CodeDread Blog

Creating a Camera Archive Folder

Jeff — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 15:28:51 +0000

I kind of forgot about the idea of writing in my blog so that I can find the answers again via Google. Well here’s a quick one: How to backup the entire contents of your webcam (I own a Sony HDR-XR150) to a “Camera Archive Folder” on OSX.

Open up iMovie
Go to “File > Import from Camera” or the click big camera button under the Project Library pane
Click the “Archive All” button beside “Camera: Sony HDR-XR150″
Choose a location to save the entire contents of your camera (I use portable hard drives)

After doing this, you’ll have a “Camera Archive Folder” where you can import movies into iMovie for your editing pleasure.

Screenshot of iMovie and the Archive All button

Binary Tools for JavaScript

Jeff — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 05:23:45 +0000

As promised, I have a tiny thing to announce here. I recently split off and refactored the code that deals binary data in kthoom into a new open source project: http://bitjs.googlecode.com/, Binary Tools for JavaScript.

The faster and faster JavaScript engines in modern browsers and the rise of new technologies like Typed Arrays, Web Workers, and the File APIs mean that browsers can actually be used to read in binary formats completely on the client-side (as long as native performance isn’t a requirement).

For now the library includes two main capabilities:

streams for reading in bits and bytes from a Typed Array
unarchiving zip, rar or tar files (that’s right, you can unzip and unrar in JavaScript now)

Shuttering…

Jeff — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 06:10:36 +0000

After finding some time to go through and mass-delete spam comments on this blog, I realized that it’s time to turn on the “Automatically close comments on post older than XX days” checkbox in WordPress. This means that posts older than 90 days will no longer be able to be commented on.

In case it’s not obvious, I haven’t been writing that much here these days. I’ve been too busy at my day job as a Google+ engineer and at my night job being a husband and father. If you really want to “follow me” these days, the best bet is Google+ for now. Let me know if you need an invite.

I’m not saying I won’t pick up the ol’ blogging pen from time to time. In fact, writing this very post has made me realize how much the UI has improved in WordPress. Also, I might have a couple new things to talk about in a little while, which I’ll likely post here and reference on Google+.

And yes, I’ve obviously been fully absorbed into the collective at this point

Don’t Use Edible Arrangements Los Gatos

Jeff — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 01:55:18 +0000

Boo. I ordered some fruit arrangement from “Edible Arrangements” in Los Gatos this the morning. I got home in the evening and it hadn’t been delivered all day. So much for surprise…

I called, they said the driver had the order and was delivering it now. It arrived 45 minutes later with no apology.

I won’t be using them again.

One step closer to image editing on Wikipedia

Jeff — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 04:44:59 +0000

Oh, I forgot to mention a cool thing that happened at the beginning of the year while I was so busy: Wikipedia inched a step closer to having an in-browser editing experience for its impressive collection of vector image files via an experimental MediaWiki Extension. The extension was put together by Brion Vibber of StatusNet and WikiMedia fame. Fingers crossed for this to one day appear in Wikipedia!

TypedArrays make me theoretically happy

Jeff — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 17:11:10 +0000

I’ve been busy at my day job not launching code, but over the weekend I had some fun converting kthoom‘s unzip/inflate algorithm from using binary strings to using Typed Arrays. Typed Arrays mean native binary data that is accessible to JavaScript in the browser, making operations like unzip much much faster (like 4x).

Unfortunately browser support is limited to WebKit nightlies (Chromium 11) and Firefox 4 at this time. To compound this, Firefox did not bother to implement FileReader.readAsArrayBuffer() which means you can’t use the File API to read in binary data yet… uh… WTF? So basically I no longer support Firefox in kthoom. Oh well, the performance benefits cannot be ignored and they’ll eventually get there. Bug.

That’s not to say WebKit is all peachy-keen. You currently can crash Chromium OSX nightlies by creating an ArrayBuffer of unusual size and there are some issues passing ArrayBuffers into web workers. This means that I disabled use of Workers in kthoom as a result and everything happens in a single thread. :-/

Oh, and you can’t easily convert bytes from TypedArrays into strings…

FML.

Oh WordPress…

Jeff — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 17:39:09 +0000

It appears that comments on my blog have been screwed up now for probably at least a month. When you try to post a comment it 404s. You can no longer see comments on a post. I simply don’t have the time to look into this at the moment, so my apologies up front. I don’t know if I’ve been hacked or if something in my theme broke in an automatic update of WP.

If you need to get ahold of me there’s always email, Google Chat, Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz. Least those don’t get hacked… much.

SVG/Canvas Marketshare: Nov 2010

Jeff — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 17:31:48 +0000

I’ve updated my marketshare spreadsheet for Nov 2010 charting the percentage of web users who can view SVG and Canvas: 44.57%

I’m also tracking what percentage of web users can see SVG in an <img> tag: 18.41%

Happy Holidays 2010

Jeff — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 18:26:54 +0000

Happy Holiday season to y’all! This is our first Christmas in California and it’s a bit of an adjustment. A wet Christmas is not a white Christmas – but at least there’s no snow shoveling for me this year.

I hope you all have a successful new year in twenty-eleven. Build more! Code more! Write more! Do more! Those are certainly my goals!

By the way, I found that Christmas Tree image by Nicu on Open Clip Art Library using Google Image Search, opened it in SVG-edit, moved the star to the top of the tree and changed its color to yellow, scoured it and then saved it to my web server. Took about 10 minutes in total!

Speaking of Christmas trees, it’s probably high time for me to update my own red and green online decoration. Soon!

Oh, and as I write more posts on my blog, you should be able to see Google indexing the SVG images from my site here. Note that these are not raster fallbacks. Hope that means something to you.

Grooveshark rocking teh HTML5

Jeff — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 05:53:30 +0000

Grooveshark recently deployed an updated UI done in HTML5 instead of Flash. In a word, it’s awesome. Scrolling is smoother. Text is fully selectable. I like being able to resize the UI (I don’t think their previous Flash interface allowed zooming at all). I really hope Grooveshark can find a successful revenue model that will keep it alive.

But this just seems to be part of the overall growing trend towards sexy HTML5 user interfaces. Netflix is another one as described in their recent post.

The industry has been steadily shifting into the next phase of web development for a couple years – we’re nearly there now. Well since IE6 is no longer a concern (or hadn’t you heard – less than 5% of web users last month and still dropping), IE7 is quickly shuffling off the stage (~12% and steadily dropping), and IE9 is waiting in the wings.

Oh and IE8?

Yeah I don’t share in the pessimism of some who think that IE8 is the new IE6. And there are a lot of reasons I don’t:

Month-by-month, the total marketshare of all IE versions combined has been steadily dropping. From 95% six years ago to about 50% now. Any gains on this percentage will be with IE9, not anything older.
There are now more major modern browsers and platforms than ever before supported by companies with lots of cash and lots of push.
Unlike IE6 at the time, IE8 simply does not have the capabilities expected of the average web developer. Given the numbers in my first point, next year there will be more users supporting SVG, Canvas, HTML5 audio/video than don’t. It makes mathematical sense to target modern browsers first.
In a year and a half, Windows 7 went from nothing to a quarter of all desktops. At the end of next year, I predict XP users will be a minority among Microsoft desktops. Any Windows 7 users will be using IE9 in a year, not IE8.
Google’s Chrome Frame plugin can be used to target IE8- users if you can convince them to download/install it. Disclaimer: I work for Google.

As for my own responsibility as a web developer… well, I’ve been developing for IE9+ for about 5 years now. I just didn’t know it at the time