Innovation through Idiotic Ideas
Development
Web Scraping using C#
21 year ago
by John
in Development
Now and then I come across a set of data on the Internet that I wish I could toss into an Excel spreadsheet for sorting but more than a few pages and copy/paste is out of the question. For times like these I generally wrote a web scraper using C# and some crazy regular expressions. Today I needed to grab a much larger dataset that is generated by a very old application we have on hand. The interface for the app generates very clean HTML but unfortunately its data is stored in an old proprietary format and More >
Monitoring Wikipedia Pages for Vandalism
51 year ago
Today at the office we were forced to once again deal with a bit of Wikipedia vandalism, something that really shouldn’t happen as frequently as it actually does. Not only were two of our pages modified, but one of actually deleted by a Wikipedia moderator for “blatant advertising”. (To be honest it was a bit spammy, but I don’t think it crossed the line when compared to other high profile brands like ours.) This is something we’ve had to deal with on Wikipedia before but I guess that is the nature of high profile pages. Since we hadn’t been keeping a More >
Archos 7 Client Server Social Development
01 year ago
With the number of connections we have to people and information sources on the Internet I am finding it difficult to maintain control over the information firehose. While having the Archos has helped me stay up to date I still find myself inundated and unable to manage everything as much as I would like. I was already looking for a development project for the Archos and this seemed like a good place to start. Since the processing power on the Archos is limited and I do not want to drain the battery by doing hundreds of queries every few minutes More >
Rovio Room Positioning Data
01 year ago
The built in Northstar system for the Rovio allows us to track the current position of the robot in real time using IR room beacons. When I started the Automated Mapping System for my Home AI I ran into a few issues, mainly that as the Rovio gets further from a beacon the positional data became less reliable. I realize this is to be expected but it makes mapping the robot dataset to a real-world view of the home a bit difficult. That is when I realized I don’t need the robot to see the More >
Flash Development with AS3
11 year ago
by John
in Development
Any developer looking to stay current with technology has looked at Flash development at one point or another in their lives. If you’re like me you installed the development environment and then sat with a dumbfounded look on your face at the monster that is the Flash UI. Timelines? Symbols? I just want to write CODE! The way I see it the Flash IDE is geared towards the designers of the world with ActionScript tossed in to allow them to do a few tricks that they could not do with the UI alone. This is not how most of us More >
Using the Google Maps API with AS3
01 year ago
by John
in Development
When I start using a new API in an application I generally start by making an abstraction layer to simplify my calls and so I can swap out the API at a later date if needed. Tonight when I started working with the Google Maps API I wasn’t sure if I was going to need an abstraction layer, but after creating a few maps I realized I was constantly copying and pasting the same code over and over. I went ahead and wrote a quick wrapper that handled all of my initial needs. As I progress this layer will be More >
Facebook Development using AS3
01 year ago
I decided to use some time this weekend to take another look at the Facebook ActionScript API for a new project I have been meaning to work on. Since I recently reloaded my primary development computer I went ahead and reinstalled my Flash development tools.
I remember the last time I used the Facebook API with Flash I ran into all sorts of silly issues so this time I want to be sure to build a reusable library as I go to make things easier in the future. There are going to More >
Rovio Automated Room Mapping
21 year ago
Using my C# Rovio library I wrote an autonomous room mapping application that randomly sends one of my Rovio’s around the room plotting data as it goes. The application uses the Rovio’s Northstar data to fetch the current x/y/theta of the robot and it then plots any obstruction at that location. (I also went ahead and start plotting both the wifi and Northstar signal strengths on separate images that I can use as overlays.)
I currently sample the Rovio status every 100ms, and process movement commands once every 5 seconds. This gives me a sample size of 50 points per More >
Facebook Fun
01 year ago
The Facebook Fun page is now fully operational once again! I will be tweaking the page once more but the URLs should be stable now.
Now that Facebook has launched the Like button for external websites it has started to show up everywhere. You can’t browse a news article, a blog post, or even shop online without seeing the familiar little blue button. I don’t blame websites at all, who wouldn’t want the extra exposure that even a single Like can generate, especially if the person clicking has a lot of friends. The Facebook stream is important to some More >