Watch these amazing videos on JavaScript by Douglas Crockford (a senior JavaScript Architect at Yahoo!). I wish I could program in JavaScript all day.

Links to Crockford's great JavaScript videos:

• Video: JavaScript
• Video: The Theory of the Dom
• Video: Advanced JavaScript
• Video: Browser Wars
• Video: Quality
• Video: JavaScript: The Good Parts

You might want to download YSlow for Firebug while your at it too... :)

Interviews are usually fun, interesting, and always different.  Last month I went through a number of job interviews for a software developer / consultant positions - my wife got a fulltime position in Calgary, we moved, I needed a new job.

Some of the types of interviews I attended:

A pop-quiz / quiz show type interview, where the interview shook my hand, sat down, and proceeded to run through lists of questions procured from the internet - afterwards, I was able to find the question list the interviewer had quized me via the internet. This went on for an hour or so, when the interviewer ran out of questions he abruptly stood up, shook my hand, and left me to find my way out. 

Reflections: from what I observed, their corporate environment differed significantly from what was presented on their corporate webpage. In addition their interviewer and interview style contradicted their corporate statement of values and corporate culture. I should have been better prepared, but without a specific job description it was difficult to prepare. Many red flags were raised - most large companies should have a formal interview process or an HR department, shouldn't they?

"The second worst kind of interviewer is the Quiz Show Interviewer. This is the kind of person who thinks that smart means “knows a lot of facts.” They just ask a bunch of trivia questions about programming and give points for correct answers." - Joel Spolsky: The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing (version 3.0)

A write the code first interview, where I was greeted by a nice HR lady, shown to a room with a computer and given a test with a one hour deadline. In the second interview I was met by two developers, I was given a couple white board questions, and asked resume related questions.

Reflections: this company seemed to have many different job descriptions for the same position, the nature of the work didn't vary, but the educational requirements did - their job descriptions individually targeted a High School, a College, and a University Grad. Their job discription was vauge, and wide - it seemed like they were trying to pull anyone in. From what I observed, the staff looked exceptionally young, the interviewers looked tired, and the computer I wrote my test on was old. I did like that I had to write code through the interview process, but again many flags were raised - mature employees are a sign of a healthy work environment, tired interviewers with transparent skin don't give off good first impressions.

A related article: "... the behavior of interviewers influences their decision to accept a position, ... despite the fact that companies are increasingly desperate for talent, many are becoming their own worst obstacles when interviewing qualified candidates. Among the sort of behaviors that adversely affect job seekers' willingness to work at a company are interviewers who are aloof ..." - http://www.management-issues.com/2007/8/9/research/poor-interviewers-driving-away-talent.asp

Anyhow; I'm now happily employed, and working with a great bunch of developers on an exciting Agile project based around Test Driven Development (TDD)  / Unit Testing, Continuous Integration, and the .NET Framework!

Visitors using Internet Explorer (6 & 7) were unable to post comments on this site (my site runs dasBlog) ever since I added a JavaScript snippet from Technorati.

The Problem in More Details: For visitors using IE (Internet Explorer 6 & 7) dasBlog's "Save Comment" button wouldn't fire, hence the web form wouldn't submit, and the comment wouldn't be posted. When dasBlog's Captcha feature was enabled the Captcha validation wouldn't fire, and again the form would not submit. When JavaScript was disabled in Internet Explorer, dasBlog / ASP.NET would revert to server side validation, the web form would submit, and the comment would be saved. Everything worked fine in Firefox and Opera.

A wild goose chase: I'm using a ASP.NET 1.x version of dasBlog converted to ASP.NET 2.0, and customized to run on a medium trust environment. I initially assumed that something had been corrupted during the ASP.NET 1.x to 2.0 conversion - I thought that some of the ASP.NET client side scripts had been corrupted, or that somehow this ASP.NET 2.0 application was referencing some older ASP.NET 1.x scripts. This assumption proved to be fruitless. I then started looking at Jeff Atwood's Captcha control as the source of the problem, but after disabling the Captcha my "Save Comment" button still didn't work. It had to be something else, I thought that it was a bug with dasBlog, but upon downloading the latest release of dasBlog 2.0 (kudos to the dasBlog team!), I noticed that I could post comments to my site when using any theme other than my own. I started looking at my theme, I disabled my JavaScript links and discovered...

The Solution: a JavaScript linked from Technorati was preventing my comments from being saved. I removed the conflicting script - Goodbye Technorati, Hello Comments from IE.

I wish I would have figured this out sooner, hopefully this article will help anyone else with a similar problem (dasBlog's "Save Comment" button doesn't work). I'll be looking closer at the Technorati script and post another entry here with my findings. In the meantime look through the conflicting script yourself at: http://embed.technorati.com/embed/93ja2gejnr.js

Update: The second line of Technorati's JavaScript causes ASP.NET's postback to fail - ASP.NET can only have one form tag declaration.

The rough JavaScript:

document.write('<form id="te_s" method="post" ...