a simple firefox extension that lets you add buttons for firefox 3's built-in zoom functionality to the toolbar, for easier user access. this is a redevelopment of my firefox text size toolbar - sadly, text resizing itself has been removed from version 3 altogether...
the magnifying glass icon is part of jonas rask's danish royalty free icons set.
tags: firefox extension
out of boredom, yet another experiment using uses my PHP feedreader class, running the audioscrobbler recent tracks feed of my last.fm account through a custom XSLT to output the last 10 tracks played.
tags: lastfm experiment xml xslt
GeoURL is, in brief, a geographical coordinates to URL reverse directory.
this extension adds a new button to the browser's status bar. if a document features either an ICBM or geo.position META element, this extension allows to open geo-related sites (such as Google Maps) and pass on the document's coordinates.
update: version 0.7 adds direct support for Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, Microsoft Live Local, Multimap, Flickr, Wikimapia, OpenStreetMap, GeoURL. behind the scenes, the extension code has been completely rewritten in preparation of version 1.0, which will allow users to add / modify / delete their own preferred geo-related services (as long as they use a URI-based REST API).
tags: firefox geo
RSS Bandit offers built-in functionality to store its feed list remotely (though it still insists on a proprietary format, instead of using/extending standard OPML). i not only use this option to keep my reading habits synchronised between various desktops, but also to provide the raw behind-the-scenes data for this site's externals list.
unfortunately, RSS Bandit's FTP settings don't provide an explicit option to force the program into passive FTP mode, opting instead for autodetection. this works...most of the time, but can cause major problems with certain routers - such as my little linksys WAG54GX2 - which pretend to support active FTP but attempt to do address translation (of things like PORT commands) on the fly.
while i certainly hope that a future version of the bandit will include a simple checkbox that just says Use passive FTP
, the current hackish way to force a passive connection is to close the application, open your settings file (usually C:\Documents and Settings\[YOUR USERNAME]\Application Data\RssBandit\.settings.xml), find the line
<property name="remotefeedlist/ftp.connectionmode.passive">False</property>
and manually change it to
<property name="remotefeedlist/ftp.connectionmode.passive">True</property>
tags: rssbandit xml
an experiment that uses my PHP feedreader class to fetch the latest 10 items from my youtube account via the simple youtube developer REST API functions and present them using a custom XSLT.
tags: youtube video experiment API XML XSLT
an experiment that uses my PHP feedreader class to fetch all events, past and future, currently in my upcoming events list via the upcoming developer API functions, and present them using a custom XSLT.
also includes (slightly inelegant) code to quickly hack around upcoming's token-based authentication.
tags: upcoming experiment API XML XSLT
not a full experiment, but something of note for those like me starting with perl on windows...
i recently needed to get a simple method for batch-renaming a large number of files, with a flexible way of controlling the new filenames. after a bit of searching, i came across larry wall's rename.pl script:
$op = shift or die "Usage: rename expr [files]\n";
chomp(@ARGV = ) unless @ARGV;
for ( @ARGV )
{
$was = $_;
eval $op;
die $@ if $@;
rename ( $was, $_ ) unless $was eq $_;
}
the script allows for the use of regular expressions, or any other bits of perl code, to create filename replacements.
unfortunately, despite a fresh install of ActivePerl, this code didn't seem to do anything. after some lengthy searching, it turns out that windows' command.com doesn't support wildcard expansion, leaving it up to scripts to handle it instead. if you plan on doing a lot of perl scripting on windows, there's a permanent workaround for this in the Perl under Win32 documentation ... but for a quick fix, the script needs to be modified to emulate the wildcard expansion as follows:
use File::DosGlob;
@ARGV = map {
my @g = File::DosGlob::glob($_) if /[*?]/;
@g ? @g : $_;
} @ARGV;
$op = shift or die "Usage: rename expr [files]\n";
chomp(@ARGV = ) unless @ARGV;
for ( @ARGV )
{
$was = $_;
eval $op;
die $@ if $@;
rename ( $was, $_ ) unless $was eq $_;
}
i'm a bit surprised that ActiePerl didn't cater for this already in its vanilla install, but no matter ... from the command line, it's now possible to do simple, yet powerful things like
rename.pl "tr/A-Z/a-z/" *
to change all filenames in the current directory to lowercase. in my particular case, i had a huge number of images from my recent visit to prague, all with IMG_XXXX.jpg filenames. using
rename.pl "s/IMG_/prague-june2007_/" *.jpg
i could simply replace the IMG_ part, resulting in files with a far more useful filename of prague-june2007_XXXX.jpg.
oh, one final note on windows-specific quirks of the command line: always use double quotes for your arguments, as single quotes get passed as literal characters to the script.
tags: perl windows
The OISTAT Sound Working Group is pleased to announce the Laptop Connections Installation, to take place at the Masarykovo Railway Station during PQ07. The installation/performance will include eight to ten pairs of sound designers, one member of each team onsite and the other member in a remote location, performing a live soundscore in the Railway Station. Each onsite designers will be strategically positioned around the station with their laptops, connected to a WiFi network, amplified through a pair of powered computer speakers and perform their contribution into the unique environment that is the Masarykovo Station.
The time for the event is 1700-1900 hours on Monday June 18th
The performance content is to be developed by each team, using the idea of "Bridging Cultures" as a jumping off point. The content could be streamed from the remote location to the Masarykovo Station to the partner onsite, where it is broadcast. Or it could be first manipulated or augmented by the onsite designer. Or it could be manipulated and folded back to the first designer for broadcast in their location. Or none of those things. Or all of those things. The possibilities are open and will only be limited by technology.
[...]
