Expecting Rain

Over the weekend I took it upon myself to try creating a Firefox extension. I was lacking for a good idea, so I donated some time to my company and created an extension that would ease the use of one of our internal applications. As such, I can't post it publicly, but I was very impressed with how easy it was to create.

Firefox extensions are basically an xml file to describe the UI (.xul), a couple RDF files to help the installation process, and JavaScript. There are many tutorials on the web you can search for. The one the got me started was found here.

Here is an interesting link about the beta? release of Java 6. I've really been looking forward to this release due to the hype it is getting.

Source: http://headius.blogspot.com/2006/11/java-se-6-passes-final-jcp-approval.html

Due to our hectic schedule and the low priority this project has, we're not exactly burning up the keyboard coding it, but we are having fun.

Code count:

Line count for src......     484
Line count for proc.....       9
Line count for util.....     176
Line count for unit.....     376
Line count for web......       9
Line count for misc.....     153
--------------------------------
Total...................    1207

Started
.....................
Finished in 0.661805 seconds.

21 tests, 107 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors

Jim Plush posted an interesting article on memory management for Firefox web apps. I've not tested his findings yet, but they look pretty good. In this world of fancy DOM modifications in a browser, memory management becomes a huge issue.

Source: http://www.litfuel.net/plush/?postid=148

As I've mentioned in the past, I'm working on a project using ruby. Here are the line count stats as of this afternoon:

Line count for src......     305
Line count for proc.....       9
Line count for util.....     176
Line count for unit.....     235
Line count for web......       9
Line count for misc.....     147
--------------------------------
Total...................     881

Here are the unit test stats:

Started
.............
Finished in 0.192702 seconds.

13 tests, 56 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors

So far, so good.

For the curious, here is the bookmarklet I wrote thanks largely to Google:

click here

Note: This only works right now in Firefox, but the concept would be similar for other browsers, also be sure to select some text on your page before clicking on the link. I have no error checking in place, just a prototype.

Today I was toying with the concept of how to create a bookmarklet that would scrape a page pulling text, formatting, and photos to make a copy of the selected information on an active page. Basically a script that could be used with a web clippings type application. I have no immediate use for this, but wanted to explore the strength of bookmarklets. As I sat trying to figure out how to get this information from a page, I realized that Google Notebook does this with their Firefox extension. I was able to look at the code for their extension which is written in javascript and come up with the functionality to do this.

Learning from the web doesn't just entail doing Google searches and finding someone who tells you what to do, but it also provides wonderful examples of implemented technology on every page. What a great resource.

Gruff is a very simple graphing library for Ruby. It creates very simple, clean graphs with very little coding. I've been searching for something like this for quite sometime now.

Here is a sample graph of the hours per week logged on a project I'm working on along with 2 other employees:


Check out the Gruff sample gallery (link)


Note: Gruff is easy to install, but the required dependancies were quite tricky. I was warned on the dependancies websites that it wasn't easy, but being cocky as I am, I went ahead and ignored them and tried to figure it out myself. Many hours later, I found myself reading the instructsions found at http://rmagick.rubyforge.org/install-osx.html which then worked. One problem I ran into however was that I had to uninstall what I had already tried by running "make uninstall" from the various libraries I already tried to install :)

I read an article on Ajaxian yesterday about an online organizer. It seemed very promising. There was a nice little video of the service they will supposedly provide which looked great. The just of the service provided by Scrybe would be to have a centralized place one could hold their calendar, todos, and notes/scraps from websites. I hope they can pull it off.

Source: http://ajaxian.com/archives/scrybe-online-organiser-with-true-offline-support

It has been a while since I've written about the Ruby project we are undertaking here. Reporting its progress has been lost in the shuffle of writing about bugs and other things.

The project is going well. We're adapting to some of the smaller things about Ruby such as adopting naming conventions (http://wiki.rubygarden.org/Ruby/page/show/RubyStyleGuide), RDoc, and most importantly unit testing. I feel we are writing very clean code right now. It seems that with Ruby you can focus more on the task at hand and proper algorithms rather than language semantics.

I'm very pleased.