So, I’ve just completed a very small util to screen capture a web browsers view. It loads the URL in question, takes a snapshot of it and also creates a thumbnail. Ill be adding this to my projects list shortly.
Add comment March 9th, 2006
Hmm, seemed to be broken this morning. None of the pages are loading for (on this site) and on /. Maybe google have bitten off more than they can chew!
Add comment March 9th, 2006
For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, take a look at [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp-y3ZNaCqs|http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp-y3ZNaCqs] . This is truly brilliant and very probably the future of interactive computing
Add comment February 22nd, 2006
Attempting to Resin 3.0.17 at work and coming accross a new changelog addition which is causing merry havoc with exisiting stuff. Caucho, in thier wisdom have decided to really start attaching null values to a Document’s DocumentType which is causing our XSLT processors to have a fit. Still having an issue getting it working but Im sure we are going to have to implement a decent entity resolver so the DocumentType is truely set and thus no null value appears.
I don’t mind changes, after all, pushing software forward requires additions but having zero tolerance for acceptable practises in previous releases is a mistake and makes introducing new systems a pain up the arse.
For the benefit of anyone googling here are some keys for this:
Document has null at beginning
How to set a Documents DocumentType
Resin 3.0.17 problem with Documents XSLT
Add comment February 16th, 2006
Well, i’ve been playing with this for a good week now and it’s pretty good. It’s a slightly more refined UI than Firefox but lacks the extensible nature of Mozilla. The Zoom feature and view all pages in one window is very neat and I like that.
Tab logic is better than firefox, most people who are new to firefox dont know about the tabs as they are only created when you specify create new tab or install the enhanced tab preferences extension. The fact that IE has put the tabs by default is good.
Wasnt able to mess with the Newzcrawler stuff since it has timed out but I imagine it would be pretty good. Nice to see RSS XML becoming a player in the browser.
There are a few HTML rendering issues, specifically background colours (download.com is an excellent example of this happening). I also managed to crash it by attempting to refresh a page whilst in the view all pages mode but it seems as though that was a one off.
Back and forward buttons sucked ass big time (I dont use anything other than classic appearence on this machine).
Anyway, it’s good and in some ways better than Firefox but the extensions, themes and security of Firefox leave it ahead as far as i am concerned. Time, releases and good community reviews and I may go back to using IE but not anytime soon.
Add comment February 7th, 2006
I like this (maybe not the flash so much): [[http://www.liveplasma.com||Live Plasma]]
Add comment December 19th, 2005
Anyone need any more evidence that [[http://www.google.com||Google]] is not the “good” we have all been PR’d into thinking. They are about to make a massive investment into [[http://www.aol.com||AOL]] (Part of Time Warner). [[http://www.aol.com||AOL]] are horrible in so many ways it’s difficult to list. [[http://www.google.com||Google]] getting into bed with them is just confirmation for me that they are getting to big, know too much and we will all eventually regret giving them our “base”.
Single dominance of one company in technology is bad for business. It’s prooved time and again with Intel (pre AMD) and Microsoft [too many things to mention] (pre suits) being the big two. Allowing a single entity to steer and direct the way forward is not good and can only end in said company getting caught up in it’s own hype to the point when it all blows up and the user base suffers. Google is either going to *be* the internet or kill it.
Add comment December 19th, 2005
[[http://www.microsoft.com||Microsoft]] are shortly to push out a new CTP (Community Technical Preview) in December of Vista. Apparently there will be an internal “full feature” version floating around Redmond (how long until it leaks?). January 2006 will see a new CTP release and some “new ” features pesented at the CES. Vista CTP builds should be a reaccuring monthly event with emphasis on beta testers to find bugs etc and not be involved so much in feature decisions.
Sounds like a good decision and will give folks a chance to play around with the O/S in a more “full” form and no doubt cause a massive amount of bugs. It’s always the way that individual programs quite often work but mix them up and things can change.
[[http://www.winsupersite.com||Paul Thurrot]] has an excellent article (as usual) on the latest developments of Vista. He’s a lucky guy.
Technorati Tags: [[[Paul Thurrot|||Paul Thurrot]]] [[[WinSuperSite|||WinSuperSite]]] [[[Vista|||Vista]]] [[[Microsoft|||Microsoft]]] [[[Longhorn|||Longhorn]]] [[[December CTP|||December CTP]]]
Add comment December 19th, 2005
i’ve been banging on about this for some time and now I can finally show you the Ajax based search system (currently in a sort of beta phase). I’ve really gone to town with the Ajax based side and it’s really prooved to be a great way for searching data when the amount of data is limited (in the sense that Google has so much data they could rarely return back without results)
You can test out the search live [[http://www.londontown.com/||by going here]] or you can see more in my description [[http://www.webcoding.co.uk/?page=lts||here]]
Technorati Tags: [[[London|||London]]] [[[LondonTown.com|||LondonTown.com]]] [[[Ajax|||Ajax]]] [[[Search|||Search]]]
Add comment December 13th, 2005
Ill be writing more about my new search system for work shortly but you can see a [[/?page=ajax||small article]] on one of the problems i was facing with automated searching using ajax.
