Here's a nice, concise snippet to demonstrate CSS3 3D transformations, from Superted's Toy Story iAd Navigation post:
items[i].style.webkitTransform = matrix.rotate(newAngle, 0, 0).translate(0, 0, 380);
Technical Note TN2262: Preparing Your Web Content for iPad:
"For example, a mouse pointer can hover over a webpage element and trigger an event; a finger on a Multi-Touch screen cannot."
"Still, what new frontiers are out there for interacting with computing devices? Michael Okuda believes that removing the touch requirement will bring new advances in gesture-based control. "Once you don't have to physically touch the screen," he told Ars, "I think yet another window is going to open up.""
Here's a part of the "suicide" story with which I was not familiar.
Wolfram|Alpha Blog : Happy Birthday, Alan Turing:
"When one first hears that Alan Turing died by eating an apple impregnated with cyanide one assumes it must have been intentional suicide. But when one later discovers that he was quite a tinkerer, had recently made cyanide for the purpose of electroplating spoons, kept chemicals alongside his food, and was rather a messy individual, the picture becomes a lot less clear."
This made me chuckle.
The iPad and immersive computing - O'Reilly Radar:
"I love how focused I am using an iPad, versus working on a laptop. New mail isn't constantly arriving; tweets aren't Growling into view; I don't even have an RSS reader installed."
NEX-3 and NEX-5 coming in July, and an interchangeable lens camcorder in the fall (Sneak Peek: New Sony Camcorder in Development).
I'm not sure what the camcorder will offer over and above the NEX cameras, but to a person living in the bright environs of northern New Mexico that optional optical viewfinder on the digicams is really appealing. SDHC/SDXC memory card support and automatic HDR look nice, too.
Recently, when opening new Terminal sessions in Mac OS X, I've started seeing a familiar old message before the first shell prompt.
Last login: Wed Apr 28 06:27:11 on ttys006
You have mail.
mymac:~ my_username$
mail: /var/mail/my_username: Is a directory
Via Tim O'Reilly, a tribute to Mikhail Gorbachev.
Eric Margolis:
"Gorbachev did not plan to destroy the Soviet Union but to reform and revitalize it. But by refusing to hold it together by force, he brought about its doom.
Gorbachev did the world a huge favor."
Chrome brings Flash Player into the fold, trains it to kill iPads? -- Engadget
As of about a year ago I thought Google didn't really care for Flash. It had accessibility problems and was opaque to search engines.
Apparently Adobe have addressed these issues.
I recently upgraded my iMac. Migration Assistant moved all of my files to the new machine without issue -- or so it seemed.
I had created Mercurial repositories in a couple of virtualenv environments, to track changes locally.[1] I didn't notice that Mercurial had put each virtual environment's .Python file under revision control.
Shortly after completing the migration I made changes in one of these virtual environments. A quick 'hg status' before committing, and...
$ hg status
abort: data/.Python.i@13b27e856c38: no match found!
EOF - The Google Exposure | Linux Journal:
" The 2008 study found half of all clicks come from lower-income young adults."
U.S. enables Chinese hacking of Google - CNN.com:
"In the aftermath of Google's announcement, some members of Congress are reviving a bill banning U.S. tech companies from working with governments that digitally spy on their citizens. Presumably, those legislators don't understand that their own government is on the list."
[cross-posted from the Desert Moon blog.]
I haven't used GNU Emacs very much since switching to TextMate in 2005. One Emacs feature which I really miss in TextMate is indent-region. It lets you take an entire region of code, whatever its language, whatever its mix of tabs and spaces and indentation widths, and re-format it using your preferred indentation style.
But wait! Emacs has a batch mode, and you can drive it from TextMate. Many thanks to Gragusa's Things for showing the way.
The post on Gragusa's Things is specific to R code, but I'm more interested in re-formatting C and C++ code. Here's my first cut at a general TextMate Bundle to re-format code regardless of the source language:
#!/usr/local/bin/python2.6
"""
Use Emacs to re-indent regions of the current buffer.
Inspired by
http://gragusa.wordpress.com/2007/11/11/textmate-emacs-like-indentation-for-r-files/
"""
import tempfile
import os
import sys
import subprocess
# Use the same filename extension so Emacs will know which
# mode to use.
ext = os.path.splitext(os.environ["TM_FILEPATH"])[-1]
outf = tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(suffix=ext, delete=False)
pathname = outf.name
outf.write(os.environ["TM_SELECTED_TEXT"])
outf.close()
args = [
"emacs", "-batch", pathname,
# Assume no emacs-startup.el
"--eval", "(setq indent-tabs-mode nil)",
"--eval", '(c-set-style "java")',
"--eval", "(setq c-basic-offset 4)",
"--eval", "(indent-region (point-min) (point-max) nil)",
"-f", "save-buffer"]
p = subprocess.Popen(args, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
out, err = p.communicate()
if p.returncode:
print(err)
inf = open(pathname, "r")
sys.stdout.write(inf.read())
inf.close()
os.remove(pathname)
delete=False keyword argument to tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile, this command bundle requires Python 2.6+./usr/local/bin in its path; hence the pathetic shebang.[cross-posted from the Desert Moon blog.]
