Zerg Rush Easter Egg

It’s incredibly funny, especially if you know that “Zerg Rush” is a very popular method for rooting Google’s Android OS. I wonder why that connection hasn’t so far popped up in any reports I’ve found about the Google Zerg Rush easter egg

Tip: Relaxing JSON strictness

I’ve decided to start posting about the little things I encounter day by day. Post #1: I needed less strict JSON parsing than Firefox usually does and a little RegEx seems to do the trick for now (it also allows for single word strings à la PHP, e.g. FOO becomes “FOO”:

var findRelevantToken=/(?:"(?:|.*?[^\\](?:\\\\)*)"|([\s,\:\{\[]|^)([a-z\_\$][a-z\_\$0-9]*))/gi;
   str=str.replace(findRelevantToken,function(m,ssep,nqs){
   if(nqs) return ssep+'"'+nqs+'"';
   else return m;
});

References vs. Pointers in Javascript

I’m as guilty as the next guy when it comes to the confusion surrounding the terminology used for variables that get assigned objects, but I think it’s time to get my act together and define a standard at least for myself:

If “new Object()” is an OBJECT, then “var obj=new Object()” makes obj a POINTER. Why is that?

The important thing here is considering what it is not. It is definitely not the actual OBJECT, because if that variable were the actual OBJECT (even if only at that particular moment), then “var obj2=obj” would have to make obj2 its own OBJECT too. But it doesn’t: Instead it points to the same OBJECT as obj does.

So that means that obj can only be a POINTER or a REFERENCE, since it doesn’t actually contain the OBJECT like it does for strings or numbers.

It’s tempting to call it a REFERENCE and I wouldn’t object to it if it weren’t for the fact that Javascript actually has real references, meaning variables that if set will cause another variable to change its value. This happens every time you access the arguments of a function:

(function(myArg){
    alert(myArg+" "+arguments[0]);
    arguments[0]="SET-BY-REF";
    alert(myArg+" "+arguments[0]);
    myArg="SET-BY-VARIABLE";
    alert(myArg+" "+arguments[0]);
})("INITIAL");

Which will print out “INITIAL INITIAL”, “SET-BY-REF SET-BY-REF”, “SET-BY-VARIABLE SET-BY-VARIABLE” in that order.

To be honest, this isn’t really something that you’ll encounter very often and it rarely is of much use, but it definitely makes myArg a REFERENCE of arguments[0], (meaning that any change to variable 1 will be reflected on variable2 – almost. In this case a change to a property will be reflected on a variable and vice-versa, but it’s so very close that it’s difficult to imagine that you’d use the term for variables pointing to an object, but not for this).

So, if obj can’t rightly be called a REFERENCE or an OBJECT, it has to be something else. And pointer seems to fit the bill very nicely, so that’s what I’m going to call it. Let’s see if it catches on 😉