How-to: Android Favorite Button (the right way, this time)

2010-04-14T17:18:00.002+03:00

My last blog post is about how to make a favorite button in an Android application. It is wrong, those drawables should not be used independently. Instead, the @android:drawable/btn_star resource should be used, as it is a state-drawable and contains all the possible states (checked, unchecked, checked and focused, checked and clicked, ...). The proper way to use this is:

Android Favorite Button

2010-04-12T18:30:00.002+03:00

I love Android. What I hate about it, though, is that they don't tell you how to make standard-looking UIs. For example, I had to dig through source codes to find the @android:style/ButtonBar style that you can use as the style on pretty much any layout (RelativeLayout, LinearLayout, etc.) which provides a nice background graphic for your button bars. Anyway, today I discovered another such

How to properly write JavaScript libraries

2010-04-02T22:50:00.003+03:00

I've seen JavaScript code written in all the possible ways. The reason there are so many ways to do it is because JavaScript is incredibly flexible. But that flexibility makes people write really ugly code. Examples of ugly, unreadable, error-prone code: (function(window, undefined) { var myLibrary = (function () { var someProp = "..."; function someFunc() { ... var

Rhythmbox "Rock" EQ Preset

2010-03-16T11:57:00.002+02:00

I recently helped a friend beta test a Winamp plugin, so I had to spend time in Windows. While listening to my music in Winamp, I chose the Rock preset in the equalizer. And my, I felt enlightened. The sound was at least ten times better than the flat sound Rhythmbox produces on my usual Ubuntu system. My music had been revived. When I went back to Ubuntu, I hated the sound. So I spent some time

How to properly use @font-face

2010-03-15T23:51:00.002+02:00

I've spent some time playing around with some of the new features in CSS3. Thankfully, these are pretty well implemented in modern browsers (read: not in IE). One feature that I really like is the @font-face rule. Finally, no more cross-platform rendering problems, with buttons that appear wider / narrower than they should and so on. However, I couldn't find anywhere how to specify different

Another Internet Explorer annoyance that you might not be aware of

2010-02-20T14:00:00.003+02:00

Recently, I've been using display: inline-block in CSS a lot. It's a very useful feature -- it allows you to have a fix-sized (e.g. 100x20px, or just fixed width / height) element that is inline, incredibly useful when doing precision design work. However! Internet Explorer 7 cannot handle display: inline-block on an element that is natively a block element. So, for instance, if you try to use

Sleeping with Linux is dangerous

2010-02-18T14:36:00.004+02:00

Seriously, using the sleep function with Linux is dangerous. I just put my laptop on sleep for a while, woke it up and apparently everything was fine. But only apparently, because the system fan (you know, the one that keeps your laptop from melting) lost its "medium" speed. That means that it wouldn't run unless it had to go on max. So, after half an hour of peace and quiet, the fan started

Windows 7 Permissions

2009-12-15T22:30:00.001+02:00

I find the way that this dialog is worded very, very funny:

Google funnies

2009-11-23T22:06:00.002+02:00

I really think these kinds of things are injected by Google as easter eggs:

DOMElement innerHMTL

2009-11-22T17:56:00.003+02:00

Currently, there's no built-in method in the DOMElement that gets the inner/outerHTML of the element. There are a few solutions in the comments and on other blogs, but they loop through all the childNodes in order to get the innerHMTL. Getting the outerHTML is much easier (no looping) and just as useful: function outerHTML($e) { $doc = new DOMDocument(); $doc->appendChild($doc->importNode

Use ssh-copy-id on a different port

2009-11-18T18:15:00.003+02:00

ssh-copy-id has known problems with handling non-standard ports (e.g. connecting to a different port than 22). To overcome this issue, use a command like: $ ssh-copy-id "user@host -p 6842"

a + b in MIPS assembly

2009-11-11T22:54:00.004+02:00

We're just starting to learn assembly at college, so here's my first program. It reads to numbers, sums them up and displays the result. Not really rocket science, but good for a first program without any previous practice: .data prompt1: .asciiz "a: " prompt2: .asciiz "b: " newline: .asciiz "\n" .text main: # print prompt 1 li $v0, 4 la $a0, prompt1 syscall # read in $

A brainfuck interpreter

2009-11-04T21:30:00.002+02:00

In case you didn't know, there's an esoteric programming language named brainfuck. It is quite simple and I thought I should make an interpreter for it, in C. It is nowhere near the sub-200 bytes compilers others have made, but it's a good exercise. Well, here's my solution: /* A brainfuck intepreter written in C, complete with error checking so you don't hurt yourself while, uh,

Windows 7 editions

2009-10-23T00:02:00.001+03:00

Did you know there's an entire article on Wikipedia about the various Windows 7 editions? Talk about confusing.

