Tag Archives: Development
Last GPS Location
Posted on 29. Nov, 2008
I've created a sidebar widget (see on the right below the Lifestream) showing the last GPS location as reported by my iPhone when running the InstaMapper application. The widget picks up the last co-ordinates via InstaMapper API and overlays a marker on Google Maps. If you click the info bubble on the marker, there's a link to a full screen map as well. InstaMapper is neat!
New Website Progress
Posted on 08. Nov, 2008
The switch to WordPress is going well. The multitude of a quality plug-ins and the ease with which you can hack at all the PHP to get it just right make WordPress an awesome choice - not yet regretting giving up on my old code. I've been writing XML export routines to transfer over 4,000 blog posts and comments going back 10 years, having some problems pulling in rich media posts the way I want them. Also haven't quite figured out how I'm going to show my videos page yet, or how to handle redirects from old perma-links. Loving the Flickr Photo Album plug-in which makes excellent use of the Flickr API to suck all my albums, tags and pictures in from Flickr into my site. To have over 5,000 pictures completely externally managed yet so intricately threaded into my site is a credit to the Flickr API team - Flickr continues to be one of my favourite things on the web. Also very happy with the Media Temple Grid-Server hosting - it feels snappy and the control panels are the best I've seen ever from a hosting company.
Bluetooth Remote Control tool updated
Posted on 29. Sep, 2005
Fun with HID.
http://developer.sonyericsson.com/...
Eclipse Project 3.0 build M8
Posted on 14. Apr, 2004
Looking good, can't wait for the final release.
http://www.eclipse.org/...
Semantic Web Application Integration: Travel Tools
Posted on 25. Feb, 2004
Excellent, I love it! And yes, great quote: "The bane of my existence is doing things I know the computer could do for me." (sorry I missed this link earlier CM). [via CM]
http://www.w3.org/...
Java 1.5 Tiger, HttpClient 2.0-RC3 and Regular Expressions
Posted on 13. Feb, 2004
Java 1.5 looks promising! Good to see autoboxing/unboxing, enhanced loop, varargs, timeouts for protocol handlers, concurrency utilities, and generics. Actually using the new stuff is another matter, I haven't even got around to trying out assertions yet. I don't know about JAXP, I'm quite happy to use Xerces et al externally, still I guess it's good to have an improved XML API in the base SDK.
Also note my favourite API at the moment, the Jakarta Commons-HttpClient went to 2.0-RC3 on 17th January. Looks like they're getting close to a final 2.0 release. This API does all the work for Aussie Blogs Update Tracker, I have it spidering thousands of URLs everyday for updates, and it works flawlessly most of the time.
I've been experimenting with content transcoding for work recently, and have found O'Reilly's Mastering Regular Expressions - Second Edition an invaluable companion. A solid reference with lots of excellent tips, a must for getting your head around the intricacies of regular expressions.
While we're on the whole subject of content transcoding, I just noticed this open source project on IBM alphaWorks. Looks like the project may not be very active, but certainly looks interesting anyway and heavily related to what I've been fiddling around with lately.
Windows Services for UNIX
Posted on 13. Feb, 2004
While I've had a reasonable level of success running unix apps on Windows using cygwin over the years, the Microsoft Service for Unix could be worth a look too. Free download. (Mac Zealots: please no OSX/BSD comments ;)
http://www.microsoft.com/...
opensourceCMS
Posted on 13. Feb, 2004
opensourceCMS looks to be an excellent resource for finding and comparing the huge range of open source content management systems available for portals, blogs, e-commerce, groupware, forums and more.
http://www.opensourcecms.com/...
An open letter to “tableless” recoders
Posted on 30. Sep, 2003
Amusing, an open letter to css zealots aka "tableless" recoders. A mate did a css version of my site a little while back, and I appreciated it as it got me moving on redeveloping my site. Unfortunately, the completely new look css/xhtml anthonyjhicks.com has been sitting on my development server in pieces for months. I plan to finish it after I graduate. As the open letter says, it's not always an easy task converting to css. Making such a significant change to my site backend has turned into a large exercise in consolidation of backend code and database cleanup, before I can even start playing with css layouts. Add to that several incomplete features that have crept into the new design as well -- plenty of distractions to slow down the conversion. [via VM]
http://www.paranoidfish.org/...
MMS Blog Posting
Posted on 27. Dec, 2002
Looks like Emmanuel has MMS blog posting working. Maybe when I upgrade to the Sony Ericsson P800 I'll rig this up on my blog as well. Being able to blog a picture and text from anywhere easily is quite cool.
http://doping.sics.se/...
