or maybe something uplifting…

The SVG Open is shaping up fast. The call for papers has been out there for a while now but if you’re quick you can still present a paper or run a workshop but the deadline to submit for papers and courses is April 18 and that’ll be here before you know it. The SVG Open is the conference for people doing SVG. The SVG Open has been running since at least 2002 and seems to get a little broader appeal every year it runs. Look at the broad areas to cover: client-side Javascript toolkits, map overlays like Google’s, widgets in Opera, cell phones and other embedded applications, UI elements in Gnome and KDE, desktop tools like Inkscape. Those are just off the top of my head, that kind of a list just didn’t exist 5 years ago - not for mainstream applications like these. SVG is growing in adoption and I don’t see that slowing down anytime soon.

I’ve been out of the scene for a while but things have really come a long way all of a sudden. There’s some great support across the latest browsers - compare that half-green Firefox 3 to the qualified “about half of the tests passed that test features supported by Firefox” from a few years ago. There are solid, supported tools that make SVG creation accessible to anyone. Inkscape may only consider their release 0.46 less than a 1.0 but it’s a real practical tool that’s adding features in leaps and bounds. Want some graphics to work with? The Open Clip Art Library has piles of subjects covered.

There are more and more compelling reasons to choose SVG every day. If you’re someone who’s been applying SVG already then share what you know and go present it at the Open.

On Pavlov.net talking about some improvements in memory handling on Firefox 3:

It isn’t reasonable to expect all those authors to write code to manually break the cycles themselves.

This reminded me immediately of an MSDN article that took a decidedly different stance on pretty much the same problem in Internet Explorer:

The good news is that memory leak patterns can be easily spotted if you know what to look for.

The fact that the MSDN article is from 2005 really drives home just how stunned I was when I first read it. The page goes on to describe how web developers should analyze their Javascript and write their code to work around bugs in garbage collection. I understand the idea that sometimes users have to work around bugs in a program but that’s definitely not the message I got looking at the MSDN article. It read a lot more to me like “we sent out IE 6 SP2 about a year ago and we have no intentions on fixing this any time soon.”

Then look at the audiences that these two very different standpoints are aimed at. The Mozilla post is about extension developers, a relatively small and advanced group compared to the number of web developers - the ones most likely to understand the issue if anyone does. The MSDN post talks to “every web developer” and says to “Use defensive coding practices and assume that you’ll need to clean up all your own memory.” While this may be practical advice for advanced coders, in this context it says to me that there’s no intention from Microsoft to really fix this problem.

Kudos to Mozilla for working to improve efficiency and close leaks instead of blaming web developers.

I want to build an application targeting the Android platform. I’m a little rusty with Java but I really like developing with Eclipse (I’ve been using it for some other stuff like PHP development). The ADT plugin got me started with the sample applications pretty quickly but now that it’s time to deviate and build something of my own I have to set a nice low goal that I can knock out with a high chance of success. Then I can iterate and go a little deeper on the next pass. To start with I think I’ll play with drawing primitive graphics. There’s an API example called DrawPoints with some code that just spouts out random points on the screen. I took a fair chunk of that and stuffed it in to the “Hello, Android” application I built earlier.

All in all the activity’s pretty straightforward and Eclipse makes it even easier. I’d post the code for drawing but it’s almost identical to DrawPoints at this stage. The next step is to get some new code in there. I decided to go for my old standby, the Hilbert curve. I modified the code to suit the drawing environment but didn’t get results right away. I learned a few things about debugging with the Android emulator and ADT in the process.
Read the rest of “Starting a Debug Session for Android with ADT”…

As I’ve been getting started with Android I decided to take some notes. What follows is something I wrote down as I was working on getting a first sample to build and download from Eclipse using ADT. I followed the instructions from Google and tried the troubleshooting directions. My platform is OpenSuse 10.3 Linux. This note might be helpful if you’re trying to develop for Android.
Read the rest of “When Android doesn’t Launch your application”…

I know I’ve written about a couple of the OpenSearch plugins that I’ve done but there are a few more I published and never really mentioned. I had a UPS tracking number for a package and I saw that Google could look them up easily (just put in the tracking number as your search) but going straight to the UPS site was actually slower. So I wrote a search plugin using the same URL structure that Google does.

Then there was the time a friend asked for a search plugin that would just look for Creative Commons licensed photos on Flickr. I whipped up something quick.
Read the rest of “Flickr Search, UPS Tracking and more with OpenSearch”…

I took a little break today from the C++ and Lua stuff I’ve been doing to have a look at Google’s new phone platform. I followed the installation instructions and had some demos up and running pretty quickly. I also grabbed the source and poked around to see whose shoulders they stand on. I saw QEMU source, SDL source and they distribute the source for the Linux kernel that they’re running.

The installation instructions worked fine for me on my Linux box, running OpenSuse 10.3 and Eclipse 3.2 that I installed via Yast. I ran in to one hiccup, when I first installed the ADT Eclipse Plug-in the extra options for it didn’t show up in the Preferences Dialog where they should. I had to check a couple times to make sure that I had installed it correctly but it showed up where it should in Help -> Software Updates -> Manage Configuration.

I started looking at the other options for building projects then realized that I didn’t have an Ant view in my Eclipse. So I went looking for where that comes from and I decided I needed to install the JDT Plug-in via Yast. Most Eclipse users probably already have the Java Development Tools (JDT), I think it’s part of most installations, but I haven’t been using Eclipse on this machine yet. After that I had the Ant view and the Android plug-in showed all the options it should. I set the SDK location and was able to create Android projects just like the directions describe.

It’s easy to get excited looking at this SDK. I tried out a couple of samples in the emulator. The connection to Google Maps is pretty impressive. I also see configuration options for XMPP. I’ll have to see if I can talk to a Jabber server on my machine and do something interesting. Maybe I could try a little Java game, I’ve done some SDL. It’s hard to choose what direction to go in but I feel like it’d be a shame not to build something of my own with all this great code to start from.

I’ve got a new update for the search plugins I wrote for the World of Warcraft Armory. Blizzard changed the search results URL slightly and that broke my old version. While I was at it I added a general search (all realms) that might work for Taiwan and Korean realms.

If you’re a new user, the basic idea I’ve used is that sometimes people want to search all realms for a character name but usually you want to look for a character only on a specific realm. Looking on a specific realm is a lot more useful since most of us only play on one realm or at most a few. You can install the realm-specific search for each of the realms you play on and the name shows up when you pick which you want from Firefox’s search box.

The search plugin shows up on the top right corner of Firefox. It might also work on Internet Explorer 7 since it’s written as an OpenSearch plugin. It doesn’t add anything to the browser except this new search engine provider - it’s not as big as a normal Firefox add-on.
Read the rest of “Updated Firefox Search Plugin for WoWArmory.com”…