Archive for February, 2007
FOWA (Future of Web Apps)
I was at the conference this week and it was pretty good. Some interesting things were shown and said and I’ve come away with perhaps a few more ideas and new things to try out.
I have to say that the conference does seem to be a lot about the sponsoring companies getting significant air time to big up their own products which isn’t something I really appreciate.
Chris Wilson did a decent talk about Internet Explorer, it’s evolution and where it is today but I was more interested in his ideas for the next generation of web browser. For me personally, I felt as though this was more a talk and promotion of MSIE 7 than a talk about where we are going next. He is obviously influential in the development of the browser and it would have been great to hear about what things he thinks and perhaps we are going to see in future revision of the browser.
Rasmus was awesome, I thought he gave a decent enough talk and the tools he was using to profile PHP loads was very interesting. If you can get a hold of his notes then you should, I scrawled down references to KCacheGrind, Valgrind and Callgrind, all of which combined to profile the load times within a PHP script. Very cool.
Simon Willison was good too actually. He was enthusiastic about openID (which looks good) and he gave a decent rundown of what’s involved and why its good but also bad. I think we’re a long way off from seeing this adopted in the mainstream but I think with some time and development it will become big. I think the best question from the floor came at this point when asking about single logins from non-web applications. Simons answer was that we should solve one thing at a time (UNIX style) and he has a point. Bringing up a small browser window in an application is no big deal so login could be easy and information easily obtained back into the main application – actually I may try this tonight.
Anyway, it was a good day and it’s good to see other people hyped about all this stuff and ending on Brice’s talk about contactoffice.com was great – he was awesome
February 22nd, 2007
I’ve been writing a few ajax objects, but im pretty fed up of rewriting ajax stuff to suit specific onreadystate changes. The following object I’ve done basically pushes the ajax onreadystate process to a new object which you pass into the core ajax object. The source is here, take a look.
Simply put, the following is how it works.
function ReadyStateHandler1(){
this.parseparseAjax = function( __ajaxobject ) {
if ( __ajaxobject.readyState==4&&__ajaxobject.status==200){
//etc etc
}
}
var handler1 = new ReadyStateHandler1();
var ajax = new Ajax();
ajax.setCallingReference(handler1);
ajax.setUrl("/Some/Url");
ajax.process();
Anyway - it might be of some use in something you do.
February 13th, 2007
So I was playing with the Sony FX1E HDV Video Camera (one of the first to record at 1080i) and the request was to push video out to the 63″ Samsung Plasma at work (yes, 63 
)
We got an S-Video lead and it worked fine but the question came as to why the resolution seemed a little blurry/low. I didn’t know this but S-Video only outputs at 480i or 576i resolutions (so basically standard def resolution). To actually push out the content at a cool 1080i you needed to connect up the composite out and then into the composite IN on the TV. It looked lovely and was running at a cool 720p - the quality difference is significant to say the least. For those of us in England, high def stuff is still fairly new and not common place so actually seeing a film of yourself and people you know in HD is very cool
ON a complete side point I’m going to be wiping Vista from my hard disk (i hate it - i’ve been through all the versions since longhorn previews and the final thing is far from finished). I will be creating a lovely XP SP2 system with a partition for Ubuntu 6.10 EDGY. Im probably going to push myself to start using Ubuntu permenantly - I did for a bout 6 months a few years ago but I fancy going back to it!
Current setup: AMD 64 3400 - Fatality ABIT board - 2×200GB Maxtor SATA II - 2×350GD Seagate SATAII (1.1 Terrabytes ) - 2 GIG Corsair - 6800 GT Nvidia (Note: I dont play games much so I dont really need a great GFX).
I’m tempted to go forward to the Intel Core Duo but Im going to wait a while and see what happens - I hear that AMD is going to push out QUAD core soon so I am waiting on this.. I am an AMD fan boy!
February 9th, 2007
Charlie Brooker over at the Guardian writes a great piece on why Mac’s are crap. Loved it and more so since those truly useless adverts currently being aired.
Charlie Brooker Article
Charlie missed out a good point too.. Mac’s are apparently so cool and amazing that Apple decided to launch boot camp to enable people to load Windows on Mac hardware.. hmm… sounds like they recognise Windows and the PC are pretty good. Utterly lame adverts. Next!
February 5th, 2007
Please, take a look at UncleGuy.co.uk and contribute. The best shots of every month will get a free uncleguy t-shirt sent to them!
February 1st, 2007
This is why the internet is great. A while I go I found a Javascript implemention of converting an easting/northing to latitude and longitude written by Roger and Carabus.co.uk. I decided to port this to java for my work and now Adam Retter from the “Devon Portal Project” has pushed this out to XQuery for his work. It’s good example of community Anyway, below are the links to the original JS version aswell as the ported ones.
Northing/Easting to Lat/Lon in XQuery - Adam Retter
Northing/Easting to Lat/Lon in Java - Me
Northing/Easting to Lat/Lon in Javascript - Roger @ Carabus
Appologies to Adam for not seeing his email, my account gets SPAMMED to death.
February 1st, 2007