Pre Links
Overview of webOS
An in-depth look at the Palm Pre's OS.
Elisa is a Simple, Streamlined Media Center
A basic multi-platform media centre which is based on the Pigment toolkit (a bit like Clutter).
Half-Life 2 mini-series blows minds on a dime
Half Life 2 miniseries, on a budget, and still looks great.
Adobe ASL - 1.0.41 Release
The latest version of the very useful C++ library.
Kevin O'Neill: The Early Days
A look at the early years of the League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen artist. He's still the only artist who was banned by the Comics Code Authority.
Introversion's DefconAR: mutually destructive augmented reality
Introversion's great MAD game as an augmented reality globe.
The Caterer Comic
Read Jeff Lint's The Caterer online.
SLIDE SHOW part two
A look at what must be the most insane (and cool) comic shop not only in Paris, but the world. I wish I'd known about it when I was there.
Decapitation Is Sometimes Good For You
Lots of people out there are looking for headless web browsers to generate things like thumbnails. In the end most people either roll their own or cheat (use xvfb and grab the pixmap). You could use Qt and grab the image, but it still requires xvfb, even if you write your own rendering backend (I assume for font stuff). There are a number of ways to solve the headless rendering problem, unfortunately not all of them are ideal.
For me I am looking at EFL WebKit as the best solution but it is not near maturity and because I quite like the way Enlightenment Foundation Libraries seem to work.
The latest possible solution(s) are born from the Clutter Project which is now under the guidance of Intel. There is Clutter Webkit which provides a Clutter Actor for rendering webpages essentially to a Cairo surface on the 3D surface. I got it to compile last night and ran a test program but it was pretty slow.
The other one is mozilla-headless which looks really interesting by providing a Mozilla library that renders to a Cairo surface. Chris Lord the main developer on this made presentation to FOSDEM available here. There is also a video of it in action here (requires OGG codecs). The source is all available here and the embedding into Clutter is available here. The source code for testing it is here.
On a vaguely related note there is an interesting article about using gstreamer through Clutter's python bindings - awesome (gstreamer * clutter).
Open-Source CAD/CAM
I spent over seven years working in the CAD/CAM industry. It's a very archaic industry with virtually no open-source building blocks available, and those that are tend be be extremely old or not even useful.
There are a few green shoots of open-source out there. First up there is wildcat-cad which is an attempt to create an open-source 3D solid modelling kernel and associated tools.
There is also heekscad which is a modelling program using the OpenCascade solid modelling kernel (GPL licensed I believe). There is also a CAM add-on for heekscad called heekscnc with a lot of associated libraries providing some good functionality.
An additional program is voxelcut which allows for a solid machining simulation to see what damage you'll do to your hardened steel.
One of the libraries is libarea which is for area-clearance algorithms in CAM. This is normally one of the most closely guarded secrets in commercial CAD/CAM so it is interesting to see an open implementation.
libactp is an adaptive clearance toolpath which originated from Freesteel. They've got it integrated into heekscnc so you can try it out for yourself.
You can keep track of a lot of this stuff through Dan Heek's blog.
Another unrelated program is monocam which uses C-sharp as a development language and has soem interesting algorithms like the drop cutter which provides the basis for most 3D machining algorithms.
Technical Links
Lots of links to cool technical things....
Not tested in IE initiative
Developers are prematurely aged by having to bake in Internet Explorer compatibility, my anecdotal evidence proves this.
The Photo Marketplace That Never Launched: Flickr Stock
An interesting article about a photo marketplace by Flickr that never got off the ground.
Real World Haskell
The whole book online.
Linux tablet emerges from blogosphere
An open-source, openly developed internet tablet. It is a really nice idea to make an internet appliance like this, especially as commercial forces seem uninterested in the device.
s3fs - FUSE file system for Amazon S3
Use Amazon's distributed hosting service as a file system. This looks really cool for simplified off-site backup - I wonder if Time Machine on the Mac could use it...?
EA’s Prototyping Framework
EA have released the source to a rapid prototyping framework for games.
google.org - Energy Information
Use the Google service to monitor your energy consumption. What you need is a special type of meter fitted to your home, it seems the UK is currently trialling the smart meters.
Programming a 64-bit Operating System
Information about developing a 64-bit operating system.
v0.8 of Redmine released
The Ruby written bug tracking system with bult in wiki, repository integration, and much more has released a new stable version.
IDE in the cloud: Mozilla Labs' browser-based IDE prototype
I see a lot of potential in this idea if it can abstract away the boring mechanics of source control and everything else.
flashbake
Source control for writers using Git and Python.
Make your Ubuntu distro look like the Mini Mi
Make Ubuntu look like the new HP developed theme.
First Look: Elive E17 Compiz
Screenshots of Enlightenment e17 running ecomorph (Compiz).
get_iplayer - Download BBC iplayer, BBC Radio & ITV programmes
Command line tool for iPlayer on Linux.
Gnome-Do Docky: A New Dock On The Block
Dock type stuff on GNOME.
Hands on: Neuros LINK, an Ubuntu-based media extender
Linux based media centre. Looks quite good for hackers.
