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December 27, 2006
Getting Lightbox to work in partials
So there I was, earlier this evening, plodding along on my little Ruby on Rails Web 2.0 media application (coming "real soon now"). And I was stumped for a while trying to get Lightbox to work on images that are loaded into a page via a partial. It just wouldn't work.
The answer however seems to be to call initLightbox(); in the partial (i.e. initialize Lightbox again after the partial has loaded).
Hope this helps someone.
Posted by Matthew at 10:36 PM | Comments (0)
December 20, 2006
Moving to the matrix
Companies are increasingly becoming fascinated with online worlds such as Second Life. Not only have a few held a press conference there, but now IBM is setting up a business devision around virtual realms such as SL.
Posted by Matthew at 08:51 AM | Comments (0)
Only a number
From here comes this today:
- 42 is bracketed by twin primes;
- It is a composite number;
- Its factorization makes it a sphenic number (and thus also a square-free integer);
- It is the product of the first three terms of Sylvester's sequence;
- Like the first four such numbers it is also a primary pseudoperfect number;
- It is the sum of the totient function for the first eleven integers;
- It is the third 15-gonal number;
- It is a Catalan number;
- It is the reciprocal of a Bernoulli number;
- It is a meandric number and an open meandric number;
But of course we all really know that I have now reached found the answer.
Posted by Matthew at 07:49 AM | Comments (4)
December 19, 2006
Google goes dirty
I've been playing around with the Google Ajax Search API recently (more on that later) and by coincidence notice that Google has now deprecated its SOAP search API.
While the Ajax Search API works well (and I'm having fun playing around with it) it is also not very flexible. There is more lock-in as to how Google wants you to use it and process the results.
Hopefully it won't be long before Google provides an alternative.
Posted by Matthew at 09:15 AM | Comments (0)
5 things
Gianugo tagged me and so here are 5 things about me I don't think I've blogged before:
- I had ballet classes at primary school back in the 70's
- As a child I was allergic to strawberries
- I once had a bat in my bedroom
- I applied to join the RAF when I was 16 or 17
- I have 2 middle names - John James
So, let me tag Steve, Frank and Carsten.
Posted by Matthew at 08:39 AM | Comments (2)
December 15, 2006
German WiMAX auction
German WiMAX licenses were auctioned off today for a total of 56 million Euros.
Posted by Matthew at 09:13 PM | Comments (0)
A choice of Ajax
The space for Ajax frameworks seems to be becoming increasingly crowded. Adobe has released a pre-release version of Spry, a JavaScript library for adding Ajax functionality to web pages. Oh and let's see - there's also this, this, and this. And more.
Posted by Matthew at 07:36 AM | Comments (0)
December 14, 2006
Riding the gondola
A few weeks ago I took a poke at some good friends for their very upbeat posts on The Venice Project. Thanks to an invitation I was able to take a look for myself today and after installing the beta client on one of our Windows PCs in the office I have to say...
.... cool. Really.
The whole experience, even though still in Beta, has been quite impressive. The UI is slick, I found it quite intuitive to use, content plays very quickly and for the most part I've had no stutters or stalls in playback at all. The quality of the video varies - but I guess that is to be expected depending on where the content actually comes from.
But that's only part of the story.
From my limited beta view I think TVP is an interesting new ballpark when it comes to this type of application. TVP seems to be aiming at becoming no less than a media framework (for want of a better word at the moment) that will allow users to interact in a way that hasn't been possible up to now. The framework/platform seems to be gearing up to become something like a "Media-Eclipse" (again, for want of a better comparison) in allowing you to build and add your own plugins to the system. In the end this could be one of the most important aspects, as "just" being able to play video will quickly become a commodity.
Because of the large number of Open Source savvy developers involved in the project, I'm pretty sure a lot of work is going into the "community" aspects of TVP with community meaning a lot more than just being able to chat about a new episode of Lassie.
A space to watch.
Posted by Matthew at 05:34 PM | Comments (3)
December 13, 2006
Le Web 3 takes a tumble
In the end I wasn't able to go to LeWeb3 and it looks as though that in itself was a wise decision. Many attendees are voicing their downright anger with the way the conference seems to have been turned into a French political event.
I echo with Ben Metcalfe on the subject of European technology conferences:
Which is a great shame, because Europe needs a good internet conference.
I'm thinking about going to Reboot next year - I've wanted to go for a couple of years but now I get to decide *grin*.
Update: Fallout crosses the Channel and reaches the UK.
Posted by Matthew at 04:06 PM | Comments (0)
December 10, 2006
PDF goes XML
Mars is the code name for the XML based representation of PDF, being developed by Adobe.
Posted by Matthew at 07:56 PM | Comments (0)
December 04, 2006
Zudeo launches
As mentioned on TechCrunch, Azureus launched Zudeo (Beta) this morning. A video site that is powered by the popular P2P client.
Basically, Zudeo is a site that will let you select the videos you want to see and then launches the Azureus client to download the files for viewing. There is currently no support for streaming so you can't watch anything until it has been downloaded.
Content providers can also use Zudeo to publish and share videos.
I just tried it out with an HD film of San Francisco and it worked as advertised. Of course the killer factor for any service like this will be the content that is available and the ease of use.
With $12 million in funding, I'm sure Zudeo will be an interesting venture to keep a close eye on as this market hots up.
Posted by Matthew at 10:27 AM | Comments (1)