James McParlane's Blog

Back From Remix 07 – Popfly/Silverlight/Visual Studio 2008

Posted on June 29, 2007 by James McParlane

It went great! My presentation went great (as far as I could tell). I spent most of the conference recovering from the Sydney Flu – so I suspect I behaved like a freak half of the time.

Met some great people and subscribed to their blogs..

http://delicategeniusblog.com/?p=464

http://blog.bluecog.co.nz/archives/2007/06/26/remix-part-iii/

Silverlight WPF and Visual Studio 2008 demos were all great.

Trialing Expression for Web here with a few developers in an attempt to move on from Dreamweaver and Homepage. Also keeping an eye on the Eclipse Web developers extensions.

The star of the show was Popfly. I built something very similar in 2001 (the inferred parameter binding seemed identical) but it was all XML and object tree tree based. We never got to the cool drag and connect stage of the IDE before “the accident“. It was the original incarnation of MetaWrap and RIDE was the “Rapid Internet Development Environment” that let you mash together any interface wrapped by the MetaWrap object model. Oh well 🙂

At WebJamm someone used Popfly to made Twittervision in 30 seconds by dragging three widgets together. Suggest you look on You-tube for videos if you don’t have an invite already.

Web 2.0 Panel

The Web 2.0 panel was good. Earned my “Cameron Reilly Wearing Sunglasses Inside” spotting badge.

The panel failed to explain why nobody can agree on what Web 2.0 is.

My answer. Five years after the dot com boom settled, everyone in the Internet industry noticed a change.

Developers noticed the swing towards Agile, unit testing, testability. So they got Ruby On rails, XP, CI and Agile.

Designers noticed the developing increase in importance towards User Experience so many of them went off to become “Information Architects”

Business Owners noticed the swing towards user generated content and social networking. Others noticed the swing towards web hosted applications.

The Public noticed that they were using certain regularly and could not imagine a world without these services did not exist. They were useful. Web 1.0 become bedrock.

..to name just a few roles.

The point is, for each group there was a major change so when the line in the sand was drawn, Web 2.0 was different things to different people.

Because of all of the above. The web went from having great potential, to actually being an essential part of social and business life.

PS: for MK 🙂

Posted in Rants, Web2.0 | 1 Comment

And then we can do it for cars too please?

Posted on June 29, 2007 by James McParlane

“Started by Google and Intel, the Climate Savers Computing Initiative brings together industry, consumers, government, and conservation organizations to significantly increase the energy efficiency of computers and servers. Believe it or not, the average desktop PC wastes over half the power delivered to it! Servers are slightly more efficient but still squander about one-third of the power consumed. This wasted electricity unnecessarily increases the cost to power computers and also increases the emissions of greenhouse gases. Improving the energy efficiency of computers is one of the most cost-effective ways to reduce electricity consumption and the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.”

Link

With any luck all new PCs sold within 5 years will be running from a 12V standard power bus.

If one entire industry can get its act together, make a fundamental change and both save money and the environment then maybe there is hope for us all.

Posted in Politics | Leave a comment

Issues With Some WMV profiles in Silverlight

Posted on June 28, 2007 by James McParlane

Found a few bugs in the way that Silverlight1.0 plays video.

Will perform definitive tests tomorrow – but looks like a pixel aspect ration that is not 1:1 will prevent video from rendering. This is a shame because there is a trick you can do that radically reduces video bandwidth if you tweak your PAR.

Of other note…

Sometimes audio does not stop playing after the browser is closed.

ASF files seem to work. Extension does not matter as long as codec is supported.

At one point during the test, all video playback in Silverlight (in IE) failed completely. Was still able to play video in WMP. Was able to recover after closing all instances of IE.

Behavior	Rate	Aspect Ratio	Dimensions	Audio	Video
No Vision – Just Audio	371 Kbps	21:17 actual, 1.79:1 displayed	??	Windows Media Audio 9.1 48 kbps, 44 kHz, mono (A/V) 2-pass CBR	Windows Media Video 9
Good	305 Kbps	4:3	320 x 200	Windows Media Audio 9.1 20 kbps, 22 kHz, stereo 1-pass CBR	Windows Media Video V8
Good	1.06 Mbps	4:3	320 x 200	Windows Media Audio 9 64 kbps, 44 kHz, stereo 2-pass VBR	Windows Media Video 9
Good	340 Kbps	4:3	320 x 200	Windows Media Audio 9.1 32 kbps, 32 kHz, stereo (A/V) 1-pass CBR	Windows Media Video 9
Black Square	340 Kbps	4:3	240 x 180	ACELP.net 16 Kbits/s, 16000Hz, Mono	Windows Media Video V8
Good	98 Kbps	1.46:1	350 x 240	Windows Media Audio 9 32 kbps, 22 kHz, stereo (A/V) 1-pass CBR	Windows Media Video V7
White Square – Just Audio	218 Kbps	13:10 actual, 1.33:1 displayed	208 x 160	Windows Media Audio 9.1 32 kbps, 22 kHz, stereo (A/V) 1-pass CBR	Windows Media Video V7
White Square, No Audio.	248 Kbps	4:3	320 x 240	WM-AUDIO 32 kbps, 22 kHz, stereo	Windows Media MPEG-4 Video V3
White Square, No Audio.	222 Kbps	1.78:1	428 x 240	Windows Media Audio 9.1 32 kbps, 32 kHz, stereo (A/V) 1-pass CBR	Windows Media Video 9
Good	1.22 Mbps	1.76:1	480 x 272	Windows Media Audio 9 64 kbps, 44 kHz, stereo (A/V) 1-pass CBR	Windows Media Video 9
White Square, No Audio.	1.08 Mbps	5:4 actual, 4:3 displayed	720 x 576	Windows Media Audio 9 VBR Quality 75, 44 kHz, stereo 1-pass VBR	Windows Media Video 9
Good	236 Kbps	1.77:1	340 x 192	Windows Media Audio 9.1 32 kbps, 32 kHz, stereo (A/V) 1-pass CBR	Windows Media Video V7
White Square, No Audio.	368 Kbps	4:3	384 x 288	Windows Media Audio V7 40 kbps, 32 kHz, stereo	Windows Media MPEG-4 Video V3

