Without polling the server, an expensive operation, there isn’t a simple way send a Javascript client frequently updated server data. This is a problem if you want to make a multiuser game or chat application in Javascript. A post on ajaxian proposes a solution: Daniel Prieler’s jsSO library, which proxies real time communication between Javascript […]
The torchiere lamp does a really nice job of lighting a room, but with a blazing hot 300 watt halogen bulb they’ve also had a nasty track record for igniting rooms. Ten years ago, these were a required addition to any dorm room or apartment that lacked overhead lighting–the bright upward facing light bounces off […]
The Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is an open source, distributed file system that’s designed to run on commodity hardware and provide a fault tolerant data store optimized capable of storing extremely large files across many machines. It’s similar in architecture to the Google File System, except that it’s something you can install and play […]
The Safari 4 beta looks pretty slick, but what do you do if you aren’t quite ready to give up your trusted browsing companion? Neil Lee has the solution for running both Safari 3 and the new version 4 beta on the same Mac: Apple dropped the first public beta release of Safari 4 today, […]
For many of us first-gen hacker types (yes, I’m that old. Shut up.), blue boxing was our introduction to hardware hacking. It was never the illegal, rip-off aspects for me, it was proving that you could build something that exploited a vulnerability in a system; to trick it to do something it wasn’t intended to […]
Javascript only supports affine transformations in the Canvas element. In plain English, this means you have control over simple transformations like rotation, scale, and skew. Rendering something with perspective, however, involves a projective transformation and there are no 3D transformation operations within the official Canvas spec to support this sort of thing. Steven Wittens hacked […]
A reader named Bruce sent in a request for a tool that will allow you to automatically download all of your Flickr photos for backup or export purposes. A quick search landed me on FlickrEdit, a Java desktop application that uses the Flickr API to manage and export your Flickr content. FlickrEdit will launch from […]
