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As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have been playing with SVG lately. I haven’t done any SVG for many years and I was curious how the browsers support them by the end of 2008. The overall picture would be quite satisfying, if our good old friend Internet Explorer wouldn’t ruin it all.
The root of all problems is that IE6 and IE7 (i have no info on IE8) do not support SVG natively but by using the external Adobe SVG Viewer, which is going to be discontinued BTW.
Other problems you will face as an SVG developer:

Earlier this year i blogged about a website called www.savethedevelopers.org (link missing on purpose). Originally the site was recommending other browsers than Explorer 6, namely: IE7, Firefox, Safari and Opera. As for today the site redirects to a Get Internet Explorer page, more ironically if you do a google search for “save the developers”, the same site appears on the top of the list.
To restore the healthy ecosystem of the Internet, I suggest all of us remove our links from this site:)

…ok, so you want a killer web app that will locate the position of the current visitor? No problem. Here are the tools of the trade. (Your requirements may vary, for me, i want Lat/Long information, with regards to the KISS principle)

1. IP to location databases
Typical providers include ip2location, ipligence, maxmind. They are usually expensive, static, and just too big. The concept is that you have a big database downloaded and monthly updated, and you can open that database to get the location info from whatever platform you want. Since IP addresses change dynamically i just don’t see this method viable. You might consider them, if you need the information in an offline environment. Note that some of these providers offer a webservice also, to query results online. More about this later.

…so i was enthusiastic about the new Picasa collage maker, and i thought to myself i could easily re-create it in the web with the help of canvas, when …darn …i am late again:) Even without googling i accidentally came across the high quality implementation of Ernest Delgado (demo here, details here).
Good job Ernest, I will keep an eye on you!

Note to self: need more eyes.

This is an archive post. It represents a point of view in the past. Facts might have changed, events might be interpreted differently as of today. Links might be broken.

Still beta (you can easily get it from filehippo), but brings around some nice new features. I have been playing around with it a little bit, things i liked most:

* Photo Viewer is a real eye-candy, it replaces your default application for double click, it loads relatively fast, and has some nice user interaction features (try your scroll wheel on the image itself, and on the film band).
* Collage maker - it has a killer interface to create the photo pile of your wish, resize, rotate, move your images one by one.
* Quick filter by starred, uploaded photos, videos, or even photos with faces. It doesn’t include yet the face recognition and tagging that is already available in picasaweb.
* Movie maker - it is not really a movie maker, more like a presentation maker, but still, it puts much more control in your hands than before.
* There are some improvements on image import, and web upload, i haven’t tried these yet.

…ok, so for a while i was wondering why my website doesnt show my latest blog entries.
I am using SimplePie to fetch the latest RSS feed from FeedBurner and display the last five items. At the beginning i was suspicious of the cache mechanism, but even if i turn off caching completely, it will not fetch the latest feed. So i dugg myself into the internals of SimplePie and it turned out that when it fetches the feed from FeedBurner, it is presented a redirect to http://feedproxy.feedburner.com which indeed does NOT have the latest version. So the problem is not with SimplePie.
Interestingly this redirect doesnt show up when browsing or wgetting the feed.
As soon as i changed the user agent that SimplePie uses, the problem didnt show up any more.
Just add:
$feed->set_useragent(‘gecko’);//anything but simplepie

Apart from some new Italian cities, Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia and Sevilla are on the map now!
Enjoy the somewhat broken view of the Sagrada Familia:)

This is an archive post. It represents a point of view in the past. Facts might have changed, events might be interpreted differently as of today. Links might be broken.