I’ve been tinkering around a bit with OpenLaszlo , since here at work I’m about to start writing an RIA for doing online extraction of genealogical records, and it would be really nice not to have to re-invent the wheel. :) The advantages of OpenLaszlo are that it’s free, it compiles to Flash (which is on pretty much every computer out there) and soon DHTML, and it looks like it’s conducive to fast development. And there are a lot of high-profile apps using it (like Pandora ).
So I spent half an hour throwing together a quick prototype of our app — no functionality, just the layout — and I think I’m liking it. It’s basically XML with a healthy dose of Javascript. Using XML this way feels almost like Lisp somehow, incidentally. :) So far I haven’t run into any huge roadblocks, so we’ll see if OpenLaszlo works for what I need.
Technorati Tags: OpenLaszlo , Flash , Pandora , XML , ...
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eHostPros is lameFrom: outsidethebox.blankslate.net
Post Date: 2006-05-09 06:35:43
Up until February when I switched to Bluehost , my sites were hosted with eHostPros . Things generally were okay, but then I tried to cancel my account (in February), before the billing cycle (which was March 9, so that it would end then). Got a confirmation that it had been cancelled.
And then I got a bill for $7.95. E-mailed them. Got an automated response worth nothing. April came around and I got billed again. This time I e-mailed them three times and each time go...
more Ruby LevenshteinFrom: outsidethebox.blankslate.net
Post Date: 2006-05-08 17:03:46
Today I read about the Levenshtein distance algorithm and decided to code it in Ruby.
In information theory, the Levenshtein distance or edit distance between two strings is given by the minimum number of operations needed to transform one string into the other, where an operation is an insertion, deletion, or substitution of a single character.
The Wikipedia article also has the algorithm in pseudocode, which is nice:
int LevenshteinDistance( char str1[1..lenStr1], char...
more Exploring TextMateFrom: outsidethebox.blankslate.net
Post Date: 2006-05-10 17:05:22
I’ve switched to TextMate for my work development (which is mostly HTML, CSS, and XSLT at the moment, plus Ruby and Python for Beyond). And I’m liking it. Granted, I haven’t read the manual yet and so my fingers are really missing vi keystrokes, but I’m going to learn the TextMate keystrokes. Before long I’ll be setting the keyboard on fire. Anyway, the project management stuff is really cool, as are bundles and column editing and I’m sure ev...
more Practice and perfectionFrom: outsidethebox.blankslate.net
Post Date: 2006-05-10 09:07:15
Ran across an interesting article on Raganwald, Why do we resist the idea that programming is hard? Here’s one of the lead-in quotes, by Edsger Dijkstra:
“Don’t blame me for the fact that competent programming, as I view it as an intellectual possibility, will be too difficult for ‘the average programmer’, you must not fall into the trap of rejecting a surgical technique because it is beyond the capabilities of the barber in his shop around the corner.”
It’s a...
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