I’ve shied away from JS frameworks on the mobile platform primarily due to performance. I had not been able to find one that came close to native performance on Android. This changed last weekend when I tried out the Sencha Touch 2.0 dev preview. Performance is vastly improved over Touch 1.0. Animations and transitions are smooth, even on my Android 2.2 device and I was able to get up and running very fast.
Grab the Sencha Touch 2.0 Dev Preview here: http://www.sencha.com/blog/sencha-touch-2-developer-preview/
While I was able to get a basic app …

With all the recent Goruck-ness it’s time to throw out a tech post. I’ve been prepping for a NodeJS presentation recently and wanted a unique demo. I had also come across the experimental build of Opera which supports accessing the native webcam of a mobile device. So I threw these two technologies together and came up with a Javascript powered way to stream a video camera from a mobile device to a bunch of desktop (or mobile) clients.
HTML5 had originally laid out support for a new element (the “device” …

Last time [LINK] I discussed how virtual Worms could “eat” a picture, seeking out the lighter or darker areas as food and leaving a trail in their wake. I’ve dumped the source here: http://francisshanahan.com/demos/worms/test.html so you can interact, create your own images and figure out how it’s done. To be honest I haven’t had much time to clean this up as I’ve been focusing on other things and doing a bit of travel for work so be gentle.
Just enter a URL of an image and click “create drawing” to …

If you have not heard of Node.js (or “Node” as Ryan Dahl calls it) [LINK] it is more fun than a barrel full of monkeys and faster than stink. Node.js is built around the Google V8 javascript engine and aims to solve the issues of concurrency and blocking IO which are prevalent in todays web servers. It also improves over traditional OS threading by using an event model to handle requests. This leads to the ability to handle many more concurrent requests but also handle them faster since less memory …

Mycelium (plural mycelia) is the vegetative part of a fungus, consisting of a mass of branching, thread-like hyphae. Hyphae are any of the threadlike filaments forming the mycelium of a fungus. And YES I had to look both of those up.
Typically they travel and branch along a source of nutrients, following the source. I came across this awesome work of Ryan Alexander [LINK] whilst messing around with Processing one evening. Ryan used Processing which is similar to Java. Processing is a great sketch-language which makes whipping up graphical wonders …

Here’s a rundown of everything I ran into when hacking my way through android development.
Setup Eclipse, run the Android SDK installer, install the correct USB drivers and finally check your device setup with “adb devices”. Your device should be listed.
If you don’t have an android device, be prepared for the emulator to be extremely slow especially during startup/shutdown. Be sure to mark your emulator as “Snapshot” (accessible from the ADB/AVD SDK Manager-> Start button). Also, don’t connect your device whilst the emulator is running. Adb gets confused.
I had …

I’m a big fan of cross-pollinating disciplines, taking two silos which rarely interact and swapping best practices. In the field of medicine before prescribing any treatment there has to be a quantitative benefit demonstrated which outweighs the risks associated to that treatment. In many cases this is black and white: You broke your arm? Let me fix it with a cast. In cases of long-term illness such as cancer the lines get blurred: You have 15 tumors in multiple locations? Yes I can arrest their growth with chemotherapy but I …

If you are using AsciiDoc (and A2X) to convert documentation to ePub you’ll probably have run into a problem where a2x runs xsltproc and fails trying to locate the ePub docbook xsl style sheet.

This post shows you how to fix it.

A good architect stays current with technology to better enable their team’s productivity. One often overlooked area is that of CSS, there have been many improvements. In this post I record the steps taken to successfully setup SASS (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets) with Sencha Touch on Windows.
If you’re building a website with a non-trivial CSS file (aren’t we all),  SASS  makes managing the CSS a lot simpler.
“Sass is a meta-language on top of CSS that’s used to describe the style of a document cleanly and structurally, with more power than …

The otherwise excellent Kindle 3 doesn’t natively let you subscribe to RSS feeds. To me this is a major failing but we can write a simple service to aggregate feeds into an HTML file. If you email this file to @free.amazon.com Amazon will convert (for free) into an AZW file and deliver to your Kindle. Presto, free feed aggregation. This is essentially what http://kindlefeeder.com does and I recommend this service if you don’t feel like writing your own.
Since switching to WordPress I hadn’t looked at RSS in a …