Posted in Silverlight | Leave a comment

RIP 144 Cleveland Street – The Old EBOM Warehouse

Posted on June 23, 2007 by James McParlane

Sadly the space where I and five other like minded people established the electronic arts space “The Evil Brotherhood Of Mutants”, is being redeveloped.

This ends what must be close to 20 years of continuous artspace use.

The Evil Brotherhood Of Mutants (EBOM) was the location of some legendary parties, some claim it was one long party. We straddled the changeover from FIDO net to the Internet as the main enthusiast backbone for email. At first the media thought the internet was very uncool. We gave away recycled computers, email accounts and web-space to many people over the years. The modems always ran hot. The render farm kept us warm at night. We made toast with a soldering iron.

Many used the experience gained there to launch careers in the arts and IT.

Seems that EBOM was where the term “doof” was coined. I know it was contemporary to EBOM. I know I heard it from Luke Dearnley from Sub-Base snarl first in his car riding down Elizabeth street. Will be happy if its true.

Some history.

Clan Analogue – Early History

144 Cleveland Street Sydney

1995 – Call To Action From Fine Art Forum

Signing off – Magneto

Posted in Me Myself and I, Music & Art, Nostalgia for Misspent Youth | Leave a comment

JavaScript Macro Recorder

Posted on June 22, 2007 by James McParlane

Here is a screen recording of my JavaScript Macro Recorder in action.

Here is a test URL for a page that has the JavaScript code embedded. Works under IE and Firefox. Safari “Real Soon Now” 🙂

Add these two lines of code into your pages <HEAD> element and your page will be recordable.

<script src="http://js.metawrap.com/mw_lib.js"></script>
<script src="http://js.metawrap.com/mw_pkg_macrorecorder.js"></script>

Post a comment and tell me how long it takes to load please 🙂

I started writing this last year, finished it a few months ago and have spent the last few months tweaking and testing.

It is entirely written in JavaScript and does not need a proxy server of any kind.

You simply need to add a few lines of JavaScript to your page and a small text control panel is added to the page.

[record] will start recording.
[stop] will stop recording or playback
[play] will playback the current macro.
[fast] will play the macro back at faster than recorded speed
[loop] will loop the macro
[hide] will hide the control panel during playback

The control panel and the macro recorder itself is based around a simple plugin architecture. I have plugins close to completion that will load and save macros and record a suite of testcases of multiple macros across a whole site.

I’ve also started on plugins that will transcode a recorded macro into Watir and Selenium formats.

Does not work under Safari, but there is no reason why it can’t. Any Safari guns willing to help? More on that in the screen recording tonight.

Enjoy!

Posted in JavaScript, Web2.0 | 12 Comments

Plague

Posted on June 14, 2007 by James McParlane

Everyone I know in Sydney is, has just been, or feels like they are about to be sick.

Don’t come to Sydney at the moment if you want to live.

Posted in Rants | 2 Comments

window.onerror does not work in Safari

Posted on June 7, 2007 by James McParlane

// Declare Error Handler
function oops() 
{
  alert ('Error!');
  return true;
}
// Assign to global error handler
window.onerror = oops;
// Trigger an error
x.y.z();

This does not work, and it makes me sad.

Updated – removed syntax error from example

Posted in JavaScript | 5 Comments

Compulsory Reading For JavaScript Developers

Posted on May 31, 2007 by James McParlane

http://simonwillison.net/2006/Jun/26/libraries/

http://dean.edwards.name/weblog/2007/03/rules/

http://erik.eae.net/archives/2005/06/06/22.13.54/

http://bob.pythonmac.org/archives/2005/07/01/javascript-frameworks/

https://blog.metawrap.com/blog/WhyIDontUseThePrototypejsJavaScriptLibrary.aspx

If at the end of this you still want to use a library that adds slots to the built-in Objects please send me your name so I can avoid hiring you or using your library.

Posted in JavaScript | 2 Comments

Microsoft "Surface"

Posted on May 30, 2007 by James McParlane

I see your Adobe Flash photo shuffling demo on a $40,000 multi-touch screen and raise you with the concept of Gorilla Arm.

Why do I get the feeling that last year Steve or Bill saw the same multi-touch demo by Jeff Han [YouTube] that we all did, but instead of just going “Ooh Ahhh” and sending messages to their geek friends along the line of “YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS!!!!!”, they threw away their pens and invested millions of dollars based on a nerdgasm.

Try putting a newspaper on a coffee table and reading it for an extended period without lifting it.

Buy shares in physiotherapists.

Posted in Hardware, Rants | 2 Comments

MMMMMMMMM x 3

Posted on May 23, 2007 by James McParlane

Finally took the plunge and got a home Espresso machine (Gaggia Classic). Only use it for short blacks so the milk steamer is wasted on me.

Guests seem to like it though. 🙂

Posted in My Hardware | Leave a comment