So, you pedal this stationary bike to pick up speed and take off. Then you manipulate various hand levers and the handlebars to affect the elevator, aileron and rudder controls. It's never been so fun to fly around the Earth. In your living room. On a bike.

Mike's Flying Bike for Google Earth

This weekend I took a big step in upping the ante for JavaScript as a Language. At some point last Friday evening I started coding and didn't stop until sometime mid-Monday. The result is a good-enough browser/DOM environment, written in JavaScript, that runs on top of Rhino; capable of running jQuery, Prototype, and MochiKit (at the very least).

The really nice touch is that you can issue PUT and DELETE requests on the XMLHttpRequest object to manipulate files on the local file system! Here's an example script that scrapes post titles from alistapart.com and stores them in a file (remember, this runs on the server like a shell script):

load("env.js");
window.location = "http://alistapart.com/";
window.onload = function(){
  load("dist/jquery.js");
  var str = "Newest A List Apart Posts:\n";
  $("h4.title").each(function(){
    str += " - " + this.textContent + "\n";
  });
  var out = new XMLHttpRequest();
  out.open("PUT", "file:/tmp/alist.txt");
  out.send( str );
};

1. If the software you're using has a "Java not included" option, install that instead. You might have to follow some extra instructions to set it up (such as setting a JAVA_HOME environment variable), but when you're done, everything should work fine.
   
2. Dig into the software you've installed, and look for a java or jre subfolder. You'll need to find your JRE installation (check C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.6.0). Copy everything from there into the misbehaving software's (Processing in the following example) jre folder. Here's how it's done at the command prompt, but you could rename java to java.old and copy the new JRE in using Windows Explorer as well:
   

   
   
   C:\>cd \processing-0123
   
   
   C:\processing-0123>ren java java.old
   
   C:\processing-0123>xcopy /s "\Program Files\Java\jre1.6.0" java
   
   Does java specify a file name
   
   or directory name on the target
   
   (F = file, D = directory)? D
   
   \Program Files\Java\jre1.6.0\COPYRIGHT
   
   \Program Files\Java\jre1.6.0\LICENSE
   
   \Program Files\Java\jre1.6.0\README.txt
   
   ...