Month: October 2005

Business Advice

/ joeygibson

Tuesday night my wife, son and I were coming home from a lovely dinner out. I was talking about stuff going on at work when Thomas (my wonderful 7-year-old boy) began the following conversation with me. (I’ve changed some of the names.)

Thomas What are you talking about?
Me Well, there are these people called Venture Capitalists and they have lots and lots and lots and lots of money. They try to find small companies that they can give this money to to help them become big companies so they can all make lots more money. And so, Mr. White and Mr. Pink are going to do a presentation to these people to try to convince them that our company is a good one to invest in.
Thomas Maybe they could do a puppet show for them!
Me A puppet show, eh?
Thomas Yeah. They could have sock puppets and do that to get them to give you some money. It would be great!
Me Yeah, it probably would be.

I just love how simple his world view is at this point.

Aggregating Gone Awry

/ joeygibson

I have news.google.com as my browser start page, and this morning I saw something funny. Unfortunately the humor was contained in the blurb of a story about the death of Rosa Parks. The humor came in because when Google pulled the story from the Indianapolis Star, the text of an advertisement got munged into the story. Check out this screen shot to see for yourself. (I highlighted the ad in yellow.)

I Need JavaScript Obfuscator Recommendations

/ joeygibson / 6 Comments

Can anyone recommend a decent JavaScript obfuscator? I don’t really care about free vs. payware as I’ll gladly pay for a quality product, so don’t limit yourselves to free products only. My only real requirement is that is must, must, must run from the command line on both Windows and Linux. It can be Java or C or Python or Ruby or anything else that is cross-platform. I have found a few, but they all seemed to run as a GUI, which violates my one requirement.

Why is the command line so important? I need to be able to have this program run as a part of my Ant build script, so no GUI’s allowed. I did actually find one obfuscator that was written in Java and ran dandily from the command line, but I didn’t find its obfuscation compelling. IOW, I didn’t think it did that much to make the scripts hard(er) to decipher. I’m currently using JSMin which, while not an obfuscator (it’s an uglifier), was better than the obfuscator I mentioned.

Anyway, leave a comment or send me email if you have a suggestion.