Hacks

Pixlr: Flash photo editor

Pixlr is a simplified photo editor that runs right in your web browser. The interface is similar to Photoshop, though its tools are still a bit rudimentary. It’s the pet project of Swedish web developer Ola Sevandersson, and is still fairly beta, but there are some things I really like about it. For one, the […]

The smallest program ever

Brian Raiter wrote an article many years ago in which he documented his quest to make the smallest possible Linux ELF executable, a stripped-down program that returns the answer to life, the universe, and everything. While the standard gcc-compiled version of the application nets out at 3998 bytes, Brian discovered that the smallest possible size […]

Chain.js – data binding for jQuery

Rizqi Ahmad, a high-school student in Germany, created a pretty useful data binding service for jQuery called Chain.js. It allows you to easily manipulate data driven content from javascript by directly manipulating the DOM, without resorting to templates or a lot of complicated code. You create the markup the way you want the data to […]

Text-to-speech in PHP

It’s been a while since I’ve played with the open source Festival TTS software, and I’m pretty impressed with the quality of the speech output. Some of the voices that are available sound so much better than the old diphone-based voices that evoke WOPR from War Games. This got me thinking it’d be fun to […]

Cross-browser rounded vector corners

As a web developer, I’ve been patiently waiting for the designer community to finally decide that rounded corners and drop shadows are out of style. I’ve been waiting since about 1999 so, uh, you know, any day now guys. I’ll just be waiting here in web developer hell trying to construct a cubic igloo. There […]