Serge's World

Picture the scene. You have spent all afternoon trying to figure out how to install a must-have app onto your smartphone, but get nowhere.

With defeat unhappily accepted, you jump onto Google to search for help. The results arrive milliseconds later promising to aid you in your quest, only to find that instead of finding a nice explanation of what to do, you are instead confronted with some stranger prattling on for 10 minutes in a YouTube video telling you how it should be done.

This scenario is not too bad if there are lots of regular text-based tutorials or webpages telling you what you need to know, since then you can just ignore the videos, but it gets really frustrating if there are no other results, and you are forced to sit through the agony of listening to this self-important guy drone on and on.

Video tutorials are very useful for practical demononstration of what they are talking about that. I think those are a great idea, and serve a purpose, so I not saying all video tutorials are a bad idea. It is just the ones that show a guy talking for however long you have to endure the video that add no value, so for anyone thinking of posting a video tutorial, here are the pros and cons to consider

Pros

• Great for demonstrations (doesn’t count if you are just standing there talking)
• Useful for people with nothing better to do

Cons

• Take up a LOT more bandwidth than text tutorials (important especially for smartphone users)
• Takes longer to find info you are looking for – you need to listen through the entire thing, including all the rambling. A text tutorial can be skimmed through
• Difficult to jump around like in a text tutorial where you can refer to any part at any time.
• Written text is often easier to understand than spoken text, especially for second-language speakers
• Do you really think that people want to listen to your voice?

So, in conclusion, unless you think it could actually add value over a simple text tutorial, please don’t post a video tutorial. Write it down instead!

I recently joined a group on Facebook that shares interesting music videos, and that got me thinking about the music of my youth.

Most kids (at least those that I have met) tend to rebel against their parents musical tastes, forging a personal sound from their social groups and media surrounding them, but I was somehow different. My core musical taste came directly from both my parents. Outside influences came a distinct second.

Now don’t get me wrong, I still loved the music around me growing up. I listened to Roxette, Bon Jovi, Queen, Michael Jackson and many more of the (then) current bands, but the music that truly defined me came from an earlier period.

I had just become a teenager when the 90′s started, but my musical taste was stuck in the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s, and not to mention classical, thanks in a very large part to my parents. I remember spending hours playing with my father’s hi-fi, and the sounds of Glenn Miller, Laura Branigan, Beach Boys, Traveling Wilbury’s and the soundtrack to Caravans are forever etched into my mind.

I also remember listening to Wham in a mix tape my mother had in her car when I was six years old.

When my father passed away in 2004 (already 8 years ago – I can remember it like yesterday), I found his collection of tapes in his estate, and for the next year, the only thing that played in my car’s tape player (yes, my car had one of those even in 2004), was these old tapes which my father adored.

My father and I never really got on very well, with some periods where I barely saw him for months or years at a time, but I did share his love for his music, counting those bands I had listened to on that hi-fi as among my favourites.

I miss him terribly sometimes, especially when I have those songs on…

Having recently created an account on Audible.com, I have been trying to find interesting titles to add to my library.

As most people would probably agree, it is always nice to get something for free, so I was rather eager to try out a suggestion I read in a Lifehacker article on how to use Google to search for free audiobooks on the audible site.

It is dreadfully simple. Simply enter the following search query into Google, and you get scores of results:

$0.00 -Excerpt -Interview -Chapter -Extract -Speech -Sample -"A Conversation" -"This is Audible" site:audible.com

It can also be modified to suite exactly what you are looking for.

One additional thing I did do though, is to use this query to create a Google Alert, so that whenever a new free title gets picked up by Google, I will be immediately notified, allowing me to take advantage. How often I will get that alert is something that only time will tell now…

Originally posted on my old blog, Smoky Cogs, on 11 Sep 2012

I was playing around with some code recently, and came across a very easy way to create a city lookup field using jQuery’s UI components and a very useful webservice provided by Geonames.

How the autocomplete functionality in jQuery works, is by wrapping the functionality around a standard html text input field, populating a dropdown list of values from an ajax call to a webservice, in this case, the Geonames webservice.

When supplied with a partial city name, the GeoNames webservice returns back a list of information for cities matching the partial city name supplied, allowing you to display, and keep track of, the country, province, full city name, and a host of other info. Full documentation is provided on the GeoNames site.

