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Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Javascript Playing Audio

This page is the clearest explanation I have seen for playing audio using Javascript:

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/mark/audio/play.htm

Playing audio from inside a web page has been an annoyance of mine for years and, until now, I have never been happy with the non-portable solutions.

Do you have any tips for playing audio using Javascript?

Ruby RSS Parser

Here's some interesting information about parsing RSS with Ruby:

http://www.manicwave.com/blog/archives/000063.html

Do you know of any other useful Ruby RSS resources?

phpDocumentor Documentation

phpDocumentor is a source code documentation tool that works in a simiar fashion as Java's JavaDoc, .Net's XML code documentation comments, or Mono's

http://phpdoc.org/

This is an interesting tool, however, of all the various documentation tools Doxygen seems to be the most useful.

Do you know of any other useful source code documentation tools?

Presentations with S5

S5 is an XHTML system for creating presentations, it's available from here:

http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/

After searching for so long for a tool that emulates MS Powerpoint (Crawips, LaTeX Beamer) I think that S5 may be a more elegant solution. The printable view dispenses with all the fluff that you may want in a presentation, so conserving paper, which makes sense to me since presentations are for presenting while a reader needs concise data rather than fancy presentation frames.

Do you agree?

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Python RSS parsing

If you want to parse RSS data with Python then the Universal Feed Parser is the best way to go. It's specifications include the following supported protocols:

"Universal Feed Parser is a Python module for downloading and parsing syndicated feeds. It can handle RSS 0.90, Netscape RSS 0.91, Userland RSS 0.91, RSS 0.92, RSS 0.93, RSS 0.94, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom, and CDF feeds."

Feed Parser is available from here:

http://feedparser.org/

There's a nice page with example code here:

http://wiki.python.org/moin/RssLibraries

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Profiling with Valgrind

Rather than using gprof to profile programming code Valgrind appears to be a more fully featured alternative, it's available here:

http://valgrind.org/

You couple the output from Valgrind with VGprof to produce gprof formatted data, VGprof is available here:

http://www.goop.org/~jeremy/valgrind/vgprof.html

Then take the gprof formatted output and create easy to read HTML reports using PyProfGen, available here:

http://www.cinsk.org/sw/pyprofgen/

Sunday, July 17, 2005

Website Monitor with StatCounter.com

If you want a free, while you have relatively low hits, website monitoring tool StatCounter is the best that I have found, available from here:

http://www.statcounter.com

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

FOSS Project Management

There are a couple of very good FOSS project management solutions available. I'm not including Mr Project AKA Gnome Planner as I'm really talking about entire project management suites.

The two main project management suites are dotProject, available from here:

http://www.dotproject.net

And phpCollab, available from here:

http://www.php-collab.org

Sunday, July 10, 2005

Repair xBox

This site has a very useful knowledge system to diagnose xBox problems:

http://www.xboxrepairguide.com

Wednesday, July 06, 2005

Junxion Box 3G to 802.11 bridge

If you want a bridge between your 2.5/3G data connection WAN and your 802.11b LAN then you want the Junxion Box:

http://www.junxion.com/

Using this device you can create an 802.11b LAN with wireless uplink connectivity to the internet anywhere where your 2.5/3G cellular telephone has connectivity. Of particular interest would be as a means to integrate 802.11b internet connectivity into your car.

Note that the StompBox is a cheaper DIY alternative, more information available from here:

http://moro.fbrtech.com/~tora/EVDO/

Friday, July 01, 2005

Persistence of Vision Bike Spokes

Hokey Spokes use strobing LEDs to create a persistence of vision optical illusion. The illusion can be custom programmed to whatever you want. They're pretty cool and available from here:

http://www.hokeyspokes.com