Food for thought from TheHuey

Having played with my new iPad for over a week, I have come to the conclusion that while it may not yet replace the laptop, it creates a new category of tech devices.

The large format screen and familiar iPhone OS were easy to get acquainted with. The touch interface and keyboard is much easier to thumb type with. The A4 CPU feels much faster and scrolling is quite smooth. I am still trying out different apps to find what works well for my needs but so far the redesigned mail application is truly an experience.

Netflix has a free application for the iPad and iPhone that allows subscribers to watch their instant watch library via the app. It is a great way to watch movies on the go or without turning on a computer. The built in Youtube app is also great for those who like independent content.

Drawing programs are another breed of fun applications. There are many to choose from, but a good price to feature app is ArtStudio. The $0.99 price belies the advanced features found on this app. With layer support (up to 3 layers), brushes and image import/export, you can save to your photos or email them to others.

News readers are another really excellent group of apps. Many newspapers have free apps allowing easy access to their content. I haven’t gotten a chance to check out most of them, but the WSJ app is pretty nice. The interface takes a little getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, it is far superior to searching thru the printed version. SkyGrid is another news aggregator and allows searching multiple sources for recent news.

Back to the post topic. Wordpress is a popular blogging software (which powers this blog), and this post is being written on their iPad app. The app is open source as well, so if you are interested in developing iPhone/iPad apps, you can start by checking out the code. My complaint about this app is the save feature is a little broken. This is my third attempt at writing this post. When you click the home button, it seems to recover your changes, but when you hit save, it reverts to the older version. So hit Save before you go play a tune.

-Huey

I was recently looking at different opportunities and saw a quite a few great companies doing wonderful things. Among them is Cooliris, previously known as PicLens. Their flagship product is a browser plugin which allows a very enticing scrolling view of media files. Images, videos, and music scroll by on the screen in an endless wall. Clicking on an image will zoom in to a higher resolution photo and a video file will zoom in and start playing. Needless to say this is a pretty cool little tool, but it’s a plugin which means the download stops a lot of potential users. But wait, they have a flash embed file which allows any website to embed the same experience on any web page! Let’s see how we can use this to show off our photos. continue reading…

I’m not sure how everyone else is using Zend_Layout, but I’m doing the following to render my navigation and footer links. It’s not the most DRY code, but works until I learn more about the framework.

In my Action file, I add actions to the stack for nav, footer, continue reading…

Someone asked how I get a db connection in my models using ZF1.5.1

Basically I have a ConfigDB singleton pattern that gets one db connection, then sets the default adapter so when I extend the Zend_DB_Table_Abstract class, the default connection gets carried around.

class ConfigDB {
static private $instance;
private function __construct() {
}
public static function getInstance() {
if (!ConfigDB::$instance) {
$params = array(
/* redacted */
);
ConfigDB::$instance = Zend_Db::factory('Mysqli', $params);
Zend_Db_Table_Abstract::setDefaultAdapter(ConfigDB::$instance);
}
return ConfigDB::$instance;
}
public static function selectDb($db) {
return ConfigDB::$instance->getConnection()->select_db($db);
}
}
ConfigDB::getInstance();

That grabs the connection and sets the default adapter. So in my model class I can do:
class Country extends Zend_Db_Table_Abstract {
protected $_name = 'countries';
protected $_primary = 'country_id';
function __construct($country = 1, $abbr = '')
{
parent::__construct();
}
}

That’s it

Monkey See. I was poking around Flickr recently and was amazed at the amount of ‘Interesting Photos’ that users have tagged. Some of the sunsets and scenery photos are absolutely stunning. Naturally, I wanted to fetch and use it as my desktop background. However, (understandably) Flickr doesn’t like people downloading (or referring directly to the images) so they have gone to some lengths to obfuscate and hide the actual image url. If you try to right-click and copy image source, you get an annoying little image called spaceball.gif. How does Monkey get around this?

Monkey Do. Having recently downloaded and installed the GreaseMonkey plugin for FireFox, I searched and couldn’t find a suitable userscript to handle the situation. Being the obsessive type, I went ahead and wrote two quick scripts to help me get at the actual image urls. One, ‘Flickr Img Src Exposer‘, exposes the image url on an individual photo. It adds a link ‘IMG LINK’ underneath the image allowing for easy copying. The second script, ‘Flickr Download Links‘, works when you are exploring the last 7 days’ interesting photos. I got tired of clicking on each photo and then saving the image, so I put a ‘LINK’ under each photo in the page. Clicking on the link takes you to a gallery of all the available image sizes. You can click on the download link to get the image downloaded or copy the images source from the image displayed. The largest size may not be available and you’ll find out if so after clicking on it. I chose not to display the largest image size to save Flickr some bandwidth.

Monkey no get spaceball.gif. This has proved somewhat useful for me and I thought I’d share it with others. You can find the scripts on ‘http://userscripts.org‘.

A preliminary demo for my hack is already installed on this site. My hack was to take any text selections a user makes and allow them to search Y! Shopping for related products. You can see it at work by selecting any word or words on this page and then by clicking the little blue box that comes up next to it. Although you might find an obvious shopping term such as nikon digital cameras much more relavant.

This can be improved very easily. For example, instead of only searching Y! Shopping, the initial box can be a drop down menu populated with results from a text analysis tool. Then the user can perform a web/news/product search by following the corresponding links.

A key benefit to this implementation, any web publisher only needs to include a single (two at the moment) javascript reference in their header to receive this functionality. They don’t have to link terms by hand, or do any backend work to support this. They get better user experience and a richer webpage essentially for free.

Here’s a plugin for people wishing to link to products within their blog. It’s simple to install and use and will allow you to add product titles and more by simply including <asin>1580420818</asin> in your posts or pages. I had written an earlier post but it was deleted accidentally. Here’s the shortened version.
continue reading…

Okay, so it doesn’t completely solve the puzzle yet. Using javascript to remove possible values from each block, the user can plug in hard values from the puzzle they are working on. The solver will try and arrive at a solution but you will be require to guess at some points. Improvements like a save point creation will be very helpful. Another improvement is to have the solver auto create a save point and branch until it gets to the final answer(s).

If you don’t know what sudoku puzzles are, check out sudoku

Here is my javascript solution to sudoku puzzles

Update: I’ve modified my sudoku solver to be a generic sudoku puzzle. You can play it for free at www.numbercrazy.com.