$( "#city" ).autocomplete({
  source: function( request, response ) {
    $.ajax({
      url: "http://ws.geonames.org/searchJSON",
      dataType: "jsonp",
      data: {
        featureClass: "P",
        style: "full",
        maxRows: 12,
        name_startsWith: request.term
      },
      success: function( data ) {
        //Display city name, state name, country name
        response( $.map( data.geonames, function( item ) {
          return {
            label: item.name + (item.adminName1 ? ", " + item.adminName1 : "") + ", " + item.countryName,
            value: item.name + (item.adminName1 ? ", " + item.adminName1 : "") + ", " + item.countryName
          }
        }));
      }
    });
  },
  minLength: 2,
  select: function( event, ui ) {
    $('#city').val(ui.item.value);
    return false;
  }
});

Previously I had posted about my entries for the Hubble Hidden Treasures Contest but there are far more datasets available online than just Hubble.

After all the fun I had processing the Hubble images, I decided to try my hand at processing a few images from the Herschel Space Observatory, which is operated by the European Space Agency.

Herschel is used for capturing images in the far infra-red and submillimetre range of the spectrum, and thus gives very different views than what Hubble can give. Similarly to Hubble, these images are stored in a searchable archive available for the public, and the process involved in processing the Hubble images is very similar, with images taken in different wavelengths can be combined into a colour image after processing.

Below is a gallery of images I created out of this archive.

The Hubble Space Telescope has taken many awesome shots of the universe, but many of them have only ever been seen by scientists. This is why the Hubble Legacy Archive and European Space Agency announced the Hubble Hidden Treasures Image Processing Contest.

The purpose of the contest was for the public to browse the Hubble Legacy Archive, which contains all the data obtained from the Hubble Space Telescope, which is freely available to the public, and find great images never before published to the public.

The raw images required a fair amount of processing. Black-and-white images are available in various wavelengths for many objects. These first need to have the brightness and contrast adjusted and then have a colour filter applied. Once this is done, the separate images can be combined into a colour image.

For the competition, over the last several months, I have managed to process 101 images which I submitted to the competition. You can view the full album on Flickr by clicking on the slideshow below.

I didn’t win anything, but it was a lot of fun to do.

One of the most frustrating things about JavaScript is being able to determine what events are being fired for a particular element, especially in a complex web application where a single element might have several different functions attached to a particular event.

Well, jQuery comes to the rescue.

jQuery has a very useful, and rather unknown, method to return all the events attached to an element, which is particularly useful when used in the web browser’s console while debugging a web page.
Read More »

I haven’t made much use of Windows batch files for many, many years. I just haven’t had a need for it, but I learnt a few interesting titbits of Batch file use that I never really knew before today.

Putting IFs into FOR loops Firstly, batch files support FOR loops as well as IF statements, and therefore putting this together, I would expect this piece of code to work:
Read More »

With AJAX being the norm for websites these days, and JavaScript taking on more a more central role in building up web content, you are more than likely going to find yourself having to build up strings containing html to display in a webpage using JavaScript.

This does come at a price though. String concatenations can be rather slow, especially if there is a lot of data that needs to get processed, such as a large table. Unsurprisingly, this is most noticeable in Internet Explorer.

A colleague of mine came up with an alternative way of creating the new html string, using an array to build it up instead of a string.

So using the traditional method you would write:

var htmlStr = '<table>';
for(i = 0; i < data.count; i++){
  htmlStr += '<tr><td>' + data[i] + '</td></tr>';
}
htmlStr += '</table>';
document.getElementById(elemId).innerHTML = htmlStr;

Using an array though, this can be rewritten as

var htmlArray = [];
htmlArray.push('<table>');
for(i = 0; i < data.count; i++){
  htmlArray.push('<tr><td>');
  htmlArray.push(data[i]);
  htmlArray.push('</td></tr>');
}
htmlArray.push('</table>');
document.getElementById(elemId).innerHTML = htmlArray.join('');

In some tests, my colleague found that speed improvements of up to 80x-400x were shown using the array method, varying on the complexity of the concatenations. The biggest improvements were shown in Internet Explorer, with less gains measured in Firefox and Chrome, although quick results were measured in each one.

Originally posted on my old blog, Smoky Cogs, on 20 Apr 2011

I have always admired subway maps for the clarity and elegance with which they are able represent a convoluted public transport system. Now there is a way to expand this concept and create your own maps using a subway map plugin for jQuery written by Nik Kalyani.

This plugin allows you to specify the data for drawing the map, and makes the concept of the subway map entensible to represent anything you would like. In fact, I recently saw one detailing the progression of modern rock music, with the different lines representing different musical genres as a timeline, and major bands representing ‘stations’.

For a detailed tutorial of how to use this plugin, go read the original post by Nik Kalyani on his blog.

Originally posted on my old blog, Smoky Cogs, on 13 Apr 2011