I was also looking into the idea of using [[http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory||MEMORY]] based tables in [[http://www.mysql.com||MySQL]] but the bloody thing doesnt support blob/texts so thats put and end to that idea. The system is working fine but dumping a considerable amount of geo (streets, county etc) data clogs it to the point that searches, while fast, don’t come back at the speed I need to do predictive search.. will have to go away and have a think about how to handle this one.
Technorati Tags: [[[MYSQL|||MYSQL]]] [[[AJAX|||AJAX]]] [[[SEARCH|||SEARCH]]]
Add comment December 9th, 2005
Check out [[http://www.pandora.com||Pandora]], a great way to listen to music in that you suggest genres and artists you enjoy and the site will attempt to create a customised station (playlist) for you based on your likes. I tried [[http://www.radiohead.com||Radiohead]] and was pleased with the selection it gave me.
I’ve discovered quite scarily that I like “Oh Jim” by [[http://musicmoz.org/Bands_and_Artists/G/Gay_Dad/||Gay Dad]] and “Made Up Dreams” by [[http://www.builttospill.com/||Built to spill]].
Technorati tags: [[[Music|||Music]]] [[[Pandora|||Pandora]]] [[[Playlists|||Playlists]]] [[[Online Radio|||Online Radio]]]
Add comment December 8th, 2005
It’s one of those things that developers put up with isn’t it?
For years now it seems I’ve searched google for specific help I wanted with some coding problem. More of than not EE comes up with a matching result. I have stopped clicking, in fact I stopped after about 2 attempts 300 years ago but they don’t seem to learn.. Firstly, I’m not going to visit a site which is so hugely annoying in polluting google with results. Secondly, im not going to go through the laborious process of signing up to get the answer for a one liner. Im happy to share what I know, but I’ll do that as I see fit and not be forced into some stupid points/registration agreement to see the one line answer I need added by some other guy on the net. Experts Exchange can kiss my arse. Im a developer and I will never use it… ever.
It just wants to make me scream, i’m really mad about it. Ive just been to the site and even the advertising, colour scheme and generally everything about it makes me want to yell and punch.
1 comment December 6th, 2005
I’ve just received the development package for the Tele Atlas product. This is going to be an interesting development and there will be numerous changes (both UI and backend) from previous GIS systems i’ve implemented.
One of the bonuses of the Tele Atlas product is the coverage area and the standard long/lat coordinate use which hasn’t been present in the previous UK/NI mapping systems i’ve been involved in. I’ve heard rumours that the Tele Atlas product also contains details of addresses/house numbers which map to specific vector coordiantes and ill be interested in looking into this. GPS (lat/long) type stuff is great but for use of the web the general idea is to locate specific places so lat/long is not the best idea since they are point specific and not address speecific which can make a difference.
I’ll report back when i’ve started working on this. Im currently producing a pretty substantial ajax based searching system for work which should change the way our users find content and potentially navigate the website.
It’s going to be really interesting to see the useage and whether it does have a good effect. The ideas we’ve implemented (ajax search, predictivie entries, folksonamy) all provide excellent nav. tools and the design is top notch. Cant wait to see this go live and ill post a link here when it goes gold.
As a side note, my interest outside of work in this area has really been a catalyst for this search and im really pleased to see it come to life. There are some great new technologies (or new ideas) coming forward at the moment and im really looking forward to seeing these exist in a well used web site to see if they improve the expierence.
Add comment December 5th, 2005
A bit away from my usual chatter but I thought I would mention how terrible “Flight Plan” is. By far the worst movie of the year due to the obvious potential and the utter destruction of this film. On the flip side, Finding Neverland, for me, was charming and really quite lovely. I should of watched this a long time ago but I only just watched it and what a film. A really good piece of work.
Finally, the odeon website, what a total pile of crap. Non functioning menuing system in IE to not working at all in FireFox. Strangely the front page doesnt appear when you first try to access the site, instead you’re presented with the terrible menuing system. On trying the odeon front page again I get the options to do text only etc but quite frankly I couldnt even be bothered. The site is boring, dark and just not even worth my time to investigate. There are better resources for film information on the net and I will not be using the odeons website for any of it, not that they will give a shit mind you.