RhythmToWeb moved to Google Code

2009-10-11T00:16:00.002+03:00

I have moved the RhythmToWeb project to Google code. Apart from a small bugfix (it used to send empty requests every x seconds when Rhythmbox was first started), I have also added a couple of server-side examples.

Apache nice URLs without mod_rewrite

2009-10-10T11:58:00.004+03:00

I recently noticed a peculiar behavior in Apache. It seems that if I have, for example, a file /var/www/hello.php, the following URLs will load the same file: http://localhost/hello.php http://localhost/hello http://localhost/hello/goodbye/ After a bit of researching, I found that this behavior is dictated by MultiViews, so if you have that option turned on on your server you can practically

RhythmToWeb Updated

2009-10-05T19:33:00.005+03:00

I've recently received an e-mail from Aaron Hill, about some modifications he's done to RhythmToWeb. I took his idea of storing information about more than one song, and adapted it in my own way. You can now use the buttons under the song information on the right to browse the last 5 songs I've played. It will also automatically refresh, so if you wait around long enough you'll see it switch to a

Android Market Share

2009-09-24T00:10:00.003+03:00

@wbm Agreed that android needs more market share before you should care.Do you think that's true? I beg to differ. Getting your foot in early can earn you recognition on a new platform pretty easily. Let me explain: if you were to develop some awesome app for the iPhone right now, you would find it at the bottom of an over saturated App Store, amongst mostly mediocre products which no one bothers

Java: parse XML from the web smartly

2009-09-22T22:21:00.005+03:00

Up until recently, I used to fetch the entire XML document before parsing it. I've found that that can be extremely unhealthy for your application, especially if you're developing on Android, where resources are scarce and the GC is very unforgiving. The optimal way to parse XML is to parse it while it's loading, so that resources are freed much more efficient. Here's a snippet of code that

Java Package Mayhem

2009-09-20T01:40:00.002+03:00

Here's how a 350-some line Android Activity looks like, in terms of imports: import java.io.StringReader; import java.net.URLEncoder; import javax.xml.parsers.SAXParser; import javax.xml.parsers.SAXParserFactory; import org.xml.sax.Attributes; import org.xml.sax.InputSource; import org.xml.sax.XMLReader; import org.xml.sax.helpers.DefaultHandler; import android.app.Activity; import

Fetch HTTP content in Java

2009-09-20T01:32:00.003+03:00

Since programming for Android, I hit my head against every possible snag in the Java programming language. For example, I have to fetch the content of a URL. In PHP, I'd simply do: $data = file_get_contents($url); But no, in Java, no such easiness for you! I had to write my own helper function: public static String getUrlContent(String sUrl) throws Exception { URL url = new URL(sUrl);

SVN for an Android project

2009-09-14T16:49:00.002+03:00

I've started working on the Android project, and I'm using SVN as my version control system (I'm the only one working on it, so I'm actually using it more as a backup and for keeping track of things). A small tip when doing this is to not simply add everything in your project directory to the repository. In one word, don't run: $ svn add * I did so, and three revisions later I was unable to

Spam

2009-09-10T10:58:00.002+03:00

Funniest spam I ever got: Hello My Dear How are you? i hope all is well with you, i hope you may not know me, and i don\'t know who you are, My Name is Miss morin khalifa i am just broswing now i just saw your email it seams like some thing touches me all over my body, i started having some feelings in me which i have never experience in me before, so i became interested in you, l will also like

Playing with HMTL5 Drag & Drop

2009-09-08T00:08:00.002+03:00

I'm just toying around with HTML5-related things, to prepare myself so I don't get smacked in the head when it starts rolling out. The most interesting feature, in my opinion, is support for Drag & Drop. What I find most interesting about this feature is being able to drag & drop files from your desktop / file browser into a webpage. Unfortunately, we are unable to upload files this way just yet

Folding@Home on Ubuntu Server

2009-09-03T01:21:00.004+03:00

I recently started folding @ home on my Jaunty-based server (which runs 24/7 with not so much activity). What I have noticed is that they do not provide a proper init.d script for it. This is the default one they tell you to use: # chkconfig: 345 93 14 # description: will start FAH client as a service cd /path/to/folding ./fah6 -verbosity 9 < /dev/null > /dev/null 2>&1 & This doesn't seem to work

Verifying a hostname / IP address with PHP

2009-09-01T23:15:00.002+03:00

If you ever need to verify a hostname or an IP address in PHP, here's how: // try to determine the IP address of the hostname // if the hostname is actually an IP, gethostbyname() will return it unchanged // if the hostname cannot be resolved, it will have the same behavior $ip = gethostbyname($address); // check if the resulting IP is valid if ($ip !== long2ip(ip2long($ip))) { echo "Invalid

