The WebGraphics blog recently had a Javascript quine contest that just ended. I'm totally bummed that I didn't hear about this until it was over. What's a "quine"? A quine is a program which, when run, produces the source code of the program as its output...

It's hard to believe it but it's true: I've been at this for an entire year. How the time has flown. In honour of my first blogoversary, today I bring you a story that has absolutely nothing to do with anything . I promised a while back that I’d...

In response to my earlier series on error handling in VBScript , Ian Griffiths blogged that Reuben Harris noticed an interesting fact about VBScript error numbers -- a fact which I will shamelessly steal and blog about myself. Here's the complete VBScript...

I got a number of good responses to last week's challenge, including some that pointed out potential flaws in my solution. See the comments for details. The question I posed is as follows: does asserting a permission before calling a method which could...

All that talk a while back about error handling in VBScript got me thinking about some error handling security issues that involve VB.NET specifically, though they apply to managed code written in any language. Consider this scenario: you provide a fully...

Here's a fragment of an email I received last week: bigValue = 4294967295 Wscript.Echo Hex(bigValue) I would like this to display FFFFFFFF, but instead get the error "Overflow: bigValue What's up with that? The Hex function only works on numbers which...

I knew this would end up being an agony column. Of the 29950 Google-referred hits since the last time I analyzed the logs, a significant fraction of them were variations on "how do I get a boy to like me?" Thank goodness I've already answered that...

Apparently I've sparked a discussion amongst the super-geniuses of LtU on various innovative language constructs for handling errors. Fascinating stuff that I'd love to learn more about! But I'll be less highfalutin: no doubt about it, error handling...

The way VBScript implements the error semantics I mentioned last time is sort of interesting. Today I'll talk a bit about the implementation details, and then next time I'll finish up by talking about some philosophy of error handling. Before I go on...

A little fun for a Friday afternoon. The economy must be picking up -- I'm getting cold calls from recruiters again for the first time in about four years. Today was the second (and third!) this month. However, apparently some of them are just a...

OK, enough about the Peloponnesian war -- a number of readers have asked me questions about error handling in VBScript recently, so I think I'll talk about it a bit for the next few days. Today, I want to very carefully describe what the error handling...