This was not your regular pre-season game, Robin van Persie punctuated a physical and intense tie by scoring in the 88th minute to give Arsenal their second trophy in a week. I’m not much for in-depth analysis of pre-season games but I know that Bakari Sagna looked weak and RVP will score a ton of goals for us. Please don’t hate Hleb, he’s going to be a big asset for us this season, yeah I know he completely disappears for long stretches of the game but he makes up for it with some nice and timely plays. Patience my dear, patience.

Anybody see that play where Eduardo had the ball, got tackled by two defenders, fell down and still managed to control the ball, and as he’s finally getting up they foul him hard. Eduardo’s a fighter. He’s obviously no Henry but the man plays every time he’s in there. I also think Flamini is made of molten lava and Denilson is underrated. Check out the match report, it’s written by professionals. Or if you prefer some really amateur but accurate analysis possibly written by a 6th grader check out post 157 by Grandizer on the Gunnerblog. There’s also some post-match interviews on the Sky Sports website.

Here’s the quote of the match and it comes from the beaten Dennis Rommedahl:

“I don’t see [Arsenal] as a candidate for the title”

Thoughts? No? Well, I have some. It’s going to be tough for us to win the title but we’re definitely a candidate for it. If our strikers stay healthy, our midfielders repeat their performance from last year and our defense gets a little tighter, we’ll be a shoe-in for Champions League play and quite possibly be in contention in April. Rommedahl used to play for Charlton and we’ve kicked their ass so consistently that he probably still has nightmares and just wanted to take a shot at us. Fucker.

I don’t speak a word of Arabic but goals sound better in it:

I was going to post a lot more highlights but both PPMate and Sopcast let me down.

Get the feed. It’s allright.

[digg=http://digg.com/programming/Internet_Explorer_s_love_for_caching_Ajax_calls]

This installment of Why IE Sucks? is dedicated to the innocent and virtuous developer who has spent hours and hours wondering why their Ajax calls are returning data so stale that it’s inedible to the point of being deadly. Here’s the scene: if you’re using Prototype or Scriptaculous and are wondering why Ajax.Updater or Ajax.Request are “not working” and the server-side call is never being made, relax there’s nothing wrong with what you’re doing, it all has to do with IE’s sick love of caching.

Firefox and any other browser made by developers possessing an IQ of over 50 don’t have this this “feature” as IE likes to call it. The easiest way to avoid this is to not make GET calls at all using Ajax.Request or Ajax.Updater, instead use POST and you’ll be fine. If you’re hell bent on using GET, you will have to make every call made to the server unique. The fastest and easiest way of doing this for me is to append a random number at the end of the query string. In other words, use the parameters option from Ajax.Options and throw in a random number as one of the request parameters:
[sourcecode language='jscript']
new Ajax.Request( ‘myPage.html’, {
method: ‘get’,
parameters: {
differentiator: Math.floor(Math.random()*50000)
}
});
[/sourcecode]
As nasty and laughable as the above code is, it works since your final URL will always be something like mypath.html?differentiator=25632 courtesy of the random number being generated. Again, all this can be avoided by just using ‘post’.

So why does IE go out of its way to break our balls? It’s the philosophy of assuming your customers have the exact same needs as the developer who made the piece of software. You’d think after making life miserable enough by not having a debugger for JavaScript, they’d go easy on us when it comes to the most basic things of web development but no, every sweat or tear extracted is a penny earned for Microsoft.

This post has moved here.

It appears to me that MapQuest is better at directions since it seems to put a lot more thought in when dishing out directions for trips. Here’s a brief summary of how my faith Google Maps ruined my trip.

I had to go to Washington DC from Toronto and despite the Mrs. Arsenalist telling me to print out the MapQuest directions, I trusted Google Maps and its AJAX loaded interface to provide me the directions. After entering the departure and destination addresses, Google Maps gave me directions which had me travel on US219 for about 150 miles. Now, if you’ve ever been on a US highway (not an interstate), you might know that it travels through countless towns where speed limits drop to 35mph and its single lane with little room for passing for the majority of the way. Not to mention traffic lights and next to no places to eat or rest, which makes for a frustrating drive.

Out of curiosity, I entered the same directions on MapQuest and it had me entirely skip US219 and instead take I-79 through Pittsburgh which is a full blown freeway where speeds rarely drop below 75mph. Although, it did add about 70 miles to the trip, it was much more preferable than going through towns like Bradford, PA and Ellicottville, PA which are not very fun to drive through.

So, is MapQuest better than Google Maps? If you believe Nathan Weinberg, MapQuest seems to know the speed limits across the country and can provide a much more desirable route than Google Maps which seems to be using something like a very unsophisticated version of Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm to figure things out.

MapQuest also gives the user routes based on preference of shortest time or shortest distance. It also has options to avoid highways, tolls or even seasonally closed roads. Given the options to customize your trips based on all these options has huge advantages and can avoid getting you stuck behind a station wagon going 35mph for 35 miles. So despite AJAX being splattered all over the browser, Google Maps as of now cannot compete with the old, industrious MapQuest. At least when it comes to directions.

Here are the two different Maps for the Toronto to DC trip. Although Google Maps predicted an estimated 9 hour travel time, it turned out to be much more since the traffic on US219 and other US routes was miserably slow.

Google Maps Directions: 484 miles (about 9 hours 2 mins)

MapQuest Directions: 557 miles (about 9 hours 18 minutes)