Team 4 - Karen Hay (UK) and Kris Popat (UK) Patrick Lauke / Prague and Leeds / Investigation of language, place and space involving verbal information passed between groups of live participants in both locations.
this experiment is a small extract of the audio (MP3) we produced in team 4, mixed together by karen hay. technically, this experiment involved the use of puredata and max/msp, with a live connection between masarykovo nádraží and leeds via ninjam (via ASIO4ALL and virtual audio cable for the two WinXP laptops on location at the trainstation).
photographs from the event are available in my laptop connections project at PQ07 flickr set.
tags: pq pq07 pq2007 prague quadriennale project experiment audio laptop puredata max/msp ninjam
as I frequently need access to a few (X)HTML elements not readily available in Dreamweaver's default toolbar/menu, I quickly threw together this simple extension.
the current version includes:
codeq)addresscite)ins)del)dfn)h4/h5/h6)once installed, these objects can be accessed from the "Additional Tags" category of the Insert Bar or from the "Insert > HTML > Additional Tags" menu.
tags: dreamweaver extension html
following on from last year's short web essentials 04 - zeldman keynote captioned with quicktime SMIL, this year I created a SMIL version of Molly Holzschlag's one hour keynote address "The State of the Web 2005" for web essentials 05, featuring the original audio/podcast synchronised with the presentation slides and captions.
you can choose the online version or download the zipped version to play locally.
on some systems it can happen that the online version loses its synchronisation when jumping to and from different parts in the timeline...something to do with quicktime's caching. if you let the keynote run its course undisturbed, the sync should be maintained. failing that the offline/download version, combined with a local copy of the original podcast audio file, should work fine.
thanks go to andy saxton and dan champion for their invaluable help with the transcript (by far the most tedious part of the process)...cheers fellas!
tags: SMIL molly video presentation
an experiment that uses my PHP feedreader class to fetch the latest 10 items from my wishlist via the amazon web services REST API functions and present them using a custom XSLT.
a stripped down version of this experiment is used on this site's experimental amazon wishlist section.
tags:
construction of the Mary Seacole building for the faculty of health & social care at the university of salford.
time-lapse movie based on webcam stills gathered in the period between july 2004 and february 2006.
warning: contains strobing/flashing images.
note: in the later parts of the movie, you can spot the construction of manchester's 171m tall Beetham Tower (on the horizon, in the left-hand side of the shot).
music by the master of javascript himself, james "brothercake" edwards.
provided here is a link to the 58 MB MPEG4 version. more formats available at archive.org
tags:
inspired by the fade-in effect over at couloir, richard rutter discusses his plan to recreate a similar bit of cross-browser javascript for his own experiment sandbox.
well, as soon as i read that, my own interest was piqued...and the result seems to be fairly workable. the main improvement over the original couloir code is in the area of accessibility: with my version, if javascript is unavailable or not enabled, the images are simply shown as normal...while previously they would simply have remained hidden behind the "loading..." layer. additionally, the messy browser sniffing has been replaced with a lean "capability check". see the (reasonably well documented) source code for further details.
updated to work in Opera - many thanks to steve clay for the small fix.
tags:
based on the previous javascript fade experiment, this uses DOM javascript to turn a simple list of images into a cross-fading slideshow. simply add more list items to include more images in the slideshow. inspired by slayeroffice's image cross fader.
as an exercise for the reader, this could also be extended to cross-fade any kind of block level elements.
updated to work in Opera - many thanks to steve clay for the small fix.
tags:
This experiment was originally posted on Drew McLellan's web development advent calendar 24 ways as splintered striper. Following some feedback, it has been further refined. It was also posted to the Webkrauts Adventskalender: splintered striper - Streifen machen schlank.
Back in March 2004, David F. Miller demonstrated a little bit of DOM scripting magic in his A List Apart article Zebra Tables.
His script programmatically adds two alternating CSS background colours to table rows, making them more readable and visually pleasing, while saving the document author the tedious task of manually assigning the styling to large static data tables.
Although David's original script performs its duty well, it is nonetheless very specific and limited in its application. It only:
table, identified by its id, with at least a single tbody sectionIn a recent project I found myself needing to apply a striped effect to a medium sized unordered list. Instead of simply modifying the Zebra Tables code for this particular case, I decided to completely recode the script to make it more generic.
Being more general purpose, the function in my splintered striper experiment is necessarily more complex. Where the original script only expected a single parameter (the id of the target table), the new function is called as follows:
striper('[parent element tag]','[parent element class or null]','[child element tag]','[comma separated list of classes]')
This new, fairly self-explanatory function:
View the demonstration page for three usage examples. For simplicity's sake, we're making the calls to the striper function from the body's onload attribute. In a real deployment situation, we would look at attaching a behaviour to the onload programmatically — just remember that, as we need to pass variables to the striper function, this would involve something like:
window.onload = function() { striper('tbody','splintered','tr','odd,even'); }
Thanks to another Patrick for this refinement from my original code, which suggested creating a wrapper function!
This script is intended for situations where we want to style a large static document in the browser; if the document is generated dynamically via a server-side language, it would obviously make more sense to assign the alternating classes at that point instead of doing it client side.
Just because the function is called striper does not mean that it's limited to purely applying a striped look; as it's more of a general purpose "alternating class assignment" script, you can achieve a whole variety of effects with it.
And what about accessibility? Even though we're using javascript, we're only influencing the presentation and not the functionality or structure of the document. As long as the parent and child elements are already sufficiently styled, it doesn't make a difference in terms of accessibility (particularly for sighted users without javascript) whether or not the script is executed.
In (the not too distant) future we'll hopefully be able to avoid this whole palaver: when browsers consistently implement the CSS 3 specification, we'll be able to solve this problem in a far more elegant way with the nth-child pseudo-selector. But until then, we can certainly use a little DOM scripting to help browsers along the way.
tags: