Life, the Universe, Software and Everything
You have a chance to prove yourself in an amazing javascript based game: http://alexnisnevich.github.io/untrusted/. Your become Doctor Eval, who needs to find The Algorithm. Would you dare?
(do not look below until you completed the game yourself)
My solution to The Boss is here: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/73304632ce742351000d.
My Jewellery shop generates slow but steady flow of orders, which lets me play with data. Today I’ve try mapping the shipping addresses to a map.
I’ve decided to try Google’s geochart from charts API. There’s simply no way they could make it any easier. They have even created a playground where you can test the api from the browser.
There are some issues with this chart though – the map looks bland, it can’t be zoomed and there’s not real map overlay. Also it take ages to draw unless the markers are given in lat/lon format.
Here’s the result:
It’s easy to talk about clever ideas, but it takes genius to present them easily and powerfully – and those guys managed to do it both in this node.js basic concepts presentations. It changed my thinking about callbacks – the concept I loathed at the first sight. I’m going to give node.js a go, seems worth it!
Google is making constant changes to their APIs and they seem to roll the alpha/beta versions for us to test. Which should be fine unless you expect your webpage to be stable and working all the time.
One of the issues in current version of Google APIs is problem of missing markers when you try to place two or more Google maps objects on a page. All maps are displayed in their div tags as expected, but only one of them gets the markers actually displayed. No error message is displayed, individual maps work with markers when they are separated, but together they don’t.
The only solution I have found so far is to tell Google that we want to use Stable Google Map API instead of latest. Do to it add v=3.0 version selector to URL of JavaScript librery, i.e. instead of
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://maps.google.com/maps/api/js?sensor=true">
</script>use
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://maps.google.com/maps/api/js?v=3.0&sensor=true">
</script>
So far I haven’t noticed any drawbacks of this solution. New unstable versions probably add new features and/or improve performance, but I’m willing to wait until the changes are tested and moved to stable API. I bet you do also.
Yesterday new version of “Translate and Speak!” (previously TranslateMe) Chrome Extension has been released and it’s now ready to download on Chrome Webstore.
New features in version 1.4 include:
The Chrome Extension model is amazingly easy to use with just few basic concepts to understand. But there are rather severe limitations. The most important I found so far:
Expect edits here.
I spend long hours reading on-line (don’t we all?). Most of interesting material is available in English only (including en.wikipedia.org which is much superior to my native pl.wikipedia.org), so I tend to read all in that language. And as it is my second tongue, I need to use translator quite often. Google translator is doing pretty good job with helping me, but the manual process (copy->new tab->type address->paste) was just too slow to be comfortable. This is where the idea for extension for Chrome came from.
Basic needs for the plugin were defined as:
The result is quite encouraging – the extension is working and can be downloaded from Chrome Web Store. More information about the extension can be found here (click!)