If you’re wondering why I’m posting twice in the same month (how shocking!), it’s because things are changing around here. You are reading this via the RSS feed so you won’t be aware that I have redesigned the blog’s homepage. My intent was to make this medium more conducive to writing quick posts on more diverse subjects yet still keep it hanging together as a coherent whole. Because let’s face it: something has got to change around here if I’m going to write more and better.

My first goal was to deemphasize the “latest post”, so everything got shrunk a bit until it was only readable by expanding with a click. (It has a nice flowy animation too. You know me, dear reader, I’m all about the javascrizzle.) Still, you can get a taster with a quick glance, and not just for one post but for the whole site, stretching back months at the moment. Please let me know if you disagree, dear reader. I value your opinion greatly.

There’s also a very simple greedy algorithm for sorting posts into streams by category/tag, so that the casual reader (not you, no no) can follow my stream of thought on a subject that interests them. And possibly ignore others. Most blogs don’t do much with the categories except list them in the sidebar. I think it’s time we made use of them. I guess it’s related to this unsubscribing thing that James Corbett is always going on about. Many people don’t want to commit the same way you have. They just want to dip in now and then to see if anything interesting has been going on. Call it grazing if you will. I noticed myself doing this recently for some blogs.

So, I understand that RSS is making the “homepage” increasingly irrelevent. Being an RSS subscriber yourself, you care little for homepages. In fact this change might even effect you negatively if I start spewing out any old rubbish that only looks good on the homepage because you can’t quite read it. NO, don’t unsubscribe!! I need you loyal reader. Without you I’m just sitting here sadly typing to myself. I haven’t forgotten you. I’m also thinking about the RSS angle. And, hopefully, RSS aggregators will pick up on the idea and start doing something useful with tags too.

Until then, let the others fly by, grazing me as they pass. You and I have a special, enduring relationship, dearest subscriber.

Yours always,

Eureka Man

PS: If you want to use the theme for your own wordpress blog (I loved that last post by the way, you put things so much more eloquently than I ever could), just leave a comment and I’ll work out how to package it up nicely.

We’re just one of several money-making projects that will progress from idea to deployment in the course of this weekend at DHX. It’s got to be simple. It’s got to be popular. And it’s got to make us more cash than any other competitor in the next month. And we need you! How would you like to take a chance this Saturday and Sunday? Imagine that you could work like hell for two days, and then never again have to work on something you didn’t enjoy. Ever. It’s a gamble. But then, that’s exactly what our project idea is about!

I’m talking to you, Irish web 2.0 community. We need someone to focus on the backend of this thing, someone who’s comfortable working out data storage schemes, working out how to parse emails and things, working with APIs. You can work in any framework that the competition rules allow. There’s no problem with you working remotely. We’ll be on California time but that might work out for the best. We can take shifts at sleeping.

Cue big lottery finger. IT COULD BE YOU! Send me an email: eurekaman at gmail.

Update: We flaked out. Sleeping under a desk is not good for morale. Release will be delayed a couple of weeks. Full marks to Matthias, though, for his MacGyver-style office camping creativity.

So as practice for another XUL project I’ve been working on, here is my solution:

ToggleSearch for Firefox

It goes away when it’s not needed. It shares space with the url bar. Just hit the search button to enter/leave search mode. Have a look at the screenshots.

A few updates:

• Mike says yes, I can play!
• and OPod makes level #2 of Hotlinks! My life is complete

This is very important for the web as a platform.

Things I didn’t know before starting this:

• Firefox allows frames embedded to a maximum depth of 8 levels.

  There’s a much more elegant way of coding this up if you can embed frames within each other to an arbitrary depth. However, to stop crashes caused by infinitely recursing frames, the Firefox developers decided to disallow frames embedded in 9 other frames. How did they choose this arbitrary number? Beats me. Am I the first to come across a useful scenario for embedding more than 8 frames? (IE seems to have no limit.)

