Articles in the General Computing Category
Cool & Future Tech, Featured, General Computing, Headline »
To date, I have met only two people who actually “get” cloud computing and why it will be so transformational (Jeff Barr and Marc Mercuri). The term “cloud” is so overloaded as to become useless. What does Cloud Computing mean to you? Storing data in the “cloud”? Yawn, boring. Storing infrastructure in a data center? Sorry, we already do it. To me, one of the most compelling areas, which I have not seen in the media is…Software Agents. (warning, some blue-sky-what-if-out-of-the-box-dreaming ahead).
Software agents exist today but most are …
Featured, General Computing, Headline »
Good documentation is a critical component in any project. A common myth is that developers hate writing documentation but I don’t think this is true. Developers are happy writing the content but it’s the formatting that’s a major headache. Do you use Word, or HTML? Do you use a Content Database? or some other knowledge management system? Mix in multiple developers and you end up with inconsistent formatting. This kills the effort.
If you are looking to produce standards-based content which is consistent across authors, which can be converted …
Cool & Future Tech, Featured, Headline, html5, Things I've Made, Web Development, Web Experiments »
Irreducible Complexity – the world is too complex to have evolved! Let’s see…
HTML5 introduces the ability to perform multi-threading in the browser using Javascript through the notion of “Web Workers”. So far I have only seen examples of using workers to calculate very high prime numbers. I took a fresh look at these from the standpoint of genetic algorithms and applied it to the Traveling Salesman Problem (a classic). The results are a multi-threaded implementation of the TSP in Javascript capable of converging on a solution for up to 200 …
Cool & Future Tech, Featured, Headline, html5, Web Experiments »
Here I show how you can re-use your Canvas images as CSS backgrounds using another interesting feature coming in HTML5. You’ll need a browser supporting CSS3 and Canvas, Chrome, Opera, Safari or Firefox will do.
Cool & Future Tech, Featured, Headline, html5, Web Development, Web Experiments »
What do you get when you combine Digital Identity, MD5 Hashes, the Canvas element, JQuery and Quilting? Answer: My first JQuery plugin – “Identicon5″ for want of a better name.
Identicon5 is a JQuery plugin that takes an MD5 hash and converts it to a unique image. It’s called Identicon5 since it works through the HTML5 Canvas element.
Working Demo is here: http://francisshanahan.com/identicon5/test.html
Project page is here: http://francisshanahan.com/index.php/identicon5
JQuery Plugin page is here: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/identicon5
Identicons provide a nice visual representation of a user’s identity, that’s unique to that user, without divulging any …
Cool & Future Tech, Featured, Headline, Web Development »
I’ve recently been doing a lot of digging into quote/unquote “newer” browser capabilities, some of which are very cool. I will share what I’ve discovered as I go.
As always I’m using a little “test project” as my sandbox, this is a real-world website that’ll use all these features and I’ll share that when it’s done. So far I’m using oAuth/Twitter integration, ASP.NET MVC/JQuery as a basic stack and am adding in HTML5 and CSS3 features. The resulting site will not be pretty but the point for me is always to …
Cool & Future Tech, Featured, Headline, html5, Web Development, Web Experiments »
What is the new Canvas tag in HTML5 all about? And why would I use it over SVG (scalable vector graphics)? I took a look and here’s what I found out…
Cool & Future Tech, Featured, Headline, Web Development »
The other day I converted the current WordPress theme of this site from XHTML Transitional 1.0 to HTML5. It was fairly easy so here’s what I did.
An XHTML 1.0 transitional website was a great place to start. I used the trusty w3c validator located at http://validator.w3.com.
First thing was to get the Doctype fixed up: I changed
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
to
<!DOCTYPE html>
and bingo, we’re recognized as HTML5 instead of XHTML. Not compliant yet though. I removed the profile attribute from my head tag as so:
<head profile=”http://gmpg.org/xfn/11″> which wasn’t …
Featured, Web Development »
By the time you read this the site will have moved to a new hosting provider (Arvixe.com).
Webhost4life was a good host for many years but something changed recently. The site was moved to a new platform without warning.
It was ported to new servers, which I’m guessing are virtual. My SSL certificate disappeared in the process. My site worked slower…MUCH slower and was out of service numerous times. Not only that but the configuration changed. The new platform doesn’t support .NET 4.0 or the .NET Wildcard mapping in IIS. Support switched …
Featured, General Computing, Headline, Web Development »
As technology rambles on, we see an ever increase in the richness of client-side web-hosted applications. Web applications need to move beyond RIA and into fully fledged applications which are downloaded like a web page but have more and more thick-client-like behaviour such as client-side storage.
Yeah, yeah, we’ve heard this all before but the big question is when is it going to happen and how?
The technology that’ll power this is undoubtedly HTML5.
Looking at the desktop market-share we see that
Firefox – 31.26%
Internet Explorer 8 – 25.23%
Internet Explorer 6 …
