The Fever of Phineas » Web Tech

Compound Interest Calculator Air App

admin — Mon, 19 May 2008 02:07:54 +0000

Here’s a little application I threw together — thoroughly unsexy but I needed it and it was a simple experiment in Adobe Air development (HTML/Javascript). Does nothing more than calculate effect of compounding interest on some initial amount — could be used for loan or investment calculations.

Please upgrade your Flash Player
This is the content that would be shown if the user does not have Flash Player 6.0.65 or higher installed.

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Vids and sounds

admin — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 18:54:04 +0000

On old complaint: videos and audio effects on web pages should never automatically start to play. They should always have a start button and wait for a user to click play. Auto-start behavior would be as if your TV just started playing whatever channel it is on every time you glance in the general direction of the TV. That’s ridiculously annoying. Web designers should code the media to wait for user to explicitly perform a click. Better yet, browsers ought to allow you to control this behavior as a browser preference.

For now I’ll try this Firefox extension:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1765

Boatmen

admin — Sat, 19 May 2007 16:41:26 +0000

I still love this image of Ken’s. He drew it and I animated back when animated gifs were the thing of the future, and Web 2.0 was but a sparkle in your mother’s eye.

Who are they? Where are they going? Who’s that guy up front? What is that precious cargo?

Byte Searching

admin — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 15:14:55 +0000

I occassionally have good ideas, and the better the idea, the more likely some else already thunk it.

Please tell me if this is a good idea, and whether you know it to have been thunk.

I was trying to find an image on the web. I saw the image, but I wanted to find out whether that same image was already out there, or what its origin might be. I know I can search google images by key word, which I guess looks at file name, or perhaps image tag/link data or other contextual data to support a keyword search. But I had no keywords to go by, so I thought it would make sense to be able to submit the actual image to a search from, and find all instances of web page which hosted that exact same jpg. So it would essentially be searching by the serial data that make up the file rather than human supplied tag data. I know this could be problematic as the same image could exist in many different formats, but it still seems like it would be useful to find exact matches by bytes. This would make as much sense on a local machine as on the internet.

?

I guess the obvious flaw here is that for such a search engine to work, it would have to index all the bytes for all the hosts it intends to provide results for, rather than the comparatively cheap text only indexing they do now.

LSD: The Geek’s Wonder Drug?

admin — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 16:03:12 +0000

Wired News: LSD: The Geek’s Wonder Drug?

Simple Ajax Test

admin — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 01:54:23 +0000

Anchor Brewery Date Decoder

My little SAJAX prototype.

Can’t get it to work on my Palm Blazer browser, though.

Wiki Tooltips

admin — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 09:18:03 +0000

Cool, I added some new bells and whistles to the Fever here. Using a combination of MTMacro, MTIfEmpty, and Overlib, I have created a macro which will alow me to easily add tooltips to Amazon or Wikipedia.

Here’s a tooltip for the Wikipedia entry on Wikipedia itself: Wikipedia (pronounced as [ˌwiˑkiˈpidi.ə] or [ˌwɪki-], also [-ɐ]) is a multi-lingual Web-based free-content encyclopedia. It is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing articles to be added or changed by anyone with an internet connection. The project began on January 15, 2001 as a complement to the expert-written Nupedia, and is now operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. The English-language version of Wikipedia currently has 849,313 articles. Wikipedia has steadily risen in popularity,[1] and has spawned several sister projects, such as Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and Wikinews. Wikipedia is widely considered an alternative to commercial encyclopedias.

Here’s the macro definition that I use to set up the custom tag:

								

I have that set up as a “module” (reusuable piece of Movable Type template code).

Here’s an example of what the entry would contain where I want to place the tooltip:

Some content including HTML pasted in from Wikipedia