getluky.net

So, here’s a VERY BETA v0.1 version of the code reference toolbar. Should be useful enough to use at the moment. Let me know if you use it, but be warned, use of this toolbar is at your own risk!

It’s just currently hardcoded for php, perl, mysql, and postgresql documentation lookup and search, so don’t expect too much. It also might be handy for firefox extension or toolbar development, because it’s so simple.

CodeRef Project Homepage mkxpi.sh - bourne-shell script to compile xpi extensions.

I whipped up a really stupid toolbar last week that only works for mozilla. It’s just got some dedicated search box space that passes queries directly to php.net’s function reference.

It turned out to be so incredibly useful this past week that I feel compelled to make it work for firefox, too. I’m just waiting in a coffee shop right now on Lincon blvd. while my car gets worked on, so the next four hours are a prime target for making this happen.

Code Reference Toolbar Design:

• Search boxes that DIRECTLY search within key code references
• First get just php.net working, then add perl, mysql, postgresql, etc.
• Configurable add / delete of boxes (future), url strings to build, and labels

Vladmir Vukicevic’s Bug Rodeo - An interesting concept on its own, Vladmir is writing a toolbar that allows locally cached metadata re: a bugzilla store. Very interesting concept of using bugzilla’s xml interface to store local metadata about a remote resource. Followup with 0.1+ version

An interesting presentation written in PHP/XUL/Javascript, about that self-referenced topic.

http://www.moztips.com/xul_lessons/fortunecookies/present.php

You might have to really maximize the screen to see the whole thing, but it does seem interesting.

http://extensions.roachfiend.com/howto.php http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/ http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2002/toolbar/

GUID Generator: http://extensions.roachfiend.com/cgi-bin/guid.pl

Firefox Extension RDF Generator: http://ted.mielczarek.org/code/mozilla/ffinstall/index.html

http://yergler.net/blog/archives/2004/05/20/writing-mozilla-extensions

Interesting Extensions http://placenamehere.com/pnhtoolbar/ - Another web developer toolbar made from bookmarklets http://yergler.net/projects/mozcc - A reader for Creative Commons licenses

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/automatingdiagramswith_visio.php

Looks like a great example article, i’ll go over it more when my wrist improves.

http://my.unidata.ucar.edu/content/staff/caron/collab/wicked.html (Via)

“Wicked problems possess a number of distinctive properties that violate the assumptions that must be made to use the problem solving methods of tame problems.”

As part of my job and everyday life, I take a sort of evil pleasure in designing good solutions to wicked problems. It’s satisfying to define a problem clearly where no definition already exists, and it’s even better to make solutions to those problems that you can watch people use.

There is, however, a middle stage of problem solving that is accompanied by fear, uncertainty, and doubt - when the problem seems so overwhelming and complex that it’s tempting to give up and create a dumb, unwieldy solution and push-back the problem onto the users of the application. With experience, an information / solution herder can learn to overcome this stage. In my mind, the FUD stage is the sure sign that the mental mapping you’re developing is expanding to include the problem space, which generates that emotional response.

Hunting for a good, free / open-source js date picker / calendar widget.

Mishoo’s jscalendar (via) - looks awesome, but doesn’t appear to be targeting anything below MSIE 5.0. It’s on SourceForge too.

Cross-Browser DHTML Date Picker - Blazing fast, and very cross browser, but doesn’t look as neat, nor does it appear as configurable. Might be the best option due to the support for NS4.

TengYong Ng’s Cut & Paste Date Time Picker - Appearing near the top of the list of google. However, it doesn’t mention anything about browser support.

It’s not often that I make a game recommendation. In fact, I’ve probably only really played 4-5 games over the past 4-5 years. But this open-source turn-based strategy game is really something.

The Battle for Wesnoth has some incredibly deep gameplay, and has characters that you build up and retain throughout the different missions in a campaign. The campaigns themselves appear very long. That means that i’ll probably never finish any due to the extreme busy-ness as of late.

It’s awesome that an open source game this detailed exists and is still being actively developed. Definitely check it out and support open source gaming (hah!)!

Oh, and did I mention that it publishes binaries for Windows, Mac OS X, and RPM for Fedora Core?

http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,64563,00.html - An interesting article about TidBits, which runs eBook publishing at an astonishing rate, charges $5-10 per eBook, doesn’t include PDF copy protection, and pays out a 50% royalty rate to its authors. A pretty innovative concept. I’ll be surprised if another evil company tries to patent it as a business process soon.

Interesting tidbits(no pun intended):

Costing $5 or $10, the books come with free updates for readers — the electronic equivalent of second and third editions. The books are nicely laid out and designed to print well on home inkjets. They include lots of links to information on the Web.

None of the books has any kind of copy protection, though Adobe’s PDF format contains various digital-rights management mechanisms. “It’s not worth doing it all, because it just causes problems,” Engst said.

Engst asks his customers to treat the books as they would physical books: Feel free to share with a couple of friends, but don’t post them on the Net. Engst has been aware of no abuse, and none of the books has shown up on file-sharing networks.

They use eSellerrate for their online sales processing, quoted as being a popular tool for shareware publishers within the article.

After much pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth, I was able to discover what was causing my MIDlets on my Sony Ericsson T610 to declare “Invalid Application”. Since I was creating all of my project directories manually, I wasn’t entering these properties to the MANIFEST.MF:

MicroEdition-Configuration: CLDC-1.0 MicroEdition-Profile: MIDP-1.0

With the J2ME Wireless Toolkit, this is done within the Settings menu for each project, and actually comes prepopulated whenever you are smart enough to let it initialize the project for you.

Once I did that, then bluetooth uploads to my phone worked like a charm. It still sucks that T-Mobile won’t let you download JAD or JAR files from online, but at least I can get applications on it now.

On a related note, the book i’m reading by Michael Morrison, SAMS “Teach Yourself Wireless Java with J2ME in 21 Days” is actually very practical. It’s a little bit outdated at this point, so I had to adapt the Weather over HTTP MIDlet to use NanoXML so that I could parse the modern weather.gov RSS feeds, but that resulted in a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms anyway.

I’ll spruce it up a little bit when I learn how to store persistent settings so that you can pick a station ID. Once that’s done i’ll probably toss it up onto sourceforge for future improvement.