I often wish Mercurial had an 'hg ignore' command similar to 'bzr ignore'. Turns out it's pretty easy to add one:
#!/usr/bin/env python
"""Ignore pathnames and patterns"""
import os
def ignore(ui, repo, *pathnames):
"""Ignore the given pathnames and patterns."""
outf = open(os.path.join(repo.root, ".hgignore"), "a")
for p in pathnames:
outf.write(p + "\n")
outf.close()
return
cmdtable = {
'ignore': (ignore, [], "hg ignore pathname [pathname]"),
}
${HOME}/platform/independent/lib/hg/ignore.py. Then add the extension to your ${HOME}/.hgrc:[extensions]
~/platform/independent/lib/hg/ignore.py
Punchline
Here is how to serve TileCache tile images from within a Django application.
from TileCache.Service import Service
_service = Service(...)
def get_tile(request):
global _service
format, image = _service.dispatchRequest(
request.GET, request.path, request.method,
request.get_host())
result = HttpResponse(str(image), mimetype=format)
return result
mapscript/python/README file in the mapserver source distribution.
import os
thisdir = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__))
def relpath(p):
return os.path.abspath(os.path.join(thisdir, p))
from TileCache.Service import Service
import TileCache.Layers.MapServer as MS
# Create the service 'singleton'.
_mapfile = relpath("../mapserv/data/mapfile.map")
_service = Service(
_cache, # See "Cache Invalidation", below
{
"basic": MS.MapServer(
"basic", _mapfile, layers="basic", debug=False),
}
)
def get_tile(request):
global _service
format, image = _service.dispatchRequest(
request.GET, request.path, request.method,
request.get_host())
result = HttpResponse(str(image), mimetype=format)
return result
...
url(r'^wms/$', 'world.views.wms', name='wms'),
...
def wms(request):
if request.GET.get("request") == "GetFeatureInfo":
return get_feature_info(request)
return get_tile(request)
import shutil
from TileCache.Caches.Disk import Disk
class InvalidatingDisk(Disk):
"""A Disk cache which can invalidate its contents,
layer by layer."""
def invalidate(self, layerName=None):
if self.basedir:
pathname = self.basedir
if layerName is not None:
pathname = os.path.join(self.basedir,
layerName)
shutil.rmtree(pathname, ignore_errors=True)
Introducing Google Chrome Frame:
"With Google Chrome Frame, developers can now take advantage of the latest open web technologies, even in Internet Explorer. From a faster Javascript engine, to support for current web technologies like HTML5's offline capabilities and <canvas>, to modern CSS/Layout handling, Google Chrome Frame enables these features within IE with no additional coding or testing for different browser versions.To start using Google Chrome Frame, all developers need to do is to add a single tag:
<meta equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">
"
(Just taking notes, trying to understand what HVDC is, what it has to do with variable power sources such as wind, and why it makes buried transmission lines convenient.)
Technology Review: China's Potent Wind Potential:
"The major grid upgrades already under way in China are making extensive use of continental-scale high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) lines, which remain the stuff of supergrid blueprints in Europe and the United States. 'They are leading the world in implementing long-distance transmission schemes,' says Bjarne Andersen, director of U.K.-based consultancy Andersen Power Electronic Solutions and an expert in the ultra-efficient HVDC technology."
"This summer [2008], for example, a negotiator appointed by the EC convinced France to accept a new transmission connection with Spain, breaking a 15-year impasse over expanding power exchanges between the countries. Use of high-voltage DC (HVDC) technology will enable planners to bury the new line and thereby overcome local opposition to conventional overhead AC transmission lines."
"Power in a circuit is proportional to the current, but the power lost as heat in the wires is proportional to the square of the current. However, power is also proportional to voltage, so for a given power level, higher voltage can be traded off for lower current. Thus, the higher the voltage, the lower the power loss."
"The advantage of HVDC is the ability to transmit large amounts of power over long distances with lower capital costs and with lower losses than AC."
"Because HVDC allows power transmission between unsynchronised AC distribution systems, it can help increase system stability, by preventing cascading failures from propagating from one part of a wider power transmission grid to another. Changes in load that would cause portions of an AC network to become unsynchronized and separate would not similarly affect a DC link, and the power flow through the DC link would tend to stabilize the AC network. The magnitude and direction of power flow through a DC link can be directly commanded, and changed as needed to support the AC networks at either end of the DC link. This has caused many power system operators to contemplate wider use of HVDC technology for its stability benefits alone."
I have a Flex app which shows users a TiledList of chemical structure depictions. Since it can be a large list, it's lazy-loaded from the server as the user scrolls through the list.
Users can delete items from the list, with undo. In order to do this with reasonable performance, once the app has received confirmation from the server that an item has been deleted, it clears out the single deleted item from its local lazy-list.
To undo the deletion locally, the Flex app fills the correct lazy-list entry with an ItemPendingError; that error gets thrown as soon as the TileList tries to retrieve the item.
All of this works okay when the row containing the undeleted item is already visible. On the other hand, if the user has scrolled away from the row where the undeleted item will reappear, then when (s)he scrolls back the TileList simply empties out that item and all of the successive items in the row. Ugly!
import mx.collections.errors.ItemPendingError;
import mx.collections.ItemResponder;
[...]
try {
structures.getItemAt(offset);
} catch (e:ItemPendingError) {
e.addResponder(
new ItemResponder(
function(result:Object, token:Object = null):void {
tilelist.invalidateList();
},
function(error:Object, token:Object = null):void {
tilelist.invalidateList();
}));
}