Finally, I thought we could talk a bit about “The Shield”. This is something which I foolishly missed when it started to appear and its only now that i’ve started to watch it. It’s really rather good. For those of you (like me) who like the American way of producing evening entertainment shows then this will appeal (e.g. House, CSI, 24 etc). Why is it that the Americans do this so well? Whilst the UK pushes out such things as Heartbeat, Last of the summer wine and Coronation Street the Americans get continual seasons of good TV. In fact, they produce so much that there is bound to be something which interests you and they seem to do it really well. Im amazed with the colour quality too. It may be a small point but the quality of the colour in American TV is amazing, it seems so much more vibrant and alive in comparison to anything created in the UK.. Maybe it’s me and i’m seeing things but I like it.
Add comment December 4th, 2005
Finally, after months of waiting my 10MEG service is here. It’s so nice…. and fast.
Add comment December 1st, 2005
Well, we now have some beta level RSS feeds for work, you can get the OPML file here (Sorry this link is going to have to wait for a day or so). Currently I’ve added 4 feeds but the ability to add more is simple and very quick. Note that this a beta test and may or may not work / be live.
Other than that, I thought i create a constantly updated list for XMLHttpRequest methods and properties as the actual structure of the thing isnt amazingly easy to find:
Methods:
.abort() -Aborts the current request
getAllResponseHeaders() - Returns all HTTP headers
getResponseHeader(”headername”) - Gets the String of a header value
open(”method”,”URL”,async,”uname”,”pswd”) - Opens a remote URL
send(content) - Sends content
setRequestHeader(”label”,”value”) - Adds headers to the request
Properties:
statusText - Status as text (404 Not found)
responseXML - Response as XML DOM
responseText - Response as text stream
readyState - What state is the request in - (0 = uninitialized.1 = loading,2 = loaded,3 = interactive,4 = complete)
onreadystatechange - Usually a function is attached to this
status - Status as number (403/404,501)
Add comment November 25th, 2005
Looking into creating more structured and deeper javascript code by using objects. You can see what ive been doing by looking here
Add comment November 24th, 2005
Work has decided to allow Fridays (assuming other things are ok) to be a day where we do new innovative research projects.
We’re currently looking closely at building a comprehensive ajax based search system for the site and it’s going to be something remarkable. Stepping back from our current search problem, the solution seems simple but it’s taken a while to get there and some time to see it as such.
Part of the problem is trying to search data and producing a decent ranking algorithm. There are always search systems out there but it’s often the case that the kind of tweaks we need are such that developing a bespoke system is a better solution. Caching aside, the raw data comes from sql and i’ve come up with a decent ranking system for the search which produces pretty accurate results at fast speeds.
if ( fieldName like 'keyword', 20,0) + if ( fieldName like '% keyword %',15,0) + if ( fieldName like '% keyword', 10,0) ) as ranking
Now, whilst that is a reduced version it somewhat highlights my ideas about it. Matching on words in different ways produces differing ranking values, which when summed up produce and overall ranking value. Other conditions such as the popularity of the item, “custom tags”, section etc all add to the overall ranking. Most of the ranking values can be added to a small table or file and adjusted outside the code which enables fine tweaking to the search system without redeployment which is always a good thing.
The other guys are seperated out to work on the Ajax implementation, the automated (cron) system which will produce the core indexed data table and the sql database tests (we are going to trial mysql 5 and postgres). I’ve been into Ajax and the whole web2 thing for a while now and its excellent. I think this will put a new lease of life into our development and hopefully let us think of more innovative things in every day projects and maintenance to make our life and that of our users better.
Add comment November 23rd, 2005
Isn’t it crazy when you message people who sit next to you 
Add comment November 18th, 2005
Check out the latest Macromedia offering “flex 2″ at thier site. Interesting to see this and it’s got good potential. The days of the desktop and internet being seperate are numbered. High “LAN” speed broadband connections is beginning to bring into reality “INTERNetwork applications”.
Add comment November 17th, 2005
Are we starting to let Google have to much information?
It’s a question I’ve been asking myself for a while now but with the advent of Google Base, I’m somewhat worried that Google is starting to take too much information. Step back for a second and examine what they have already:
With all this information I’m becoming worried that they almost know too much. THe public seems to adore them without recognising that the data they now have allows them to know a lot about many people. You wouldn’t object to a few companies knowing a bit about you but i doubt you would give any company details of your emails, shopping habits, what your interested in and so on - it’s too much and essentially we don’t know what they really do with it..
I suppose the second point here is that we also run the risk that they will eventually monopolise the internet to such a degree that our reliance on them gives them the ability to start being less of the “nice” google and perhaps more of an “evil” google..
At the end of the day you have to take your hats off to them, they’ve done a remarkable job but that doesn’t mean we should sit back and let Google become the web instead of the web containing google.
