/dev/null

Moan my IP

Forget ipchicken.com. I’d much rather use moanmyip.com.

Back from the UK

Posting has been a bit sparse lately as I’ve been seriously busy with work. I also just returned from a trip to the UK for work.

It was the first time I’d ever been to the UK, or even Europe for that matter. It was a short visit unfortunately and I can’t wait to get back and explore some more.

I loved London - the busyness, the people, the architecture - all good stuff. I was only in London for an evening, but got to see some of the more touristy things like Buckingham Palace, Piccadilly Circus, Parliament and Big Ben, which was all cool.

Can’t wait to get back.

Seam carving for content aware image resizing

Ariel Shamir and Shai Avidan have come up with a method for “retargeting” photos. An algorithm is used to detect horizontal and vertical seams of pixels with the least gradient magnitude. This path of pixels can then be removed from the photo, shrinking it in size, but preserving the rest of the photo. To increase the size of the photo, pixels are added along the determined seam.

You can view a higher resolution movie at Ariel Shamir web site. There is also a pdf available, however server speeds prevented me from actually downloading it.

RegexPal - JavaScript Regular Expressions Tester

RegexPal is a great little utility for testing JavaScript regular expressions. It’s fast and quite helpful to those learning regular expressions.

Some note features include:

• Real-time regex syntax highlighting with backwards and forwards context awareness.
• Lightning-fast match highlighting with alternating styles.
• Inverted matches (match any text not matched by the regex).

Visit RegexPal here : http://regexpal.com/

Development, JavaScript

Hip hop meets the violin

Paul Dateh and inka one, layin’ it down. You can find their myspace pages here and here

Tsukuba - nonsense instruments

dsHistory - Back button management with JavaScript

dsHistory internally works somewhat similar to the other history solutions that exist, but it is implemented more like dojo’s bind than anything else. It requires no supporting libraries, it checks in at just over 7kb when compressed, and it is easy to use. The history is thought of as a series of events that have functions attached to them, and the bookmarkable window hash data is designed to be controlled independently from the events (if it is even utilized at all, which I’ve found isn’t desired at times).

See dsHistory in action
Read the full article

Breakin’ - Turbo’s Broom-Dance

That’s hot.

@tomic XML-RPC JavaScript Client

Jon Brisbin has created an XML-RPC JavaScript client called @tomic:

The @tomic XML-RPC client requires ExtJS 1.1, but has no other external requirements. It’s designed to be easy-to-use, flexible, and robust enough for anything you might throw at it. Since this is an initial release, I’m putting it out as a beta (under the GPL).

Ext.onReady( function()
{
    var xmlrpc = new Atomic.util.XMLRPC( {
        url: "xmlrpc.php",
        method: "blogger.getUsersBlogs"
    } );
    // Add parameters to the RPC call
    xmlrpc.addParameter( "0123456789ABCDEF" );
    xmlrpc.addParameter( "MyUsername" );
    xmlrpc.addParameter( "mypassword" );

    // Subscribe to events
    xmlrpc.addListener( "success", function( xhr, xml ) {
        // Handle the response from the XML-RPC service, which is in the 'xml' object
        console.log( xml );
    } );
    xmlrpc.addListener( "fault", function( xhr, fault ) {
        // Handle any faults issued by the XML-RPC server
        Ext.MessageBox.alert( "XML-RPC fault #" + fault.code, fault.message );
    } );

    // make the call
    xmlrpc.call( {
        method: "blogger.getUsersBlogs",
        params: [
             "0123456789ABCDEF",
             "MyUsername",
             "mypassword"
        ]
    } );
}