Not long ago I was selecting a javascript framework for a large client web project. The client’s existing applications made heavy use of Microsoft technologies so one factor in my choice was how would the framework “feel” coming from a background in Microsoft UI technologies. Having built Silverlight, WPF and Windows Phone apps myself, I felt particularly drawn to AngularJS. Below I’m calling out some core XAML concepts and their corresponding concepts in Angular. Along the way I’ll also note some key differences you should understand if you’re coming from the world of XAML development.

I’ve been playing around with the YahooMaps AS3 api a bit (actually it was months ago..) Good stuff. I added in a little Flickr integration as well for fun using the AS3 Flickr Library

Fedora Core 3 Installation Notes open up some basic ports in iptables with system-config-securitylevel

This was a question posed to me by a friend several months ago as I was first getting up to speed on the Adobe Flex platform and expressing some enthusiasm. At the time no immediate answer came to mind. I had just finished up some AJAX work and knew that AJAX is a powerful approach to building rich user-experiences and I scarcely knew the Flex platform had to offer. Today I ran across a post from EffectiveUI that really lays out the advantages of each technology and when it makes sense to use each. Well Done! http://www.effectiveui.com/blogs/?p=133

In the past, if you wanted to use data from another website, you often had to resort to ”screen scraping”–or pulling data from a web page by parsing through the raw HTML. In my experience “screenscraping” is a challenge consisting primarily of carefully constructing just the right regex expression to get past a jumble of HTML tags to the content you’re interested in.

Creating Office documents–spreadsheets (Excel), or printable word processing documents (Word), etc–with some kind of dynamic data seems to be a fairly common user requirement for applications, web or otherwise. On the web, creating these documents can be a little tricky. It helps that Word, Excel and others can actually read HTML so without too much trouble you can send a response back with the Content-Type header set to "application/msword" and then just output html and it will open in Word. However, HTML only takes you so far, what if you need to take advantage of some of the more advanced features available in the target application?

As many as times as I’ve scoured the web looking for free audio books I don’t know how I managed to miss LibriVox until recently! This is a great site for those who can appreciate classic literature, poetry, and anything else in the public domain but have little time for reading. Summarily, the concept is this: volunteers record themselves reading the text of public domain works and the recordings are aggregated into freely available audio books!

OK, I can mount a Windows share just fine with smbmount as a normal user but I’ve having trouble getting the fstab mount method described here to work… It’s been a useful article overall…UPDATE: I got the fstab mount to work (partially), the problem was that I was initializing my wireless connection through an rc.local script AFTER the attempt to mount the samba drive… DUH! Still working on making the mount read-write for all users…

I just spent several hours getting my WinTV PVR USB2 video capture device up and running on my laptop running Fedora Core 4. Here’s the really quick rundown of what I did…

1. I started with Mike Isley’s work on the driver which seems to be the only one active still; or rather the latest iteration on this driver.

2. I did not have to set up a kernel source tree as he describes (luckily because I didn’t really know how to do that…). Instead I had to install the kernel-devel package with yum and then I discovered that it had downloaded sources for the latest kernel and I needed to update mine before it worked. See the FC4 release notes for more detail.

3. Once I had installed the kernel-devel package and made sure my kernel was up to date I was able to run make and make install for both the driver subfolder and the ivtv subfolder in the source code downloaded from Mike Isley’s site. I followed his instructions for loading the modules and checking for dependencies etc. The first time I tried to load the module I got an error. I restarted and tried again and got a slightly different error. I was about to give up but decided to just plug the capture device in anyway to see what would happen and it seemed to work.

OK, so my XP pro install on my laptop cratered which was all I needed to finally get me to try installing linux on it which I’d been wanting to try for a while. I expected to hit some snags but that didn’t really make the late hours combing the web any less frustrating… Maybe this will be useful to someone out there…

Here’s a snippet for generating synthetic JS events; works in at least mozilla browsers and IE6, haven’t tried others…

…useful with the “could not find tsearch config by locale” error pg_controldata [data dir] | grep LC Finding PostgreSQL data directory …since I continually forget where mine is: find / -name data

Implementing Full Text Indexing with PostgreSQL