• Navigating within multiple dynamically created iframes does something weird to the Firefox history list. (Still under investigation)
• An iframe with no src adds a new item to Firefox’s history list but not to IE’s.
• Overflow:scroll gets you mandatory scrollbars but overflow:auto only puts them in when the div actually overflows.
• Scrolling divs have no scrollTo method. But you can set their scrollLeft and scrollTop properties to achieve the same effect.
• You can set the rows and cols attributes of a frameset dynamically! (though I didn’t use this)
• This works:

  var head = document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0];
  var link = document.createElement('link');
  link.rel  = 'stylesheet';
  link.href = 'style.css';
  head.appendChild(link);

And finally, a plea to browser makers:

In your next version, please support some kind of ContextAgnosticXMLHttpRequest (and come up with a better name while you’re at it). There’s a lot of client processing power going to waste right now while the server churns away fetching XML and transforming it one way or the other.

]]> http://eurekaman.com/widgety-goodness-part-i/feed 2 http://eurekaman.com/swing-panorama http://eurekaman.com/swing-panorama#comments Fri, 25 Nov 2005 19:34:01 +0000 Eureka Man http://eurekaman.com/?p=14

Deep in the foothills of Wicklow a new web app is quickly taking shape. But when I lose concentration I’m pretty lucky to be able to step out the front door and go walk in the woods. On the hill opposite the house there is a huge, sprawling tree. And hanging from a branch is a swing. This is one of my favourite places in the world. You sit here swinging slowly, iPod cranked up, the winter sun warming away the chills. You can see the sea sparkling in the distance and you can’t help but feel good. And you think…

“Hey! I could make a nice little javascript panorama viewer/editor pretty easily!”

So there goes the rest of the afternoon . I’ve put the result on this page because Wordpress doesn’t seem to accomodate javascript in posts (Anyone know of a plugin for that?).

Feel free to put your own images in and nick it. In fact this widget was specifically designed to be copied. Like some broody, psuedo-biological AI it can reproduce its own source code with whatever modifications you like. It won’t be long until it takes over the world . Select ‘Edit’ and, when you’ve finished making your own panorama, click ‘Get the Code’. Let me know if you find any problems with it.

]]> http://eurekaman.com/swing-panorama/feed 1 http://eurekaman.com/link-mail http://eurekaman.com/link-mail#comments Sun, 07 Aug 2005 01:06:55 +0000 Eureka Man While we wait for del.icio.us to add link emailing, here’s a little hack to make life easier in the mean time.

In javascript, just as in a HTML link, you can target a mailto: url. So you can make a bookmarklet that extracts info from the page you are browsing and pops up a new email message with the info filled in. Bowen Dwelle has already done the dirty work. His nice Mailto Bookmarklet takes the URL, title and any selected text from the current page and slots them into a new mail message in your default mail client (I have Gmail set as mine through their notifier). I’ve made it a bit more user-friendly for my own purpose:

• I removed the extraneous email entry popup. I’d much rather do that in my mail client.
• I added a [Link Mail] prefix to the subject line so that recipients can easily filter these mails as they wish.

Here’s my version: Mail to…. Save it as a bookmark/favourite on your toolbar if you want a fast way to send links to people.

]]> http://eurekaman.com/link-mail/feed 0 http://eurekaman.com/superhappydeveloping http://eurekaman.com/superhappydeveloping#comments Sun, 10 Jul 2005 23:58:55 +0000 Eureka Man

Last night was my first SuperHappyDevHouse. It was the first time since college that I experienced such a gathering of people, expressing a shared love of coding and tech ideas, and it felt great. Personally, I found it rather too SuperHappy to get a lot of Dev done – so many interesting or just entertaining things going on that it’s quite hard to concentrate on your own stuff. I worked on my idea for giving arbitrary (i.e. including REST) XML webservices a semantics. I showed a few freinds and they were diligently positive but the idea felt in too much of a hand-wavy state to show to others – a missed opportunity, I know. Mark Lentczner’s demo of Wheat was a highlight of the night for me. Let’s hope it catches on.

All in all, a success. What better motivation to code until dawn than to be surrounded by a chorus of SuperHappyDevelopers? I’ll be back next time. With attitude. Maybe.

Tags: superhappydevhouse

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