Add comment November 17th, 2005
Well, took me a massive four hours to create this web site Haven’t got a lot of time so I hope people like it. I decided to do a little revamp so the homepage now includes my blog, projects and such aswell as rss xml listings. Blog backend is still using wordpress and I moved all the data to the database to make things a bit easier. Hope you like, feed back to web@webcoding.co.uk
Add comment November 17th, 2005
I was working with XSLT today and after some thought I realised that this (especially XSLT2) is turning into a proper programming language (of sorts). If you code XSLT and use the template system aggreesively you can really start to produce well structured XSLT (trust me, this is hard).
It leads me to think about introduced the well known @ comment tags. Creating XSLT with a “methodised” approach could really bring a display language into it’s own: e.g.:
<!--
@name getTableListing
@desc Gets a table listing
@param title:String - The title of the table
@author jh
-->
<xsl :template name="getTableListing">
<xsl :param name="title"/>
<xsl :if test="/ms/test = '1'">
<xsl :value-of select="."/>
</xsl:template>
This kind of approach really starts to produce maintainable style sheets. In fact we need a plugin for eclipse that also does the atypical predictive drop down approach when calling xslt functions - that would be sweet.
Add comment November 16th, 2005
Microsoft have released the .NET Framework 2.0 for your PC, you should grab it today! You can get the latest framework from Microsoft.
Expect to see more and more applications requiring this to run as .NET with it’s JIT compiler and other features look like a good thing. Now.. where’s the .NET port for Linux..
Add comment November 15th, 2005
Well I’m just about to undertake a port of my Java based RSS Ticker to Win32. IM going to attempt to replicate the BBC’s ticker in full but adapted to use the BBC’s RSS feeds. I’ll follow this post up with more news as it comes. The project will be titled, suprisingly, as “Backstage RSS Ticker for Windows”. Project will be built in C# and I dont expect it to take overly long.
I’ve only really been doing Windows programming for a few months but c# is so like Java it’s untrue. The process for the application is the same as the java one and the way c# handles XML files is impressive.
New screenshots now available of working demo: Click here
Add comment November 9th, 2005
After spending several million years trying to find a good way to handle my task load, that being work, computer home stuff and general life issues I havent had much luck… or that was until I had a spare 10 minutes and wrote an RSS feed for the job.
Continue Reading Add comment November 9th, 2005
Now in working stage. Proper installation to go but very cool. See pics here
Add comment November 7th, 2005
My Wife’s iPod decided to become corrupt. Seeking a solution and a happy wife I must look into the horrible structure that is the iPod Mini 
Result! iPod reformatted, all old music EXACTLY as it was before and a smiling wife.
Continue Reading Add comment November 1st, 2005
I’ve just release v1.0-RC4 of my BBC Backstage RSS ticker. Thanks to some great feedback from people I’ve been able to add numerous features which have resulted in a new release. The project is now on freshmeat and it’s nice to get some hits for it and to know that at least a few people are using it.
You can find out more about the ticker here
bump.
Add comment October 31st, 2005
So I’ve just bought a new inside for my computer. AMD64, aBit Fatality nForce4 Mobo with non-fan cooling, 2×250GB Maxtor SATA drives and a Nvidia 6600 GT Graphics card. I love it. Have to mention though that Windows XP 64-bit Edition is useless. Driver issues, application slow-down - the whole thing seemed to crawl and the kit is reasonably good.
Now I have my old machine spare (2×80GIG Seagate SATA, AMD Athlon 2800 and MSI ILSR-Delta with 5700 Nvidia) and I’m pretty sure Im going to make this my work machine. Im fed up of using an old Fujitsu pile which runs like a mum on sports day. Luckily I am able to do this without issue and I think I will be a lot happier being able to work within an enivornment which is responsive - hey I’m a programmer.
Add comment October 31st, 2005
I’ve just bought the final piece to my puzzle. I’ve been wanting to install a car-puter for a year or so now and I’ve just recently made the purchase which makes it all possible.
Let me introduce the Lilliput 7″ Touchscreen TFT. It’s lovely, the first one I got was broken but this one is working a treat. I’ve hooked up a MicroATX MSI board running a P4 2.54Ghz with 1GB RAM and the usual stuff. It looks sweet and with the Navigator software I’ve got I am sure its going to be a lot of fun.
My main worry is obviosuly installing the beast. I may end up buying the 12v -> Motherboard convertor as I’ve currently got a 240V 300WAT invertor which is kind of scary - cars arnt supposed to have 240v streaming around. Either way I’ve run a test and the system works fine. The GPS reciever is great (and magnetic) so it is now a question of a perm. install.
I will keep this post updated as I do more.
Add comment October 31st, 2005
If you dont have a 2.5 inch drive enclosure then I’m afraid you’re falling behind. The size of a wallet and holding 80gigs, its awesome.
Continue Reading Add comment October 31st, 2005
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