Raphael is my new favourite Javascript library. I can’t believe that I’ve managed to learn it and write a simple vector-based drawing program in one afternoon. Click here to see my test Raphael library can be found here: http://raphaeljs.com/
This is pretty neat toy if you’re into chemistry. An interactive periodic table which shows properties, electron configuration and everything else you could think of – including a 3D render of the electron orbitals! http://ptable.com/
In the past I’ve written a couple of posts on how to get better magnification out of a digital camera. Well, you can get some pretty reasonably priced digital microscopes these days – and now I have one, the DigiTech QC3247. It has two modes, a 20X mode which is fairly useful and a 400X mode [...]
A few posts ago I mentioned that I was having trouble with my Class-D amplifier design. It’s been sitting on the shelf for a few weeks and I think it’s time to have another look at it. It’s amazing how you can notice new things when you take a fresh look at something. The problem [...]
Here’s a quick Javascript I whipped up to make an HTML5 video object track a second HTML5 video object. I needed to do this because I had two videos from a talk – a video of the speaker and a video of his powerpoint presentation, both as MP4 files. This script will trap events from [...]
I finally got around to upgrading to Dev Studio 2010 Express. It looks nice so far but I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the number of fundamental UI mistakes they have made with the documentation system. Have Microsoft learned nothing about user interface and user experience in the 18-odd years they have [...]
This bizarre iPhone compiler error message had me tearing my hair out this morning. I’ve finally figured it out. Here’s the scene: You have two classes, each class has an init method with the same name and taking the same parameters. Here’s an example: @interface myClass1 : NSObject { } -(myClass1 *)initWithName:(NSString *)name; @end @interface [...]
I’ve been doing a lot of GPS work lately. Here’s a little utility I wrote which I’d like to share with you all. It’s an NMEA checksum calculator written in PHP. Try it out here: http://siliconsparrow.com/nmeachecksum.php Here’s the source code: <html> <head> <title>NMEA Checksum Calculator</title> </head> <body> <h1>NMEA Checksum Calculator</h1> <?php // Simple NMEA Checksum [...]
Well here’s a curly issue I blundered into today. I was trying to replicate a Postgres database from an old server to a new one using pg_dump/pg_restore and found some errors like this: invalid byte sequence for encoding “UTF8″: 0×92 After some investigation it turns out the older version of Postgres defaults to ASCII encoding [...]
Here’s a real easy way to do close-up when you’ve only got a phone. All you need is a loupe which is a magnifying lens inside a tube, they are used a lot by jewellers, artists and well, people who work in micro-electronics like me. Just plonk it over the lens of your phone’s camera [...]