Loading ...Posts filed under ‘geeky’
adobe flex
February 14th, 2008
i’m doing some more reading and researching on open laszlo. it’s kinda funny that i found a blog entry that compares open laszlo and adobe flex. i’ve just recently been to a jug meeting that presented flex. due to technology difficulties the presenter was not able to show us live the flex IDE. here’s a webcast for the flex IDE.
another interesting note. the two sides of RIA 
Do we really need it? vs. Why not?
Although I do not doubt that RIA is the future of web applications. I really don’t think the web is ready for it yet. For example, I was just thinking if I use a full scaled open laszlo app like this one, my firefox won’t even prompt to remember my password at the login. Browsers are still very much build for the traditional web apps. In the sense, ajax has the upper hand. It offers a more smooth transition. However, flash can be a lot more integrated.
Just getting my feet wet in Open Laszlo
February 14th, 2008
here’s my shoutBox written in openLaszlo frontend and PHP backend.
Try closing the shoutBox, it is animated
Click here if you do not see the flash embeded
So the idea of writing this simple application is just to get my feet wet in Open Laszlo. As we are moving to web 2.0, writing RIAs will be the future for web programmers. Many frameworks now have ajax plugin. I wrote my first ajax chat script in 2005 without any libraries. I’m sure it’s much easier to write one with plugins. But it was still nice to write one from scratch. You then truly understand how it works. Competing with adobe’s flex, google’s GWT (ajax framework), possibly Microsoft’s new silverlight there is an open source project called open laszlo. If you look at their demo applications, it seems to be pretty powerful. I think it’s a very interesting alternative to ajax so I gave it a shot.
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how fast does google crawl?
February 3rd, 2008
This blew my mind.
I submitted a topic on my message board to ask someone to preview a layout for me in mac. And about five minutes later I did a google search on “preview layout in mac,” that thread showed up in the first page of the search results.
UN……REAL!
OpenLaszlo
January 31st, 2008
This looks really cool. Maybe I will write a simple guestbook with it.
http://www.openlaszlo.org/demos
Bonus, found a tutorial for OpenLaszlo front end and php back end. Too bad it does require a java container to run. There are ways to get around that I guess.
I was watching this video produced by the author. It’s really very cool!!
dodo has been online for ten years
January 4th, 2008
the other night i realized something amazing. i’ve been to the online world for ten years. i got my first modem at home when i was 16 and i’m turning 26 soon. TEN YEARS.. that’s a long time. a very significant part of a life. from 16 to 26, a person can change so much. so i started to remember everything that happened in this ten years. i became so emotional i couldn’t sleep. perhaps every generation has its own thing that’s bound to change people’s lives and the internet is the one for mine.
now please excuse my poor english. i can never express my emotions in english the way i do in chinese. therefore i notice when i get emotional, i speak in chinglish.
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upgraded to wordpress 2.3
December 22nd, 2007
I’ve upgraded to wordpress 2.3 mainly to use their new sidebar widget feature. I thought it will be overly cool to not have to rewrite the sidebar.php for every theme. However, I’d like to have different sidebars for different views. Like the sidebar for my index page would look different than the sidebar for my single post. I haven’t yet figured out how to create additional sidebar for a theme. Do you know how to do it? Please share if you do. Thanks! N/M I figured out. It’s talked about here.
Consider the Ultimate Tag Warrior 3 plugin
If you are like me and use the UTW plugin, you might notice wordpress 2.3 now has its own native tags support. After the upgrade, I notice the old tags are not converted. I thought there must be already a way to convert them. Fortunately for us, wordpress 2.3 has also a built in way to convert your tags from the UTW plugin. Just go to your wordpress admin and look under Manage > Import. You will see the UTW import option.
where is IE7 refresh button?
December 18th, 2007
I can’t believe I googled on this. I thought IE7 took out the refresh button but in fact they just moved it. Moved it to the end of the address line. This also shows how little I used IE7 even tho I’ve been using Vista for over 9 months.
transparent PNG background
November 23rd, 2007
I finally found some time to put back the transparent PNG background tutorial. It’s by far the most requested tutorial from Dodo’s New World. People email me from this original post.
taskbar shuffle
November 1st, 2007
I used to use a free software called task arrange for windows XP to rearrange my buttons in the taskbar. But the software does not work in Vista. I found another software named taskbar shuffle today that allows you to drag the buttons around in your taskbar.
On top of that, it comes with two new features. If you love how middle button clicks close firefox tabs, you can now do the same to close buttons in the taskbar. You can also now easily rearrange the icons in your system tray if you wish
Very awesome. I highly recommend it if you are looking for something similar.
How to STYLE a table using CSS (JSF examples)
October 18th, 2007
Tables are very important parts of the web interface. They are (hopefully) used for tabular data. It is one of the oldest and most basic HTML presentation tag but in order for it to smoothly fit into the new CSS age, we need to look at the most practical way in correctly setting up the markup and the CSS.
Nowadays, we no longer wish to make separate instances of a similar application for different clients. We want to thrive on making a single application that will fit the needs of as many clients as possible. This task is very challenging. In my opinion the ideal situation is to have the clients and developers both understand the benefits of the end goal and compromise to reach it. As developers we can always dream to have a single application reach the level of customization we can accomplish with many separate applications and yet don’t confuse the heck out of the end users. While I am unsure if that’s ever a possibility, I know ways that might help get us closer.
One of the biggest challenges is to give each client who uses the same application their own unique UI presentation. This is no small task and I only plan to address a small issue you might encounter in accomplishing this task. That’s how to mark up a table with the most amount of UI flexibility.
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