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Monthly Archives: October 2006
My Dashboard widget stopped working
A while ago me and my wife created a simple Dashboard widget that displayed our current amount of bonus accrued at the foodstore “club” we’re in. Since the website was just using a form which accepted member ID and PIN code, and the only thing you could do with the club website was enter see that amount, I figured I could afford a little scripting. A short script (and a lot of fiddling with the HTML, CSS, and Javascript for the widget) later, we had single-keystroke access to the number.
And then it happens. The widget displays “undefined”, instead of “24.00″. A bit of looking around later, it turns out the shopping center club has turned its simple form into a bigger “portal”. Now, the page for the login sits in a popup window, that shows this Flash movie. Darn. I’m not disassembling that SWF file, nor am I starting up Ethereal to monitor what it does. This time this throwaway script gets thrown away. So there.
[tags]dashboard,widget[/tags]
Go read this Intro to Io
If you are interested in the Io language, go read Getting to know Io, by Bruce. He is a Rails programmer who’s also an “Io tourist”, and this gentle intro to how Io works is fine for whetting your appetite. Go!
BarCamp here, in Copenhagen
On **17 november** at 17:00 [BarCamp Copenhagen](http://barcamp.org/BarCampCopenhagen) begins. What’s that? Let me quote [barcamp.org](http://barcamp.org/):
> BarCamp is an “ad-hoc” gathering born from the desire of people to share and learn in an open environment.
The activity is very simple:
> every person participating has to fill in a slot of 3 minutes for a presentation, idea, or anything related (or not related ?) to the people participating.
Interesting! You **get to present, for 180 seconds**!
**[Sign up at the wiki](http://barcamp.org/BarCampCopenhagen)**! That’s how to sign up for this event.
[Oschlag](http://oschlag.dk/) tells [more about it](http://oschlag.dk/weblog/2006/08/15/barcamp-copenhagen/), in Danish.
[tags]barcampcopenhagen[/tags]
Delicious integrates with many services
The bookmarking service Del.icio.us has done quite a few “incremental changes” since I started using it. As has photo service Flickr. Here are two very small, but context-adding betterments that I like a lot.
Flickr’s small context-enhancers: more functional tags. Now Flickr sports a few tags that behave in a special way, apart from being one-word keywords. The tags geo:lat=100.10 and geo:long=123.123 situates a photo in a geographical context (visualized by inserting a GoogleMap on the page). Some cameras and photo-generating devices (urrg, bad word) insert that information right into their EXIF data (which is information embedded in the photo file), so the user doesn’t have to do a thing to get that geo-context.
Also, events published at the Upcoming.org service can be denoted with the Flickr special tag form upcoming:event=123123. 123123 is the ID of this fictional event. A text link with an Upcoming icon pointing to the event is shown with the photo. (The image linked to this article has that property.)
Del.icio.us’ incremental change can be dubbed context-sensitive representations. When you add a bookmark to an URL pointing to a usable media type (say, a photo, or an MP3), Del.icio.us adds either a thumbnail image, or a Flash-based audio player to the bookmarks listing. Makes your listings more immediately useful, without any extra brainpower on your part.
Selenium on Rails: extra-special testing tool
When Obie F. was in town, he ended his talk by showing a final, extra-special productivity-boosting developer tool: Selenium on Rails. As it happens, it is our own Jonas “Danger Bay” Bengtsson who created that Rails plugin, on top of the ingenious Selenium testing software.
Jonas’ own screencast is a little dated, but it shows off perfectly what Selenium on Rails does. Take a look at it. Again, if you already did: now it comes with Obie’s seal of approval, should you need such a thing.
Io on OS X: Get a fixed libsgml
libsgml.zip is the libsgml library with a slightly modified build sequence, to accomodate the Mac OS X need for .dylib instead of .so files.
I learnt a bit on making Makefile.in and configure.in do my bidding, but don’t do this with your spare time. Try and download this file instead.
- get the fixed libsgml, unpack it
make clean && ./configure && makesudo make install- recompile your Io!
- start
io, and test:
SGML; "<foo>bar</foo>" asXML
Update: I just took a look at this again, now on a newer Intel Mac. Here, there was trouble. There is a newer, better source code chunk at: http://www.hick.org/code/skape/libsgml/. Patch that instead. If and when I have something, I’ll post it here. It seems to be the LIBBIN line that irks.
LIBBIN="\\${CXX} \\${DEBUG} -Wall -dynamiclib -install_name /usr/local/lib/libsgml.dylib -fPIC -o ../libsgml.dylib \\${OBJS}"
That was my blind try. And, it compiles a “dylib” alright. The install step is broken, though. I can not figure out how to get the Makefile.in to recreate the Makefile. That should happen on leaving the .configure.in, I think. Gotta learn more about this.
Update again: GNU Autoconf, Automake and Libtool helps understanding what those files are about. Now I have a little working knowledge, but my head’s spinning with all the things you could do with your Makefiles…
[tags]Io[/tags]
Method Resolution Order in Io
Prunedtree asked the Io channel at Freenode: “How does Io avoid diamonds and cycling when finding methods in protos? Is there code to resolve loops?” Here is the answer.
Continue reading
Ruby rockstars in Copenhagen, again
Cph.rb had one more visiting rockstar. Thanks for coming, folks, and thanks for presenting, Obie! Update: Jesper‘s photos.
We did the most of Kassen as an impromptu conference space. There were a large table of guys from Cph.rb, and I got to meet well-known faces, hear some rumours, yammer on about Erlang (my programming language tourist experience of the week), and meet new Ruby folks from Copenhagen.
After some initial hanging out, Obie announced he was going to re-run his JAOO talk. JAOO is that Aarhus conference, “OO stands for object-oriented”. VNC woes made things hard with “sending the presentation across the table”, but we all huddled around Obie, and “shoulder-surfed” as he fired off a version of his Agile talk. It was good, many nice personal pictures. Some were really great explanations of what working in an agile office is like.
Microfacts on Obie:
- He’s as tall in real life as you’d expect
- Your beard style my vary (YBSMV)
- He plays keyboard a little bit, and has made public some of his music
All in all, a great guy. Maybe you had to be there.
Began running
Just found an old unblogged note from August 27:
Today I went for a run in Fælledparken, with my training buddy, PM. This is a completely new experience for me: sports that I have elected to perform myself.
I’m beat! Exhausted. Sweating.
We ran from my house to the park, footfalls synchronized. After a couple of minutes, I felt an onrush of endorphines.
I had to stop for air a few times during the 4 km run, when the pace was too much for me. I just ran out of air. And my legs were killing me.
The body comes into its own again after 48 hours. So, I can run again on Tuesday, at the earliest. But I guess Wednesday is better. When the running season ends, I’ll swim, and there are such facilities nearby.
My training buddy is a kayaker and a programmer (!) and he knows all about how the human body reacts to training. You know, “results”. “Give it 2-3 months of a couple of running sessions a week, and you’ll be at a local max. From there you can get further only by using interval training.” In ordinary words, “interval training” means “running an extra lap at full speed.” PM does that. After running a lap, I’m completely, utterly beat.
Today, some time later, I ran the same course, in the park, on my own. Quantity, and lung capacity, that’s the order of the day here.