Captcha

2009-08-17T14:57:00.004+03:00

Here's a custom image captcha I just made. What's cool about it is that it's transparent (PNG), so it 'blends' into the background. To suit different backgrounds, it has two settings - dark and light - which you set according to the background color of the page you want to put it on. Here's a picture that demonstrates this; you can see that the captcha is completely unreadable when put on the

Ubuntu One

2009-08-15T21:10:00.006+03:00

Ubuntu One is a file hosting service provided by Canonical (the company that develops Ubuntu). You are given 2GB for free and 10GB for $10/month. The way it works is that you create an account, install a client and associate it with your account. After that, the client will monitor your $HOME/Ubuntu One folder and synchronize its contents with the Ubuntu One servers. The main idea of it is that

Pagination with Smarty

2009-08-15T02:13:00.004+03:00

I've spent the last hour or two on this. It's a Smarty template that takes an associative array with these keys: curPage: The number of the current pageurl: The url to which it will make the links. It replaces "%x" with the page number in the URL, so this can be something like /news/page-%x/ or /news.php?page=%xtotalPages: The number of total pages. It also has a few variables that tweak its

PHP Server Uptime

2009-08-14T19:25:00.005+03:00

This is a pretty simple way of getting the server uptime using PHP. Note that this only works on Linux (and probably other Unix-like OSes that store the machine uptime in /proc/uptime). Straight to the code: function get_uptime() { $file = @fopen('/proc/uptime', 'r'); if (!$file) return 'Opening of /proc/uptime failed!'; $data = @fread($file, 128); if ($data === false) return '

GeoIP MySQL

2009-08-13T03:55:00.003+03:00

A while ago I found this great article on how to import the free GeoIP database into MySQL. It provides a really simple way to look up IPs and see what country they are from using a MySQL database. It is also fairly optimized for size (the GeoIP .csv is 7.9MB and the MySQL tables are 1.9MB). Vincent (the author of the article) also provides some PHP snippets that look up IPs, just to get the feel

Ubuntu: Home Sweet Home

2009-08-12T00:43:00.004+03:00

Back to Ubuntu from my temporary Windows usage. Man, it's good to be back. Have to go restore all my backups now, buh bye.

Notepad++ and Python

2009-08-06T01:51:00.002+03:00

I know, I know, I'm using Windows. But it's just temporary, I just felt like playing some video games. Anyway, Notepad++ is awesome, I must say. And I wanted to use it for Python developing (I hate that IDLE Python comes with). To set up Notepad++ for Python developing I had to: Create a batch script that would run a python script and then wait for a key (so that the terminal (or, command line)

Rant on Eclipse

2009-08-06T00:25:00.004+03:00

If you at least once thought about programming in Java, you must have heard about Eclipse. Well, I'm playing around with the Android SDK, learning Java at the same time. While using Eclipse to code for Android is very easy and straightforward, Eclipse itself is a monstrous bloat of an application. I barely have one project and five files open and Eclipse is using up 400MB of memory. Don't believe

Small bandwidth optimization trick

2009-08-05T00:34:00.004+03:00

I've been helping my brother out with his project (http://tastekid.com) and learning some new tricks in the meantime. One thing that bugged me is that we have a lot of JavaScript files, because we like to keep things separated (one file for the tooltip, one for the autocomplete feature etc.). While this makes developing easier, it's pretty bad for production because it drastically increases the

Google is really open minded

2009-05-14T22:23:00.003+03:00

I use Google Reader to read a few feeds. And it has this nifty little box called Recommended for you. Usually, that box is full of Python, PHP, Linux-related feeds. But today, something new: a website called rule #34 - If it exists there IS porn of it. Wow. I swear I don't have any kinky feeds in my reader :-\.

Upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04

2009-05-14T15:30:00.004+03:00

1) The Desktop As always, I did a full reinstall on the desktop. I don't like having old packages and configuration files in my system, so I always to a fresh install no matter what. However, I have a /home partition, so all my settings, e-mails, documents, work is saved (I still do backups, just in case). Installing was a breeze (as always with Ubuntu), so here are my impressions (it's already

RhythmToWeb

2009-05-02T17:59:00.008+03:00

Attention: RhythmToWeb has moved to Google Code RhythmToWeb is a plugin for Rhythmbox (a music player for the GNOME desktop). It sends information about the currently playing song over the web. The information is sent as a series of GET variables: artist, title, album, genre, year, duration (seconds). The configuration dialog:URL: This is the URL that is going to be called.Interval: This is NOT

Python: alternative class initializers

2009-05-02T14:10:00.004+03:00

You may notice that some Python modules have classes that define more than one initializer. Why you may want this is if you have more than one input method of initializing it. For example, you can have an RPC class (just an example) which can take both XML and JSON arguments when initializing. There are more than one way of doing this, but having a couple of initializers is the most beautiful way

