Archive for category Uncategorized

cloud-the-web – my new web project

Posted by jens in Uncategorized on August 8, 2009

A little time ago I started experimenting with some of the new HTML 5 features. Some seam pretty impressive although some a rather unnecessary in my opinion. But one thing got me really hooked – the HTML canvas.
The possibilities of this control are only limited by the performance of javascript and the missing 3d feature (hopefully this comes pretty soon). With that technology I finally got some way to implement something I wanted to try for some time now. So here is the basic idea what it is all about.

A lot of people out there use services like delicious where you tag you favorite sites and make this available to other users. Now I started to grab that data and began to build a massive tag cloud. After some time the site collected hundreds of thousands of links with their corresponding tags. So now you can start on the site and search for tags which interests you. These search tags will then be correlated against the cloud database and you get the most active links for your tags. So here is an example.
Let’s say you are interested in a tomcat tutorial.
tags:

tutorial, tomcat

results:

howtoforge.com
howtogeek.com
java.sun.com

Of course those results will be a link to the concrete tutorial (not just the entry page).
So far to the official part. For me this is more of a fun project. I prefer to start with some random tag and then wander around. It’s more like browsing, cause you start at points that you don’t already know. You have the chance to break out of your existing network of most used sites and see something new.

So have fun with it.

www.cloudtheweb.com

PS: For the implementation part – if you have any questions, just ask. I’m planning to explain some details about how it works on some later posts.

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shell-tools.net version2

Posted by jens in Uncategorized on July 31, 2009

After nearly a full year, I finally got the time to rework my existing shell-tools.net site. The changes are rather small, because I think the site already works well, so why destroy a working site. So here is what I have done.
I have added some new features like evaluating XPaths, pretty print JSON and transform XML files into JSON. Further to that I modified the css slightly so that from now on the current location will be highlighted in the navigation. I also removed some features which were rarely used because otherwise the menu would get to crowded.
There are still some features which I really would like to implement, but haven’t got the time so far, for example resizing the input and output boxes on demand.

So enjoy the new features and lets hope the next release will not take another year.

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installing GLUEscript on debian squeeze 64bit

Posted by jens in Uncategorized on July 15, 2009

The GLUEscript runtime is still in an pretty early development stage. Basically they use the Firefox spidermonkey javascript engine and build some useful libraries on top of that (like curl,mysql, filesystem support).
They also provide a little help in form of a little text file, but with this, it still took me half a day for my first installation. Most issues I got were based on version mismatches, because debian and also ubuntu use older versions of the required libraries.

First download the GLUEscript source from sourceforge.
A second tool you will need to get this running is premake. This is also a sourceforge project (you can use the binary version of it right away).
After downloading, I copied the premake binary into the glue/src folder.

So now we can start with fetching the dependencies which debian can fulfill.

sudo apt-get install libnspr4-0d libnspr4-0d-dbg libnspr4-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libwxgtk2.8-dev libssl-dev libiodbc2-dev libmysql++-dev

In addition to that I needed a library called poco version 1.3.5 (all repositories I found just provided versions up to 1.3.3 -> those don’t work). So get the source from http://pocoproject.org/download/ (the complete version). Compiling that should make no trouble cause all the dependencies are already installed.

/tmp$ cd poco-1.3.5-all/
/tmp/poco-1.3.5-all$ ./configure
Configured for Linux
/tmp/poco-1.3.5-all$ make
/tmp/poco-1.3.5-all$ sudo make install

Now let’s get back to configuring GLUEscript. All configuration is done via lua script which will than be consumed by premake. The config file I needed to edit was the premake.lua file:

-- Check NSPR
if ( string.len(nspr_dir) == 0 ) then
  print("Using the NSPR library which is part of GLUEscript")
  dopackage("nspr") -- build our own NSPR
  nspr_dir = "../nspr/include"
  nspr_lib = "nspr"
  nspr_lib_dir = project.libdir
else
  print("You are using your own NSPR library: ")
  nspr_dir = "/usr/include/nspr"
  print("nspr include: " .. nspr_dir)
  print("nspr lib: " .. nspr_lib_dir .. "/" .. nspr_lib)
end

I copied the whole paragraph to just make it easier to find the position. Important is the added row in the else part.

nspr_dir = “/usr/include/nspr”

This is needed because debian has a different file structure for header files than the script expects it.

After that we are done with configuring. To actually start the build process you have to run premake first.

./premake gnu
make

The output will be generated to the following directory:

glue/bin/Debug

So far the makefile does not a an installation part. So if you want to install this you have to do it by yourself.

PS: This only works for the 0.0.1 version. So far I didn’t get any more recent svn version running.

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