Actually, dojo has two APIs in the core to support running code in the context of an iframe: dojo.withGlobal and dojo.withDoc. However, they do not have much attention, as most of their usage is only seen in the dijit.Editor code. Actually, they were introduced for the sole purpose of dojo.widget.Editor (which is the dojo 0.4 Editor widget) for dojo 0.4 in the first place.

Both of them have identical signature:

dojo.withGlobal(/*Object*/globalObject, /*Function*/callback,/*Object?*/thisObject, /*Array?*/cbArguments)

In order to use them, you can wrap your code in a function first, like this:

function iframefunc(){
    dojo.byId(‘foo’);
    dijit.byId(‘foo’);
    dojo.query(‘a.foo’);
}

and call the function as this in an iframe:

dojo.withGlobal(window,iframefunc)

You can also call dojo APIs directly use dojo.withGlobal. Say you want to run dojo.byId(‘foo’) in an iframe, you can do:

dojo.withGlobal(window,'byId',dojo,['foo'])

Note that, the above code can also run correctly in the context of the top window.

The differences between dojo.withGlobal and dojo.withDoc is the first argument: if you want to only change document of a function call operates on, you can use dojo.withDoc instead and pass it with the document of an iframe.

One of the features for those supported dynamic languages is auto-generation of a list of available functions defined in a script. However, when editing dojo based javascript files, komodo can not pick up any classes declared using dojo.declare and it does not support dojo.extend either.

As it is open source, so I can have a look at the code briefly to find out where that is handled. It turns out to be a python script (to be pricise, it is KOMODO_INSTALL_DIR\lib\mozilla\python\komodo\codeintel2\lang_javascript.py). There are some YUI special handling in it to support yahoo.extend and yahoo.lang.extend. After some trail and failure, I managed to change that to support dojo.declare and dojo.extend pretty well.

For those impatient, you can download the modified lang_javascript.py and replace the file in your installation (this is for komodo editor 4.2.x or IDE 4.2.x, not sure whether it works for previous versions of komodo). After restarting your komodo, classes declared using dojo.declare should be recognized and shown in the object browser tab. Autocompletion should also work for these classes, as well as additions to a function inplanted using dojo.extend.

Although komodo has a plugin framework just as firefox, I can see no way to add logics to the functions defined in the file lang_javascript.py. If anyone knows how, I may try to convert this to a plugin of komodo. The modification is also available in diff format.

If you want to add dojo API support to komodo, try the dojo extension.

As a side note: the modified lang_javascript.py does not keep the original YUI support any more.

Edit on 22/2/2008:  a cleaner patch is submitted to komodo bugzilla. It is cleaner than the patch linked here and fixes several issues. However, that is against the latest revision of that file, rather than the one shipped with komodo editor/IDE 4.2.x.

I will upload pictures of our little baby to the online gallery soon.

In the thread about this issue, 5 possible workarounds are presented. However, none of them are easy under gentoo without messing up with ebuild/emerge. I found another way, and you don’t need to regenerate the configure file for rsync at all, all you need is to comment the following line in the config.h file (which is generated after you run the configure script):

#define HAVE_LUTIMES 1

then make and make install, all should be fine now.

To use this script, just extract the file, and place ec2.conf under /etc/conf.d and rename it as ec2, then move file ec2 to /etc/init.d

Before you can use it, you have to set some parameters in file /etc/conf.d/ec2, please consult the comments in that file.

In order to register IP address whenever the AMI is getting booted, a final step is needed:

rc-update add ec2 default

Googling around, it turns out that, it’s due to my “too recent” version of ruby (I only use stable packages in gentoo, but we all know gentoo is always cutting edge, even its stable branch, isn’t it?), which has a backward incompability. The fix is trivial:

— rexml/text.rb.orig 2007-10-22 08:00:04.000000000 +0100
+++ rexml/text.rb 2007-10-22 08:00:33.000000000 +0100
@@ -286,7 +286,7 @@
EREFERENCE = /&(?!#{Entity::NAME};)/
# Escapes all possible entities
def Text::normalize( input, doctype=nil, entity_filter=nil )
- copy = input
+ copy = input.to_s
# Doing it like this rather than in a loop improves the speed
#copy = copy.gsub( EREFERENCE, ‘&’ )
copy = copy.gsub( “&”, “&” )

