue? It has to do [...]

As a presentation layer architect, graphical alchemist, and Web Standards advocate for Avenue A | Razorfish, Frederic Welterlin’s experience and areas of focus include designing, architecting, and programming client-side templates, providing interaction and technical recommendations, and developing standards and processes for best of breed Web development. Frederic has eleven years experience working as a user interface [...]

The IE8 team has created a blitz on its blog with a slew of posts on security. There is a ton of great stuff here, and is well worth going into detail on each post: IE8 and Trustworthy Browsing At first they set the scene: This blog post frames our approach in IE8 for delivering trustworthy browsing. The [...]

Michal Zalewski, of Google, has released ratproxy, a tool to test your Web application against attacks such as XSS and XSRF: Ratproxy is a semi-automated, largely passive web application security audit tool. It is meant to complement active crawlers and manual proxies more commonly used for this task, and is optimized specifically for an accurate and [...]

OpenLaszlo is a fascinating project, and got even more interesting when they went meta, and allowed you to general Ajax applications as well as SWF ones. The 4.1 release is a big one, as it brings full parity to the Ajax side of the house: OpenLaszlo 4.1 is a major release bringing full support for both [...]

James Coglan wrote a piece on There is no such thing as a JavaScript plugin that uses jQuery as a use case for how simple it is to have a plugin contract. When you think about plugins in many environments, you have strict contracts through interfaces that you have to implement. With jQuery, you can just [...]

Dojo is a framework that you can bend for your needs. You have very fine grained control on what you want in your base dojo.js, how other components are loaded, and a final custom JavaScript file. Brad Neuberg showed a project, SearchTools, that added local search via Gears, and had a custom Dojo that wasn't Dojo [...]

Every single time I read code like the following it seems like someone has particularly gone out of their way to try to trick me and waste a little bit of my time.

var f = function() {

  // function body code
  // ...
  // ...

}();

This past week I've implemented "Reader Shorts" onto DustinDiaz.com(a website that once talked about JavaScript on a regular basis) as a way to include updates on my website on a more frequent basis. These "shorts" are also available as an xml feed and can be commented on (en route to a discussion) using Friend Feed. One funny thing that dawned on me this week is that after including my Twitter updates, and now my Reader Shorts, I've come to the conclusion that there is no need to ever come up with your own database backend and that you can fully run a website off of other free web services. That's right. No Wordpress, PostNuke, or MovableType. Instead, simple services like FriendFeed's API, or Google Reader (as we've already seen), Twitter, Flickr, or better yet, TinyPaste (which is actually kind of a stretch).