Tag Archives for technical
Google Glass as an Apple strategy
If the recently hyped Google Goggles (AKA Project Glass) aren’t vaporware, they represent a classic move from the Apple playbook: Invent the products that replace your best-sellers I’m thinking of this in terms of Glass replacing Android handsets. Apple doesn’t … Continue reading
“Mining of Massive Datasets”
My earlier work with Social Book Club, and current work with Kirkus Reviews, has me spending a fair amount of time exploring and developing recommendation systems. There are a variety of good books and papers on the subject, but I … Continue reading
JavaScript on the Server, and conversations at TXJS
We’ve seen various attempts at using JavaScript on the server over the last decade. Mozilla’s Rhino (Java) engine fueled most of it. However, with the release of Google’s V8 (C++) engine (and the networking performance example set by Node.js), the … Continue reading
“Coders at Work”
I finished reading “Coders at Work“ last night. In it, author Peter Seibel interviews 15 legendary programmers, discussing how they got started with computers, how they learned to program, how they read and debug code, etc. The interviews cover a … Continue reading
Atlas demo: If Interface Builder made web apps
Neat demo of upcoming Cappuccino UI development tool Atlas. If you’ve used XCode and Interface Builder, the app will seem rather familiar:
Finished reading “Even Faster Web Sites”
I just finished reading “Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers“, by Steve Souders. It’s technical, and definitely for a limited audience, but it’s certainly relevant for web developers trying to squeeze a few extra milliseconds out … Continue reading
Book Review: “Practical Django Projects”
Summary: Targeted at developers wanting to learn Django by building example applications rather then (or in addition to) reading the docs and man pages The reader builds three working applications by following along The examples are based on up-to-date Django … Continue reading
Recovering deleted images from a Nokia N90 (Symbian OS)
Over the holidays we had an accidental deletion of every image on one of our phones (a Nokia N90, Symbian OS device.) Mild panic was quickly replaced with a gentle pondering on the difference between what a normal person would … Continue reading
Lily: Visual programming in JavaScript
I have an odd fascination with Visual Programming languages, and while I’ve gotten so far as sketching out some UI concepts and object models for a text-processing focused, web-mashing, visual programming environment, I’m a long way from having anything that … Continue reading
My new phone used to be a web tablet
The Maemo team has been quietly rocking Nokia’s world for some time now. They’re off in the background building (almost pocketable) mobile computers; fine-tuning touch interfaces and small-screen UIs; becoming experts in embedded linux; and bringing top-notch open source software … Continue reading
Ubuntu + Hildon UI = in-Car PC UI
Awhile back, Ubuntu announced a mobile and embedded edition of it’s popular Linux distribution. The buzz was around the possibility of Ubuntu Mobile showing up on future UMPCs. The news caught my eye, but didn’t really get my attention until … Continue reading
Django “lorem ipsum” generator (and a new contrib.webdesign module)
Django “lorem ipsum” generator (and a new contrib.webdesign module) The Django Web Framework project just added a new contrib.webdesign module with an amazingly simple, but incredibly handy first feature: a lorem ipsum generator. The idea is that a project’s base … Continue reading
Manually fixing Ubuntu Edgy timezone file (my laptop didn’t update)
Even though most articles indicate that Ubuntu Edgy should have automatically patched itself with updated timezone files, my laptop (and apparently a few others didn’t get the update either.) With some googling, I found plenty of suggestions (including “sorry, mine … Continue reading
Triggering a browser’s “Save As…” dialog using a custom Content-Type header
My previous post, “Passing JSON via the X-JSON HTTP header with Django and Prototype“, contained an example on writing custom HTTP headers from a Django-based web application. Continuing with that theme, here’s another header trick that I use in one … Continue reading
Passing JSON via the X-JSON HTTP header with Django and Prototype
One of the demo sites I was working on this week needed to pass a small amount of JSON back with it’s page results. There are a few ways to do this (and I’d suggest this post, “Loading Content with … Continue reading
Moving my blog from WordPress to Django; Part 2: Migrating the data
In Part 1 of this series, I described some of the motivation, and the components being used to build a new blog for myself. In this (lengthy) post, I’ll address the solution I used to move my content archives from … Continue reading
From Dapper to Edgy
It’s always a strange feeling when my main Linux box is stable and running great, so I figured it was time to update from Ubuntu Dapper to Edgy (which is still pre-release.) I took the simple approach of swapping “dapper” … Continue reading
Real-time patches going into Linux kernel
One of the most common concerns I hear when talking about Linux on mobile devices, is the lack of true real-time support. Perhaps this will be a step in the right direction: “Linux kernel gains new real-time support” (linuxdevices.com) (via … Continue reading
Resetting a Django environment
For one of my Django-based projects, I decided to setup an automated functional-testing system using Selenium to add content to the Admin tool and verify that it works in the site. In order to use this in a “continuous-integration”-like manner, … Continue reading
Ruby for Symbian
This isn’t a Nokia project, but a friend pointed me to Ruby for Symbian today: “Ruby for Symbian is [...] the Ruby interpreter built for Symbian OS. Though the Series 60 devices are the main focus, more Symbian platforms could … Continue reading