Abstraction Fail

Loading Javascript in a Web page. Pretty high-level stuff. Isn't it fun to live in a world without endianness, memory allocation, GOTO, compilation, packets, out-of-order message arrival, unreliable streams, network addresses, filesystems and all of that other low-level crap? We can float in our clouds high above it all :)

Except when Facebook Connect doesn't work in IE because of an OS bug in the networking stack. The network layer in Windows XP can throw away incoming data if it is a) "chunked" (ie. split into sections) and b) compressed. Since missing data causes the decompression to fail, this results in compressed data being sent to the browser, which subsequently ignores it as incomprehensible gibberish. Thus Facebook Connect didn't work. Bloody Microsoft >:(

If you've been hit by this, there's no solution I know of. As a workaround, you may be able to try swapping from HTTP to HTTPS or HTTPS to HTTP in the URL you're referencing, but of course that will only work if a) the server you're contacting supports HTTP and HTTPS (Facebook does, thankfully), b) the one you switch to doesn't trigger this bug as well and c) you don't give a crap about using SSL.

Red Lights Of Death. All I can say is ROFL.

In other news, *sniff* oh God, *sob*... I can't even bring myself to... *blows nose* a rights abusing media whore might have to think of something new to keep the money rolling in! I don't think I can even begin to feel the hardship and suffering she must be going through right now. What a cruel world this is.

PS: I wrote this from within the bollock-licking Blogger.com interface, which has now decided that letting me write something in the "Title" field is obviously asking too much.