henry's blog

Available from userscripts.org.

This has been knocking around in my head for a while, but I’ve finally got around to doing it: it’s a Greasemonkey script that fetches recently played information from last.fm, injects it into a sig file containing certain tokens (%artist% and %track% for now, example here) and inserts the whole lot as a signature when you start composing a new Gmail message.

It’s pretty classic scratch-itch-ware, in that it does something that I wanted done in a way fairly specific to my needs – there’s no way to input your sigs directly and store on the local machine, for instance, because I wanted it to work across all the computers I use regularly and therefore use a remote sig. Likewise, because I don’t use Gmail’s rich formatting, I haven’t tested it in that context, though I doubt it’ll work there.

I’m setting it loose in the wild in the hope that it’ll prove useful to people other than me, and the missing functionality can get added by people who need it!

First Greasemonkey script, and in fact the first relatively complex Javascript I’ve done for a while. I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out, and learnt a fair bit about JS while doing it. That said, I’m sure that there’s a lot wrong with it to the experienced eye; it is a bit of a collection of hacks ;)

Based on Gmail: Random Signature Remote 1.0 by Stuart Langridge and Gmail HTML Signatures 1.07 by Jerome Dane.

I’m a big fan of the MondoGlobo podcasts, and there’s been a cracking two-part interview with Rudy Rucker recently in the Neofiles strand. The first time that I’ve had to do the podcast equivalent of skipping back a few pages in order to listen again to a particularly interesting bit. Top stuff!

Part One

Part Two

Boing Boing links to a post today made on Toothpaste for Dinner which, in an awesomely funny way, hits the nail on the head about Second Life in a number of ways.

The thing is… well… I’m not quite sure how to say this…

It’s a bit shit, isn’t it?

I mean, there’s been endless amounts of purple prose written about how it’s the future of the internet, that it allows infinte amounts of personal expression, changes the economy, revolutionises communication and is the next step in our evolution, but is it really? Isn’t it just another, fairly ropey, 3D MUSH? Hasn’t it already been done a bunch of times, inevitably ending in failure?

Let me share my experience. First, there’s downloading and installing the thing, which exposed me to a whole lot of cringe-inducing copy about how my Second Life was just around the corner, how much better it would be than the depressing, windblown husk of my Real Life and how I would never need to leave my flat again, except to stock up on Doritos and Coke to fuel the decaying, bloated hulk that my First Body would become now that I didn’t need it any more*. I thought this was a shame, as I quite like my Real Life. It involves tea, and my friends. And cake. And girls.

*I may be paraphrasing slightly.

Then comes the birth of my Second Life, which, as I remember, involved some very tedious playing with sliders and stuff to alter my astoundingly low poly-count avatar. I like to represent myself online as closely as possible to my actual appearance, cos I’m that kind of tediously literal guy, bound by my shackled mind to the fleshy prison I was unfortunate enough to be born into. Unfortunately, because this is the realm of possiblity, the closest I could get was this vaguely elfin, androgynous guy with pointy ears. I think his skin and/or ears were green. Then more tedium, in the form of a tutorial which taught me how to walk around, and fly (jerkily). Then a plaza, filled with lots more people flying around (jerkily) and sod all else. I think there were a few “clubs” and things, consisting of, as Drew so aptly put it “full of…. cubes… with bad JPEGs on the side.” Logged out with a vague sense of disappointment and a lingering aftertaste of Adobe Atmosphere (circa 2000 vintage).

I’m willing to be proved wrong here. I’m well aware that online 3D worlds have to sacrifice fidelity and detail in the name of bandwidth. I’m a geeky developer for fuck’s sake, I grew up reading Neuromancer and Snow Crash, wishing that the virtual worlds depicted therein existed. The idea of being able to build, script and orchestrate stuff in a multi-user environment gets all the right juices flowing. It’s just such a horrible user experience that I was turned right off. Mainstream games like WOW and Half Life 2 get it right – compelling, relatively intuitive, high-enough fidelity multi-user 3D worlds – why can’t Second Life learn from these guys? Make it easy for us!

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been using Screenweaver HX to build a little seat-planning app. Well, thinks got a point today where I was ready to start importing the client’s list of attendees (an Excel sheet, naturally). So I decide to go the time honoured route of exporting a tab-separated text file and parsing that in Flash, after getting the contents in via a file open call in the haXe backend (file I/O in Flash! Hurrah!). However, as soon as I do this, Flash chokes on the import.

Now this is weird, becuase I’d been using exactly the same file open stuff to get in my development testing data (a nice, sane XML file) and the app had been playing just fine. Long story short, after banging my head against a brick wall for a few hours (even to the point of offloading all the parsing to the backend, and passing a neatly parsed array to the hosted SWF, which also failed), I figured out that Flash was choking because the offending text file wasn’t UTF-8 encoded. A quick insertion of this line:

content = neko.Utf8.encode( content );

into my file opening method in the backend solved all my problems and I could loosen my jaw muscles again :)

So, the moral of this story is (besides always read the friggin’ docs) is: if you’re doing text file I/O in Screenweaver, always make sure you UTF-8 encode before handing it over to Flash. Here endeth today’s lesson.

So I’ve been playing about a bit with Screenweaver HX recently in order to make a little app to generate seating plans for some swanky industry dinner or other (but that’s another story).

So far it looks pretty cool – once you get your head around the fact that, unlike with other extended projectors, the functionality of the projector is defined by another script (written in haXe, which also looks pretty awesome), which you have to write and compile yourself. Of course, this makes it about a gazillion times more flexible and extensible than any other extended projector I’ve come across, but also a bit of a headfuck. So much like any other open source effort then :)