If you are a gentooer, then you have to do it manually. The following is what I have done to make it work

rpm2targz ec2-ami-tools.noarch.rpm #if you don't have rpm2targz, run emerge rpm2targz first
tar xvfz ec2-ami-tools.noarch.tar.gz
mv usr/local/* /usr/local/
mv usr/lib/site_ruby/ /usr/lib/
mv etc/aes/ /etc/
ln -s /usr/lib/site_ruby/aes /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/i686-linux/aes

After that, you should be able to run ec2-bundle-vol and others just fine.

Another tip: I have this in my ~/.bash_profile (~/.bashrc will do too):

#for Amazon EC2 AMI bundle
EC2_BUNDLE="-k /path/to/your/pk/pem -c /path/to/your/cert/.pem -u <user_id>"
alias ec2-bundle-vol="ec2-bundle-vol $EC2_BUNDLE"
alias ec2-bundle-image="ec2-bundle-image $EC2_BUNDLE"

So that you don’t need to specify all those mandatory options every time you invoke these commands.

When I first saw the post, only 3 algorithms were presented. Looking at the 3rd algorithm, I think it can receive some improvement if exponential concatenation is used more efficiently. By the time I implement the improved version, Steve added a 4th one to his post, which is quite similar to what I have here:

function mul5(str, n) {
 	var r=[];
 	while(n){
 		if(n%2)
 			r.push(str);
 		str+=str;
 		n >>=1;
 	}
 	return r.join(”);
}

The main difference is that it is more compact. My tests show that, in Firefox and Safari 3.0.4, mul5 is as fast as mul4. However, similar to mul4, mul5 is about 30% slower than mul3 in IE (mult5 performs as good as mul4 in IE).

The reason of slowdown in IE compared to mul3 is this part: str+=str. IE does not handle that direct string concatenation well if the string is quite long. What if we use array.push there as well? After several fail-and-error, I found out one solution which will actually boost the performance for IE:

function mul5(str, n) {
 	var r=[],t=[str];
 	while(n){
 		if(n%2)
 			r.push.apply(r,t);
 		t.push.apply(t,t);
 		n >>=1;
 	}
 	return r.join(”);
}

As shown above, the trick is to use array.push.apply(array,anotherArray) to add all elements in anotherArray to array. This IE version is as good as mul3, or even slightly faster than it.

However, this modification will slow down other browsers. We can use conditional compilation support in IE to work around this. The merged version is like this:

function mul5(str, n) {
	var r=[];
	/*@cc_on //for IE
	var t=[str];
	while(n){
		if(n%2)
			r.push.apply(r,t);
		t.push.apply(t,t);
		n >>=1;
	}
	return r.join(”);
	@*/
	while(n){
		if(n%2)
			r.push(str);
		str+=str;
		n >>=1;
	}
	return r.join(”);
}

If using dojo, the conditional compilation should be changed to just test dojo.isIE. (conditional compilation is not supported by dojo builder, so it will be lost when building dojo)

Try it yourself here. Changes compared to the original one:

1. mul1 and mul2 are slow, so removed from the test
2. the number of repetition and the length of the input str are slightly different from the original one
3. A table is used to present the result, rather than a list

Thanks first go to my family, including my parents, who  made my PhD study possible finacially and they are always ready to encourage me whenever I am struggling with whatever issues. My wife, (was my girlfriend) , also support me throughout my PhD study.

This research was made possible under the excellent supervision of Prof. Andy Tyrrell and Dr. Julian Miller. I would like to thank them for their continuous support and guidance of the project as well as their suggestions and direction. In addition, I highly appreciate the efforts they exerted to find financial support for my further research.

Credits should also go to my friends, labmates, thanks for the assistance and suggestions, as well as the laughs and times shared with me.

I think this should be the last degree in my life, or anyone know is there a higher degree to pursue? (I know postdoctor is not considered as a degree, but rather a job) Although, even if there is a higher one, I doubt whether I am willing to consider it…