http://2tap.com Random projects and stuff by Russ Hall in London Tue, 16 Jun 2009 22:41:15 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I have recently been developing some fancy AJAX upload progress meters for a project I'm working on. This is using the new(ish) hooks in PHP which, when coupled with an extension such as APC, allow for polling of the upload progress as a file uploads in a standard HTML form. Developing ... http://2tap.com/2009/06/16/throttling-uploads-on-linux/ "The new image is showing but I think it's using the old stylesheet!" Sound familiar? Caching? Caching of a web page's assets such as CSS and image files can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, if done right, it can lead to much faster load times with less strain on the ... http://2tap.com/2009/05/18/efficient-caching-of-versioned-javascript-css-and-image-assets-for-fun-and-profit/ More and more of our data is hidden behind login forms in online apps. When this data updates frequently, and the site provides no API to access the information, keeping on top of it can be a laborious task. One such example is Createspace. Createspace are a company who provide produce-on-demand ... http://2tap.com/2009/04/29/screen-scraping-book-sales-from-createspace-with-zend_http_client/ There are a lot of jQuery plugins to add simple enhancements to DOM elements (such as form validation, adding tooltips to links, etc.). In contrast, the Mootools plugin scene is relatively baron which is a shame. The architecture of MooTools is quite different to jQuery and doesn't perhaps encourage this ... http://2tap.com/2009/01/11/extending-dom-elements-in-mootools-ala-jquery/ Have a play You can try out JSFractal here. What is it? JSFractal is a web-based tool (written entirely client side in JavaScript) to allow you to explore fractals. Currently, only the Mandelbrot set is implemented but I hope to add support for switching to Julia sets and other types in the future. You ... http://2tap.com/2008/12/18/jsfractal-javascript-fractal-explorer/ Since launching Tap Trap, there have been a steady stream of players stumbling across the game and, in some cases, getting hooked! I wrote the game a couple of years ago now (mostly as an experiment with JavaScript) and didn't really plan to promote it particularly but it's great to see ... http://2tap.com/2008/12/10/tap-trap-the-year-of-procrastination/ Useful custom kernel (including working wireless drivers) available from "adamm"'s repository here: http://www.array.org/ubuntu/ At the time of writing not everything's fully worked out (issues with the headphone socket etc.) but it's a good way to get the stock Hardy 8.04 install functional and on the net. For the most basic install (to ... http://2tap.com/2008/08/12/ubuntu-on-the-asus-eeepc-90110001000h/ I'm not entirely sure why this exists, but here's a 3 minute video of a trip between Hammersmith and Piccadilly Circus in London (playing at 20x speed). It's roughly 4 miles of urban assault course carnage. Not a lot of planning went into this one (read: no planning went into this ... http://2tap.com/2007/11/03/parklife/ VMware Workstation (and presumably the other enterprise-grade products in the VMware family) come with the handy "shared folders" feature which makes sharing files between a host and a virtual appliance nice and simple. The free products (VMware Player and Server) do not, unfortunately, have this ability and so we must ... http://2tap.com/2007/04/22/sharing-files-between-a-windows-guest-and-ubuntu-host-using-vmware-and-samba/ The latest version of "Tap Trap" is now live. New features include: More high scores shown (top 30 now rather than the original top 5) 'Replay' feature - watch any game currently in the top 30 New theme "alternate" - it's ugly, but it might help people who have trouble with red/blue/green http://2tap.com/2006/10/10/tap-trap-11-new-features/