timwhitlock.info

Yesterday I posted a hack which adds an old style RT button to the new Twitter website. Here’s the full post on what it is, and why I did it.

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I use this really basic Firefox bookmarklet pretty much every day, so I thought I’d post it.

–> Dictionary.com <– drag to toolbar

Dictionary.com provide an ‘official’ bookmarklet, here:
http://dictionary.reference.com/tools/bookmarklets.html

I’ve improved it a bit Read more…

AMF and RTMP libraries for node.js – Flash remoting with node.

I’ve been having fun playing with node.js over the past year, but have had little, or no excuse to use it in any production work, so I thought I’d set myself a challenge and build a module. That challenge was firstly to create a simple AMF gateway for Flash remoting, and secondarily to see if an RTMP socket server was achievable in node.

If you don’t know about “node” – It’s a JavaScript runtime that allows you to write socket servers. I like it a lot – it brings asynchronous, event-driven programming to the server side and provides a truly global variable scope across all connections. I’ll blog about it in more detail later, perhaps.

At Public we do a lot of Flash work, and regularly implement Flash remoting using a PHP AMF gateway. I wasn’t necessarily looking to replace this stock approach with node, but node offers proper socket connections that PHP can’t, so I was imagining the possibilities of using node as a free, and more flexible alternative to Flash Media Server. Not for streaming media, but for real-time messaging, for example in multi-player games. If I’m honest though, I did this mostly for fun, an academic exercise and as an excuse to work with node.

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I couldn’t find this information today when I needed, so I thought I’d share. If it’s in the Google maps documentation, then I missed it.

If you want to zoom a map to fit a particular distance as tightly as possible, you need to know the scale of each of the 19 levels. In metres per pixel, I worked them out to be as follows: Read more…

After nearly two years I’ve finally gotten around to releasing my PHP JavaScript parser, although documentation is still thin on the ground.

• Download jParser 1.0.0 (recommended)
  
• Download jParser devel package (Full source and build scripts)
• See the library examples running at apps.timwhitlock.info/jparser

The library has been split in two:

1. jTokenizer – A JavaScript tokenizer designed to mimic the PHP tokenizer.
2. jParser - The fully blown JavaScript syntactical parser which generates a parse tree.

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