I was recently asked to aggregate tweets based on their hashtags using PHP (no Ajax), so I decided to turn this into a small tutorial that will hopefully enable you build all sorts of XML parsers in PHP.
Full Story »
I don’t like tag clouds. Not in the way they’re usually implemented anyway. They are dull and ugly, really nothing more than a list of words of varying sizes. And yet, properly designed, they can be great infographics – beautiful and informative at the same time.
I discovered Wordle a few weeks ago and I found it fun for doing a little literary analysis, or comparing the spin on the news from different news sites (say Fox vs. CNN.) Still, I was unhappy with its lack of flexibility and options – not to mention that’s not a real, interactive tag cloud. Then I heard about Tagul.
You may remember that Adobe had promised a public beta of Flash CS5 for December 2009 but they changed their mind, leaving everyone to guess when the new suite will come out and what new features it will have.
After a long wait, hints are being dropped left and right for an imminent release of their next Creative Suite.
Just this morning, John Nack hinted that CS5 will be released within the next 30 days:
In case you think embedding fonts in web pages is something new, I made the first font embedding experiments in browsers in 1998. It was working – cross-browser too: Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape Navigator 4. See, EOT from Microsoft is quite old (introduced in 1996) and Netscape had their own format, called .pfr, based on the TrueDoc technology developed by Bitstream. So how comes that more than a decade later we still don’t have a fully working way of using custom fonts on the web?
A simple solution to a complicated error for anyone to try out before searching any further : Having to write a WCF service to handle complex LINQ entities with various foreign key references I came across the following exception when trying to consume the respective service : Object graph for type “EntityType” contains cycles and [...]
A truly humbling moment: Google has selected my flashCHESS III flash chess game to be included with their Chrome OS. Here are some screenshots – apparently the guys at TechRadar like the game as well considering the number of screenshots of the chess app
As many other times, I came across this issue having to begin at the wrong end, i.e. having the result and in need of the problem. The samples and recommended procedures offer – as in most cases – only the simplest examples. The workaround is often tedious and in absence of feedback uncertain.