Transmission BitTorrent on a headless server

2009-04-24T23:30:00.002+03:00

I never would have thought installing a WebUI-based torrent client could be so easy. I have a 24/7 running server, on Ubuntu 8.10 Server Edition, so I thought I should try to install a BitTorrent client so I can download torrents even when my PC is turned off, so I can add torrents while away etc. The client of choice was Transmission. I use this on the desktop, too, and the only down side I can

Pygmentool

2009-04-16T22:48:00.002+03:00

I have written my first Python web application, yay! The purpose of the application is to help people post highlighted code on their blogs using Pygments. I have written an article on this before, but it implied using Pygments from the command line, which is unpleasant for most people. Also, not all people have Python available (like, say, Windows users?) and don't feel like installing it just

The nature of the HTTP protocol

2009-04-12T22:06:00.007+03:00

When first learning web programming and web design, a very basic thing it is good to understand from the very beginning is the nature of the HTTP protocol. That's because everything you are going to do will be based on this protocol. HTTP is a "connect-and-disconnect" type of protocol. Here's a hopeful diagram (which I will explain shortly): I will try my best to explain this simple yet very

A possible new look

2009-04-10T13:28:00.003+03:00

I made a Blogger theme concept. I'm not sure it can actually be implemented in Blogger, but I'll try (I have to read the documentation on Blogger templates). So far I have just an image: Here's the Inkscape SVG concept. Hope I'll get the time to look into Blogger template docs and make this happen in the near future.

Smart Ajax / Javascript Paths

2009-04-05T13:42:00.005+03:00

I always wondered how heavy Ajax applications (like Facebook) make use of those smart paths. When I browse on Facebook, I can see that the actual URL is always the same, usually http://facebook.com/home.php, but after that comes a "#" and then a path, for example http://facebook.com/home.php#/profile.php etc. I had a look with Firebug and found that there are no magic Javascript events going on

Facebook funnies

2009-04-05T12:33:00.005+03:00

An excerpt from a Facebook Javascript file: function URI(uri) { if (uri===window) { Util.error('what the hell are you doing'); return; } // ... Hah! I found this while trying to figure out how they do the smart Ajax urls (like http://example.com/page.html#/smart/path) and it seems they just check from time to time (about five times a second) if the document location

Keywords from a string

2009-04-04T18:11:00.005+03:00

For a project of mine, I had to get the most used X words from a string (mainly an HTML document), in Python. I took some inspiration from this post, but added quite a few things to it (besides translating it to Python, duh). Here are a few optimizations I made: Parse only the content between and ; Remove any scripts or stylesheets as they will contain words that repeat a lot of

Your own PHP framework

2009-04-02T22:04:00.006+03:00

This article is based on the previous "Perfect PHP Setup" one. I will explain everything here again, so you don't have to read it. This tutorial will show you how you can build your own PHP framework from scratch. You might ask yourself, why do that when there are so many third party frameworks out there? Well, here are a few reasons I can think of off the top of my head: You understand how

Perfect PHP Setup

2009-04-01T21:53:00.007+03:00

PHP is the first 'serious' language I've learned. I fiddled around with it quite a lot, and came up with this 'perfect' setup. What I mean by this is that this will give you full flexibility, easy adding of modules and native "nice URLs". First of all, I'm using Apache as my webserver. If you're using something else, the .htaccess part might not work for you. Now, this RewriteRule is gold:

Syntax Highlighting on Blogger with Pygments

2009-03-31T21:36:00.008+03:00

It seems that Blogger is not a "by coders for coders" type of service. Not at all, actually. Currently, there's no easy way to post syntax highlighted code on your blog. Although, this blog is pretty new, I have a hunch I'll be posting bits of code quite often, so I thought I should find a way to do it, and do it right. Most of the solutions on the web today imply the use of complicated

The "Now Playing" Feature

2009-03-31T11:52:00.004+03:00

Notice the "Now Playing" widget in the right sidebar? Just goes to show the awesome things you can do in Python in one evening. It's basically a Rhythmbox plugin that sends information about the currently playing song over HTTP. A small PHP script takes that and writes a simple Javascript file that just does a document.write() which is then included in the sidebar. Awesome! :-) I still have a

Why Oracle is stupid

2009-03-29T22:38:00.003+03:00

We're learning Oracle SQL in school. Now, this may seem a good thing, but it is not, unfortuantely. For one, the Oracle "enhanced" SQL blows. It is completely un-standard and to quote an experienced programmer: "If you want to learn assbackward SQL, learn Oracle". To quote another experienced programmer, "It's a great hole in the ground into which money can be poured". The only good thing about

A Programmer's Ride

Android AdMob & ProGuard

Android: implementing a notification service the right way

Save image in instance state (Android)

Android Title Marquee

Java vs. Python: fetching URLs

Java "Hello, World!" 6x slower than Python

Server 'kitty' shut down

Android YouTube Intent