brainwagon

Need to get some weather information? The website forecast.io has a nice web based service you can use up to one thousand times a day for free. I was thinking of using it for an automated sprinkler application, but just to test it, I wrote this simple chunk of python to try it out. To […]

Don’t you hate it when you see something that you want to investigate further, but then you can’t remember what the project is called? That’s what happened to me: I recently saw some cool little web server, implemented as a single C file, and that could either embed or be embedded in other applications. And […]

I’ve been making some minor tweeks to the excellent 1024 px WordPress theme that I started using a few weeks ago. I found a small issue with the CSS for images that are supposed to be center (a priority mistake meant it didn’t work) and I’ve made a few other minor tweaks. I finally got […]

One year ago today, I first published a link to The Broadcaster Project, a site which had several tips on using command line tools such as ffmpeg to assemble videos. I use a similar technique to do my more recent videos: I take the raw footage from the camera and resize it, denoise it, and […]

It’s occasionally useful to have a basic HTTP running to serve the files in a directory. You might want to fetch some MP3 or movie files from one machine, or in my case, a PDF document that I’m hacking on my Linux box while ssh’ed in from my Windows laptop. In the past, I have […]

As I was driving in this morning, I entertained a train of thought that led me back to thinking about peer to peer networks. I recalled that I had seen a posting by Ed Felton some years ago about implementing a peer-to-peer networking scheme in a very few lines of Python. A few minutes of […]

Here’s a useful little chunk of Javascript which can probably be put to good use on your website: Lightbox JS is a simple, unobtrusive script used to to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers. It works quite well, and is also somewhat instructive. I […]

My recent attempts to block hotlinking made me search for a few minutes to find the information contained on this handy htaccess cheatsheet. It’s got some good stuff in it.

I received an email a couple of days ago from someone who thoughtfully noted that someone was stealing bandwidth from my by hotlinking to images in my /images directory. Effectively these people use your webserver to serve images for their websites. It’s tacky: kind of like filling your pockets with napkins and packets of ketchup […]

This is getting a lot of play everywhere, but Microsoft’s new mapping application, Virtual Earth is now live. In most respects, I find it very similar to Google’s offering, but the API seems a bit more refined, and it doesn’t have the problems associated with generating usage keys. You can find information about programming the […]

Today Google released their own plugin for playing video on their Google Video Search page. Apparently it is based upon VLC, and you can get the source. Unfortunately, no love for Linux, FreeBSD or Mac OSX users yet.

I’m not color saavy savvy enough to actually design a good color scheme for websites. What I did years ago was come up with a particular blue (#336699) and just chose to use it as the predominant color for my website. I keep thinking that it would be nice to add some different colors, but […]

Slashdot mentioned that the Google SiteRank patent application was available, so here it is for your perusal.

AXS is a pretty nice little program that can gather many of the web usage statistics that are provided by statcounter.com, but without any limits. There is a new AXS and WordPress Integration Plugin that makes it very simple to add to your WordPress setup: basically just put the plugin where they all go, configure […]

I had heard about the open source browser Minimo, but they just recently released their first trial build. You can download a sneak peak at this build here: http://www.meer.net/~dougt/minimo_ce/MinimoCE_0.002.zip. Keep in mind, it is basically the second build that I made that actually rendered a page successfully. When you check it out, remember I told […]