Saturday, October 17, 2009

The Non Fuzzy Face Cyclist

I'm often travelling around the world in Google Maps Street View. From the Eiffel Tower to the The London Eye. When Street View first hit the Maps product I was absolutely amazed.


Since first reading about all the legal and privacy ramifications of this technology I've had a personal quest to find a person that somehow missed the fuzzy face filter. Up until now it's been a very unsatisfying search - thank you Google; But today I'll be collecting my quest points and moving on. The following cyclists face was found after reading Google's post on their trikes and the new LegoLand footage. Even though its not a fully disclosed face, its the the most clear example of one I have come to finding.




Guess they missed this because of the glasses. Maybe on purpose as well, but if that's the case then I'm kind of surprised because it's surely safer (legally) just to blur faces with glasses or any other obstruction as well.

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Some Server JS

Javscript on the serverside,.. it's happening; I'm drawn in by its beauty.

My workplace requires I base our web applications on a Microsoft product foundation. Not that I've got anything against Microsoft (I don't like vendor lock-in, but even so..), I just more prefer some of the non Microsoft founded languages ~ I'm a dynamic language fan. C# and friends are great, but they aren't as vendor neutral yet (I am looking forward to playing with more of the Iron** products they pushing out now; very interesting combo.)

What I love about Javsacript: It tends to be platform, vendor and pretty much all round - neutral. It's a dynamic, flexible and powerful syntax. I'm sold on it. Even better when it comes to web apps, now I'm playing with JS on the clientside and serverside; The consistency is awesome.

I've started building my take-over-the-world-its-so-powerful-framework; and it's in Javscript; On a Microsoft platform... [Awkward silence]

It's still all quite new to me, and I can't quite believe its working so well in our work context. I've basically setup a platform neutral interface of JS objects. I then create all application and framework objects above that. Below the interface sits a layer to allow all of the above to run on the MS JScript engine.



One thing (large thing) I haven't addressed is the ServerJS standard that's in formulation. Someday,.. but for now I'm just playing around. For example; I can now execute code on the server that looks something like this:

function getUsers(type) {
return $(['getUsers', 'usertype=' + type], function() {
var s = {
title: 'Users of Type: ' + type,
data: new Array()
};
db.query('select * from grv_user').each(function(o) {
s.data.push(o);
});
return s;
});
}


This example function prepares a response object (that will be JSON'ized), reads a list of data from the default database, and handles caching of this result in a tag based cache.

I'm personally quite happy with my new playground; I can squeeze a lot of functionality into a few lines. (Not that that's the point, but my RSI appreciates it). The serverside framework I've put in place includes a stripped version of the MooTools Framework. Fabulous!

Monday, February 23, 2009

Fedora 10 - Geforce 6800

Recently I installed Fedora 10 and ran into some difficulty trying to install the correct drivers for my graphics card - a GeForce 6800. After much searching, and re-installing a couple times, I found these simple steps to be my answer.

Firstly from http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showpost.php?p=1114769&postcount=1:

su
rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
yum install kmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i386 xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.x86_64
reboot


Then of course I wanted the CompizFusion desktop effects.
From http://www.fedoraguide.info/index.php?title=Main_Page#Applications

su -c 'yum -y install compiz-fusion-extras libcompizconfig ccsm compiz-manager libcompizconfig'
su -c 'yum -y install compiz-fusion-extras-gnome fusion-icon-gtk'
compiz-manager


This took my Fedora 10 out the box, from being pretty good to looking flippen great!