I ran into Processing at BarCamp earlier this year. It was quite an interesting concept. Slashdot has news of a javascript version of this system. This is mainly cool because it makes it that much easier to have a play around with Processing. Yay the good old days of demo writing.
Mysql backup extensions are open source again
As linked to all over the web, Kaj Arnö has posted a blog post explaining that the Enterprise-only backup extensions that I previously covered on this blog are now to also be available in MySQL Community. This essentailly means that the encryption and compression backup extensions be available to the open source world.
Tags: database, open source, software
Cross Platform Standalone Silverlight
Miguel posts an interesting blog on cross platform stand alone silverlight. As Miguel points out there was already a way to do this with Moonlight on linux, but not on windows.
Using a Windows.Forms.WebControl to embed a sliverlight control is trivial approach to doing this. But Tamir has gone to the effort of wiring it all up for you now which is great. His approach also runs a HttpListener in a separate thread to enable the silverlight control to dispatch requests back and forth.
Tags: .net, silverlight, software
Webkit GTK (and QT) get plugin support
Another gem from planet gnome. WebKit GTK and QT are finally getting pluggin support (follow the link for screenshot bling). WebKit is fast becoming the little browser engine that could. I’m looking forward to seeing the GTK and QT pushes bring on an age that gets us native Win32 WebKit. I can think of tonnes of projects where I needed a light weight, easy to embed browser engine and instead resort to IE shell hacks.
Tags: browsers, open source, software
Open source use of flash spec is now ok
According to this blog from planet gnome, open source projects are now able to use the flash spec to create their own SWF and FLV decoders. This is good news both for the open source projects that try to bring flash to linux and its ilk and for Adobe since there is no better way to put a spec to test than to have multiple implementations against it.
Tags: flash, open source, software
Actionscript 2 DateDiff function
Mostly a note to self for future reference. Not quite an implementation of the much loved datediff function, but close enough to get what I want:
// yearValue, monthValue, dayValue are assumed to be populated by the UI somewhere
startDate:Date = new Date(yearValue, monthValue, dayValue)
seconds:Number = ((new Date()).getTime() - startDate.getTime())/1000;
differenceInYears:Number = seconds / 60 / 525948.766; // google says a year is 525,948.766 minutes
Every language should have a date difference function and the ability to handle timespans as native types.
New header image, updated wordpress and cleaned theme
So I updated the header image on the blog. Took me a while to relearn my GIMP foo to get the grey-scale mask and desaturate the colour portions.
I also took some time to clean up the theme, ngatini 1.1, which had some malformed html in the footer. It’s been a long time since I hacked in PHP. I’m going to try and find some time to clean up the stylesheet in the coming days/weeks as the css seems a bit heavy for what it’s doing, in particular it seems to have some float overuse .
While I was at it I updated to Wordpress 2.5.1 and hacked on the output from the About-Me sidebar widget. It now has an extra option to turn the heading for the sidebar into a link to an about me page (to expand on the one paragraph intro). I’ll look to fill in that page some more in the coming days/weeks also.
Consolas: Awesome free developers font from Microsoft
Found this info about a new free developers (fixed width) font over on the IEBlog. The great thing about this is that it has ClearType support, so is a fixed width font that looks sexy, and they get the developer friendly versions of 0, O, 1, L and I.
Yay for developers. Hurry over and download it now.
Predator Rap
It’s a day for you-tube videos.
Got sent this link today for a six-and-a-half minute rap that explains the storyline to the entire Predator move.
Impressive, if not for the fact that it explains the whole plot in such a short period of time, then for the fact that it’s done lyrically. And it contains that legendary quote, “If it bleeds, we can kill it”.