Articles in the Featured Category
Cool & Future Tech, Featured, Headline, Web Development »
Here I show how you can re-use your Canvas images as CSS backgrounds using another interesting feature coming in HTML5. You’ll need a browser supporting CSS3 and Canvas, Chrome, Opera, Safari or Firefox will do.
Cool & Future Tech, Featured, Headline, Web Development »
What do you get when you combine Digital Identity, MD5 Hashes, the Canvas element, JQuery and Quilting? Answer: My first JQuery plugin – “Identicon5″ for want of a better name.
Identicon5 is a JQuery plugin that takes an MD5 hash and converts it to a unique image. It’s called Identicon5 since it works through the HTML5 Canvas element.
Working Demo is here: http://francisshanahan.com/identicon5/test.html
Project page is here: http://francisshanahan.com/index.php/identicon5
JQuery Plugin page is here: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/identicon5
Identicons provide a nice visual representation of a user’s identity, that’s unique to that user, without divulging any …
Cool & Future Tech, Featured, Headline, Web Development »
I’ve recently been doing a lot of digging into quote/unquote “newer” browser capabilities, some of which are very cool. I will share what I’ve discovered as I go.
As always I’m using a little “test project” as my sandbox, this is a real-world website that’ll use all these features and I’ll share that when it’s done. So far I’m using oAuth/Twitter integration, ASP.NET MVC/JQuery as a basic stack and am adding in HTML5 and CSS3 features. The resulting site will not be pretty but the point for me is always to …
Cool & Future Tech, Featured, Headline, Web Development »
What is the new Canvas tag in HTML5 all about? And why would I use it over SVG (scalable vector graphics)? I took a look and here’s what I found out…
Cool & Future Tech, Featured, Headline, Web Development »
The other day I converted the current WordPress theme of this site from XHTML Transitional 1.0 to HTML5. It was fairly easy so here’s what I did.
An XHTML 1.0 transitional website was a great place to start. I used the trusty w3c validator located at http://validator.w3.com.
First thing was to get the Doctype fixed up: I changed
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
to
<!DOCTYPE html>
and bingo, we’re recognized as HTML5 instead of XHTML. Not compliant yet though. I removed the profile attribute from my head tag as so:
<head profile=”http://gmpg.org/xfn/11″> which wasn’t …
Featured, Web Development »
By the time you read this the site will have moved to a new hosting provider (Arvixe.com).
Webhost4life was a good host for many years but something changed recently. The site was moved to a new platform without warning.
It was ported to new servers, which I’m guessing are virtual. My SSL certificate disappeared in the process. My site worked slower…MUCH slower and was out of service numerous times. Not only that but the configuration changed. The new platform doesn’t support .NET 4.0 or the .NET Wildcard mapping in IIS. Support switched …
Featured, General Computing, Headline, Web Development »
As technology rambles on, we see an ever increase in the richness of client-side web-hosted applications. Web applications need to move beyond RIA and into fully fledged applications which are downloaded like a web page but have more and more thick-client-like behaviour such as client-side storage.
Yeah, yeah, we’ve heard this all before but the big question is when is it going to happen and how?
The technology that’ll power this is undoubtedly HTML5.
Looking at the desktop market-share we see that
Firefox – 31.26%
Internet Explorer 8 – 25.23%
Internet Explorer 6 …
Featured, Headline, Life & Introspection, Things I've Made »
File this under “do try this at home”. Since Christmas I have been occasionally practicing Origami which has been a lot of fun. Origami, particularly unit-origami as you might think has some fairly strong roots in geometry and some exquisite forms can be produced with some surprisingly complex folds. Probably the best example of this is the Bisected Cube folded from a single sheet, the bisection is covered exactly by a 2nd sheet of paper folded into a perfect hexagon.
This past weekend I tried my hand at Kirigami. Kirigami is …
Featured, Headline, Life & Introspection »
Are you out of your mind? Meaning are you mad? Or insane? and to what degree? Seriously, how would you know?
Consider the tool you’d be using to determine the answer could potentially be skewing the results, e.g. your mind if insane may not give the right answer.
So the question is relative. You need a frame of reference. An objective third party perhaps, such as a psychologist or psychiatrist. A neurologist could verify the physical construction of your brain but that will fall short in validating how the mind …
Featured, Headline, Web Development »
Deferred Binding in GWT lets you swap classes at compile time and have GWT generate the result into JavaScript as if you’d coded it that way from the start. Sort of like reflection but at compile time instead of runtime. It’s a bit of nonsense to allow extension of GWT beyond what the native compiler can do.
As a side-note, GWT’s big value add is that it generates JavaScript off of Java. It also does some things during compilation which will speed up the JavaScript it produces de-virtualizing methods and …