Entries for archive: 2010-05

Found 4 entries.

Two Reasons Why I'll Never Install Flash Again

The first is pretty obvious. Now that I can watch YouTube using HTML5 features that means Flash is one step away from being chucked out forever.

And after reading this blog entry about the Google Maps API v3, Flash – as far as I’m concerned – is now out of the window. I didn’t realise but hidden in amongst a lot of other text are the words The most significant change is that Street View is entirely implemented in HTML....

I thought “No, surely not”, so I kept double clicking the map until I was sufficiently zoomed in to see 'Pegman’ and I moved him onto the road. Sure enough, in my non-Flash versions of both Chrome and Firefox I could see Street View. After twisting the view around, clicking up and down the street I was wondering to myself “I have no freakin’ idea how they did this, but I’m glad they did”. If you haven’t noticed already, I think the Flash version of Street View had two levels of zoom, well this one seems to have 5 or 6.

So yes, I’m a happy bunny tonight. Add this to the fact that GitHub also reimplemented their network graph a few months ago using the Canvas element, the future is looking decidedly bright (and very HTML5-CSS3-like).

Labels: html5, css3, gmaps, flash, github, google, street-view

Inserted: 2010-05-21 11:46 (1 year, 9 months ago)

ismyblogworking.com doesn't really work

I got an item in my RSS feed the other day. It was for my old (hardly used, one careful owner) site www.pie.geek.nz. I have let it lapse since I never really used it, hence DNS broke.

It read:

Your blog is broken:
DNS failure.
Last change in status was Sun, 02 May 2010 11:28:00 +0000

Great, except it gave me this update on the 19th May. That means it took 17 days for the ismyblogworking.com service to tell me. Hardly a recommendation for you to use it.

For some reason I expect that if I sign up to a service which tells you if your blog is broken, it would notify you a little quicker than 17 days. All good fun.

Labels: blog

Inserted: 2010-05-21 11:09 (1 year, 9 months ago)

New Release of Cil v0.07

I’d just like to mention that cil v0.07 has had a belated release. It had a bit of work done to it (6 issues) back in January and February and since it’s been working fine for me since then, I thought it about time to release.

Please see the project page for cil for the download link and other information.

Note, the six issues that have been completed are (generated by `cil summary —is-closed —label=Milestone-v0.07`:

  • 03c93e82 Remove the whole VCS.pm stuff, just have a Git.pm at the top level
  • 1111d724 Make sure libfile-homedir-perl is in Debian packaging
  • 1a5fb257 Make sure depends-on and precedes can —add and —commit
  • 52d702df The StatusOpenList and StatusClosedList should fully describe what is allowed
  • c77fae7c Make commit messages nicer when multiple issues are updated
  • f7ce705b Check for duplicate DependsOn and Precedes

Labels: cil

Inserted: 2010-05-17 10:25 (1 year, 9 months ago)

Making a new Free Software Project

Over the past few days I’ve been playing with NodeJS. It’s been an eye opener to see how JavaScript would work out on the server (notice I didn’t say server-side JavaScript, which I don’t yet think it is suitable for, in liue of a nice templating system).

My initial plan was to write a small queue system, much like AWS’s SQS. In the end, I created one in less than 130 lines of JavaScript though I know that can also get smaller.

It’s been a good eye-opener to see what NodeJS can already do, added to the fact that it’s an event driven language – much like JS in the browser is – so it’s pretty fast. Even though it is an interpreted language, the V8 engine it is using (the one from Google) is heavily optimised and the main developer of NodeJS, Ryan Dahl, is always careful to write non-blocking C code when developing Node itself, or it’s modules.

For my future plan, I intend on writing a couple more infrastructure services. A queue system which is distributed and uses the above simple queue would come in very useful, as would a publish/subscribe system much like the new AWS SNS.

Maybe in the future, I’ll also try out some other things too.

But the purpose of this blog entry is to describe what I’m doing to make sure that the project starts out the Open Source way from the beginning. Usually I add copyrights and suchlike later, but hopefully will do it all properly from the start.

I have (so far) been following two articles, one from my good friend Francois and one from the Gnu site:

To see the result of this, go and have a look at the GitHub repo I have pushed to. The project will be called 'sensi’ and will expand in the near future.

One final point to mention is how I figured the name 'sensi’ was ok. I trawled through the searches of all of the following sites to make sure it wasn’t already used:

Anything else I should do now whilst the project is still young? Any other code related or repository websites I should have checked to see if the name was unique? Any other ideas for (FOSS) 'Infrastucture as a Service’?

Labels: git, foss, sensi

Inserted: 2010-05-08 10:13 (1 year, 9 months ago)