Nialls newest undertaking

... is a jewelery site. He pestered me for advice as it's his first decent website job interview thing. 'Cause I'm so.. wise in the ways of the world, he obviously got the job. Or something. Well, at least he can have some pagerank :)

Fire in Ice... tasty stuff.

Technorati Tags: Jewelery, Marriage, Fire, Ice, Web Design.

Printing From XUL Applications

I've been working on something spiffy for work, but I had one major problem. I could not print anything from the screen in a real-life printer. Could I? Firefox has flags disabling printing for XUL documents.

Simplest thing in the world.

window.print()

The trick is to use a browser control, and redirect to the printable HTML. Use a nice CSS stylesheet, and wham, bam, thank you m'am, you have a real world application that will be replacing my work's entire Point of Sale solution. Well, eventually.

Take a look at the demo or peek in the CVS.

Technorati Tags: Cool, Geek, XUL, Javascript, PHP

THE

I read slashdot, today and almost every day. Gmail was applauded for its ease-of-use and bringing the desktop to the web.

I then found out about THE. It's nifty. Here's a demonstration of how it's meant to work. Requires flash and a bit of a wait (8mb!)

This is cooler than Sun's 3D desktop system - though the two share some similarities.

I really want to be a part of something like this!

Technorati Tags: Geek, User Interfaces, Open Source, Cool, Innovative.

Automatic Movie Ratings web service!

FilmTrust is a semantic web research project by Jen Golbeck. It's nifty and finally fills that void in my life where I want to share it all with the blogosphere.

To that end, I've written some very simple and poorly implemented base classes for PHP blogs. All you need is to install PEAR::XML_Serializer and extract some files, then you are off on the road to developing.

For a live demo, see my movies.

Download FilmTrust Webservices Kit.

As ever, the code is under the GPL.

For Non Geek Blogger

Do you want to get movie ratings and reviews on your site or blog? It's really simple!

1. Sign up to FilmTrust and rate some movies.


2. Add some code to your website or blog template.
   

   
   
   <script
   src="http://www.ahsonline.com.au/dod/filmtrust/example.php?
   user=[YourUsernameHere]
   &javascript=true">
   </script>
   
   

   
   

Note: The above Javascript will insert your movies as well as a small Google Adsense advertisement. Ensure that your blog host allows advertising (ie, livejournal does not). I request that you keep the advertising present. You don't have to if you don't want to. But while the code is free providing bandwidth and eating isn't.

Technorati Tags

PHP, Movies, Semantic Web, FOAF, FilmTrust, Blogging, Social Networks, Web Services.

Oh. My. God.

Try as I might, developing XUL applications is too hard. Mainly because if you do it locally with firefox, you have to kill off firefox in order to refresh the cached application. Thus the tutorial you are reading, in firefox, dies. Not good for learning well.
This can be solved though. Serve your XUL applications up over http, instead of chrome, and it's all good. But it's still sticky... edit this file, edit that file.
There's not enough abstraction.

Enter PEAR::XML_XUL! Baby XUL Steps took me maybe 10 minutes to get a start in. It's just layout xul, but BAM! I have rapid prototyping happening.
I still can't get it right adding a Script element, but that will come soon. The plan is to offer two flavours of XUL up, behind a password. External customers can look up our products and check their account balances, internal staff can do regular point of sale stuff.

Not yet impressed? Try these spiffy examples of PEAR::XML_XUL in action.

Technorati Tags

XUL, PHP, Geek.

Bookshelf

I've been in a very bookish mood of late. I've churned through countless books over christmas. My room is covered in piles of dusty books I love. My girlfriend has even caught the fever and is reading at a tremendous rate.

I've been fooling around in some shady things. Like clit. Ahem. Convert Lit. I've also been looking at OeB - a 'standard' for the ebook industry.

Rubbishy standard. Everyone takes an OEB and them DRMs it to SFA. (Translation: OeB isn't used as plain OeB, making me think what is the point?)

Book people just don't get metadata. Librarians kind of do. But book makers, particularly ebook makers, don't really. ISBN? Use it as a what? International identifying number for my work? Why ever should I do that! BAH!
I'll use a GUID. Globally Unique Identifier. Yes, that's it.

Luckily, Amazon provides fixes for this; title based lookup for ISBN.

To that end, I've begun some work. On a Bookshelf. It's in C#, my first decent C# undertaking. There's nothing much at the moment to it, just an OEB Serializer and Unserializer class. Work enough in itself!

Browse the CVS if you care to.

On a cooler note, I found generation5.org. Generation5 is all about AI, and I found it while googling for LSystems and Virtual Plants. I was wowed at how easy it was to do much of this. The math isn't hard. Neural Nets are fairly simple to construct, and training seems the hardest part. The coolest-thing-ever was the article on ISBN reading from scanned barcodes via webcam. I'd only ever seen this mentioned before in relation to an Apple application. That is definately on the list of cool things to hack. I'm too lazy to find the link for either.

Technorati Tags

Geek, C#, Books, E-Books