Weblog Archive Dead Link Checker
Posted on 26. Dec, 2002
Yet another thing I've been meaning to develop for ages, a checker to go back over an entire weblog archive periodically and rewrite dead links to the Google Cache and Internet Archive. I took a fairly easy approach by using the excellent and free Xenu checker and then importing the tabbed result file into my weblog database. A seperate chunk of code parses the the list and marks the posts with dead links. More on this when I iron out all the bugs..
UPDATE: Ok, the dead link checker is working pretty well now. It took about 10 mins to crawl 2,351 links going back to 1998. It found 358 were dead or returned some sort of error, so I imported that list into the database and Lotuscript agent automatically kicked off and flagged the corresponding weblog posts with a dead link status. Whenever a post with a dead link is viewed, the link is rewritten to point to the Google Cache and Internet Archive. It's also setup so if a link is temporarily unavailable, the next time the link checker runs it'll flag it as a working again. All in all, a nice approach. Still have a couple of bugs sort out, but still, it's a good start.. now to fully automate it..
For an example, see this post from back in 1999 on the Microsoft DOJ findings. The PDF is not at the page I originally linked to, so click the Internet Archive link and you'll see they have the PDF. Nice!
http://anthonyjhicks.com/...
Domino XML-RPC Client
Posted on 26. Dec, 2002
Great article on adding XML-RPC support to Domino. The example includes the weblogs.com ping code, which I've been meaning to implement myself for ages. Good stuff.
http://www.unganisha.org/...
Advanced Domino weblog and personal site features
Posted on 21. Dec, 2002
Just in the past week I've noticed a handful of weblogs actually powered by Domino! For a long time since I started blogging using Domino back in '98 or '99 I thought I was the only one. Well now that there's actually more out there, I thought I'd contribute a little to the Domino blog community through describing some of the features of my personal site and weblog content management system. I'm not going to go into the every single boring detail of how it all goes together, nor do I plan to release the source. There are other projects aimed at building blog tools based on Domino, see these if you're looking for a pre-built Domino blog template.
What I am going to do is discuss the more interesting aspects of several features I've developed into my site: cross-content categories, indexing variants, related pages, Google keyword personalisation, last 100 Google referrers, post permalinks, SMS commands, XML channels and syndication, Avantgo channel, Moodometer, Achieveometer, Procrastometer, a bulk image loader, random picture, file mirroring and Winamp integration. Snippets of code and some screenshots are included. There's definitely no rocket science here. Come on lets be honest, Domino is just so easy it's barely programming at all, minimal effort is required to develop quite complicated features in very short periods of time. Some of the approaches here are noteworthy more than anything else, so I thought they may be worth documenting.
Read the rest of this article here.
http://anthonyjhicks.com/...
Linux, Java and other open source fun
Posted on 01. Dec, 2002
To keep myself current in the latest the Java and Open Source worlds have to offer, I've started an interesting side project to redevelop anthonyjhicks.com into a completely Java and Open Source backend and frontend (for want of a better site to work on). It's unlikely I'll actually put it online, it'll just sit on my Red Hat 8.0 box at home. Perhaps it will morph into something more useful as I continue to tinker.
The chosen technologies and standards for redevelopment include: OSUser, SiteMesh, WebWork, Lucene, ElectricXML, CSS2, XHTML 1.0, JSP and IBM WSAD5.
The former Domino zealot in me groans at the complexity of mixing so many different things together to get essentially what is all provided in a single package by Domino. But the exercise should be educational, and encourage me to try some new things.
On a side note, Anya, my little Red Hat box is getting a lot of use lately. For an AMD K6/2 running at only 400MHz, 8GB HD and 128MB RAM it's running a hell of a lot very happily. I installed Webmin 1.030 which gives effortless web browser based administrative control over practically everything useful on the box, particularly server modules. From that I've got Squid proxy server, ProstgreSQL database server, BIND DNS server, WU-FTP server, Samba, CVS, Tomcat (no plug-in for Webmin), and a Linux Firewall all very nicely configured.
Over the next few weeks the box will also host a wireless card, acting as a gateway and firewall to some local wireless nodes in the surrounding blocks of units near my apartment. Protecting my internal network and routing for semi-public wireless network. Gotta love Linux.
Free PHP based log analysers
Posted on 01. May, 2002
Can anyone recommend a good PHP based free HTTP log analyser? I remember finding a brilliant one ages back, but can't find it again! Argh.
Ahh, I found it.. it's called AWStats and is CGI based, not PHP.
wireless blog post
Posted on 13. Mar, 2002
This post made wirelessly on my PDA using Avantgo via infared dialup to my T39m while sitting in an IBM lecture at Star City.
