A year ago I received an OLPC XO (the “$100 laptop”) through their Give One Get One program. I played with it for a few days and found it essentially useless due to unstable and slow software (and lack of WPA support), so it quickly began gathering dust on a shelf (it has since improved).
Last [...]
The Problem
Most Mac OS X power users know about the “open” command line tool which opens the files specified as arguments in their default (or a specified) OS X application. Additionally, many OS X text editors, such as TextMate (”mate”) and SubEthaEdit (”see”), come with command line tools which can be used to open files.
These [...]
One very nice thing about JavaScript is it’s support for first-class functions and closures. Crockford calls JavaScript “Lisp in C’s Clothing”. I’m no Lisper, but I enjoy I discovering new tricks or applications of functional programming in JavaScript.
I wanted to hook all the browser’s asynchronous JavaScript “entry points” : events, timers, asynchronous XMLHttpRequests, script tags, [...]
My friend Andrew recently posted a teaser for a new project he’s working on, but with part of the headline pixelated to obscure what the project actually is. My curiosity got the best of me and I decided to do what any self-respecting geek would do: write a program to figure out what the censored [...]
The Google Charts API is a useful little tool for generating charts. The “API” is actually just a set of parameters you pass to a single URL endpoint: http://chart.apis.google.com/chart
It’s a very capable API, and you could write an entire framework around it (as some people have), but I don’t think it’s necessary. A few little [...]
Yesterday Facebook added the “Live Feed”, which is like the existing News Feed, but automatically updates the page without requiring the user to refresh. It simply polls Facebook’s servers every few seconds, rather than the slightly fancier “comet”-style long-polling they do for Facebook chat:
Polling is perfectly sufficient for this sort of updating (it’s not particularly [...]
AppleInsider.com posted an article today claiming the lack of SSL on MobileMe has caused “unnecessary panic” and MobileMe is in fact secure. This is 100% false.
I’m not sure what to make of the article. I feel like the author said a bunch of big words hoping that most people would assume he knew what he [...]
Now that iPhone 2.0 is out I started playing around with some of the new web features, and soon found that I had created the prototypical virtual light table that’s an essential demo for any new multitouch technology.
It’s about 100 lines of JavaScript. It grabs the 10 latest photos from Flickr’s “interesting photos” API and [...]
Today Yahoo launched support for OpenID. On the surface this seems great for OpenID. Unfortunately there are a number of problems with it.
For those unfamiliar with OpenID, it is a single sign-on system, which allows users to remember a single username and password for signing in to any site which supports OpenID . There are [...]
I came across a neat little tool called rlwrap, which essentially wraps the functionality of readline (line editing, history, etc) for any other command line utility. For example, it works well with my GCCalc hack, which I didn’t bother to integrate readline into, but rlwrap gives you the same thing for free:
rlwrap gccalc
It’s useful with [...]