Make Ubiquity Your Ultimate Firefox Commander
A nice article covering some of the more interesting aspects of Mozilla's Ubiquity. Also more info about putting together a Ubiquity photo editor.
Cool Links
If they made a ‘Dark Knight’ NES game…
I bet this game would be better than the official game as well.
Sleeze Brothers Return!
I remember buying the Sleeze Brothers 20 years ago in Braintree - that's showing my age!
Dr Who Anime
New Dave Gibbons WATCHMEN Art?!?! You better bet we got it!
The world can never have too much Dave Gibbons artwork.
Also from Watchmen there is the trailer for the Tales Of The Black Freighter animated DVD:
Ubuntu - now found in the UK too
Ubuntu Cola.... bought just down the road from where I am sitting.
Jeff Lint’s THE CATERER - available for order!
Finally back in print - get more on the genius Jeff Lint here.
New Look
I decided it was time for a new look so I grabbed the iNove theme for WordPress. I've made a few minor hacks for it which I will publish in due course (although I've got no idea what license these themes are available under. The changes I've made are the code tag now using different formatting, different font for the title, and making the hover on the subscribe link show the number of subscribers on Feedburner.
The website for the guy that supplied this theme is here.
I've also now installed WP-Codebox to make posting code much easier and configurable.
Getting Your Feedburner Statistics
For the CODA app Using CODA to track your website's performance with FeedBurner I knocked up some code which gets your Feedburner statistics through the Awareness API with a simple bit of PHP.
Since the migration of Feedburner to Google's Adwords for Feeds is in full swing I found I had to make sure I supported both methods. So the most interesting piece of information in this MIT Licensed piece of code is the retrieving of statistics from the API (which is still available after the Google migration). I'm not a PHP expert or anything (in fact it was my first bit of PHP I have ever written from scratch).
Here is the code which does the Feedburner API retrieval into some PHP variables:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 | <? // Get the blog type because some are still hosted on Feedburner whilst others // are migrated to Google. // Options are: "google" and "feedburner" $blogtype = $_GET["type"]; // Get the blog name for the Feeedburner API. $blogname = $_GET["blogname"]; // We default to Feedburner if the "type" parameter does not exist. $base_url = "http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri="; if ($blogtype == "google") $base_url = "https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri="; // Query the Feedburner API and parse the statistics. $xml = simplexml_load_file($base_url . $blogname) or die ("Unable to load XML file!"); $subs = $xml->feed->entry['circulation']; $hits = $xml->feed->entry['hits']; $reach = $xml->feed->entry['reach']; ?> |
Feedbutcher – Because Feeds Need Dissecting
For the CODA application Follow Flickr tags on your CODA screen we have released some source code on GitHub for this. It's a full-on Django App in the repository.
But within there is a little bit of code we call FeedButcher which is a very simple piece of Python code which carves up feeds. We needed it to get pictures out of feeds for our Flickr app.
It's released under MIT license so if anyone else can find a use for it/improve it - have fun.
Month of Coda Applications – Half Way Through
The developers here at Camvine have held on to the Camvine Twitter Feed for two weeks now with ten examples of cool uses of the CODA digital signage system.
Here is a run-down of the ten so far:
#1 - Get live updates from your Twitter feed displayed on the wall!
#2 - Get up-to-date feeds from popular photo sharing sites on your wall by using photocasts!
#3 - Real time network monitoring at a glance using CODA to display Pingdom reports!
#4 - Get calendars out of the computer and to where they can be seen and matter.
#5 - For very busy people - put your inbox status on a display in your office!
#6 - Email your wall - a quick way for getting messages to all!
#7 - Keep abreast of what's going on with RSS feeds in CODA!
#8 - Make it easier to track software development projects with CODA!
#9 - Themed random photo mosaics using Flickr tags to generate art on your screens.
#10 - Monitor your website's readership stats in real time via Feedburner and CODA!
There are a number of interesting bits of source code to come out of this which I'll cover in my next post.
What I'm Doing...
- http://j.mp/c5NtYQ 2 weeks ago
- Awesome painted scifi. I'm sure the cover is the same as Psygnosis' Blood Money. http://j.mp/aiT6Ta 2 weeks ago
- @kumbunterland got all three books and they rock. Especially surfing a Dracula robot from the moon. in reply to kumbunterland 2 weeks ago
- Oh, and they sold the Samsung Wave as an Android phone when it blatantly isn't. AAAARGH! 3 weeks ago
- And that was in exchange of the hatefully bad LG Viewty Snap they had convinced her to get last time. 3 weeks ago
- I sent my wife into O2 expecting her to get a Palm Pre and she walks out with a Samsung Wave. They're actively discouraging people from Palm 3 weeks ago
- ProgrammersLog Update: Python is beautifully over-engineered http://blog.programmerslog.com/?p=459 3 weeks ago
- Whoops - I need to get a micro-SD card so I can upgrade my Android tablet to the latests 2.2 firmware. An oversight involving yet more money 3 weeks ago
- New toy - cheap Chinese Android tablet. http://twitpic.com/2e2gwl 3 weeks ago
- In web browser drawing http://bit.ly/b2Wg0m 3 weeks ago
- More updates...
Posting tweet...
Powered by Twitter Tools
Pages
Archives
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- February 2010
- December 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
