Disqus - Latest Comments for James Urquhart

Re: Heroku | The Big Kickoff

James Urquhart — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 02:19:06 -0000

Neat! I was just thinking "Wouldn't it be cool if someone made an internet IDE?", and now i see that they have!

I wish you guy's the best of luck in getting this project off the ground and into the mainstream.

I think there is definitely some sort of niche out there for this sort of tool. The most obvious would be mobile workers like Joseph.

Good luck!

Re: Now where should I share my links?

James Urquhart — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 03:44:13 -0000

Nice idea!

Really shows how easy it is to combine all of these web 2.0 services and create a lot of synergy. One of the perks of using these online apps, i think. :)

Re: 280Slides brings Keynote to the Browser

James Urquhart — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 03:58:10 -0000

A few weeks ago, I too tried out 280slides. Was very impressed that it ran rather nicely in the browser, using no flash whatsoever. And its written in Objective-J too - crazy but hey, it works.

The only issue i had though was that there are no transitions. So far at least.

I hope we see more web apps like this.

Re: 280Slides brings Keynote to the Browser

James Urquhart — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 06:52:21 -0000

From what i have been able to tell, Objective-J is still under the hood. Still, if you look at the files downloaded from the server on 280slides, you should be able to find the runtime and a lot of the objective-j sources for the app.

There is also an interview all about it with the developers over at Ajaxian -> http://ajaxian.com/archives/an-interview-with-2... .

Re: What does this got to do with IPhone?!?

James Urquhart — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 05:29:36 -0000

Could it be a subtle hint that they are making a LinkPoints app tailored to iPhone users?
Or perhaps they are going to be giving away iPhone's?

Or, as you suggest, "everyone is crazy over IPhone". :)

Re: 280 Slides (beta) is live!

James Urquhart — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:28:39 -0000

Nice work. A bit slow loading, but the clean and straight-forward interface pretty much made up for it.

Hats off to the Objective-J too. It's nice to see a creative use of a compiler written in JavaScript. :)

Re: open source to multiple versions

James Urquhart — Tue, 29 May 2007 11:00:38 -0000

Hey Kevin,

Just thought i'd let you know that about a month after that announcement, i started the RailsCollab project (http://rubyforge.org/projects/railscollab/) which is basically a rewrite of ActiveCollab in Ruby using the Ruby on Rails framework. It currently implements most of the base functionality (minus things such as the administration section and proper security checks), and best of all, is still open source.

Sadly though, not a lot of people seem to be interested in it (yet), so i'm pretty much on my own updating it when i can. At least the guy who writ ActiveCollab chose to mirror his code closely on the Ruby on Rails framework, otherwise i probably wouldn't have even bothered undertaking this rather tedious effort.

With regard to successfull open source models, the most common one seems to be the "pay us if you want us to make sure it works for you, otherwise figure it out yourself" model.

Re: Common Craft - Wikis in Plain English

James Urquhart — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 15:49:26 -0000

Hey kevin,

Neat video. I always find that watching a video gives me a greater sense of accomplishment than just reading one long boring page of information.

I think there needs to be more video's in this sort of format that cover other topics like open source, using linux, GTD, blogging, etc. Practical and fun to watch, that's what i like. :)

Regards

James

p.s. I have tagged you with the 8 random facts meme. If you have a minute, please join in. :)

Re: Introducing Holler

James Urquhart — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 19:30:08 -0000

Hey Zack,

Wow. I've been looking for an open Twitter-like app for a while now, and Holler seems to be just the thing i need.

Might even fit in nicely with my Backpack-like "clone", which if you look, you might find on GitHub... :)

Keep up the good work!

Re: Cuppadev » Wonderful Dynamic Widgets

James Urquhart — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 14:27:00 -0000

Ian,

Sounds great! Though i suspect putting in how long ago the visit was might be a bit detrimental as my blog isn't quite high traffic so it would be very likely that everyone would be listed as having visited days ago - hehe.

Thanks for the suggestion,

James

Re: The Web on a PocketPC

James Urquhart — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 14:00:00 -0000

Gaz,

I did try to redeem myself by trying to run Linux on it. Sadly though hardware support is pretty much minimal not to mention the pre-built distribution was abysmal in terms of usability.

Thanks,

James Urquhart

Re: Cuppadev » OpenMoko

James Urquhart — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 12:07:00 -0000

Gaz,

Sadly an SD slot camera wouldn't be very useful as the phone uses a mini sd slot. Under the battery.

There might be hope in using a USB camera though, provided of course you could find one that doesn't draw power from the USB bus, as the phone supposedly supports USB's host mode but doesn't supply the power.

I wouldn't mind an iPhone, but it is a bit expensive for me at the moment - up to 2x the price of the OpenMoko phone.
Though then again the consumer version of the OpenMoko phone appears to be set at $400, $100 more than the developer preview. So the gap in pricing definitely starts to close up.

With regards to the development kit emulator, i tried it out but found it was intolerably slow. Though then again that might have been because i was running it under Linux under Parallels Desktop under Mac OS X. Haha.

Thanks for the suggestions

James Urquhart

Re: Cuppadev » SSH Tunnel Manager

James Urquhart — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 19:32:00 -0000

Hi Gaz,

Haha, i wondered if you would put your security hat on and investigate what secret code i inserted (thankfully none) :)

The XCode version i used was v2.4.1. And yes, i did miss out the step of making the arch option "i386 ppc".

With regards to security, i am surprised Apple haven't added some signing mechanism for applications, considering they are supposed to be security conscious. Actually, that sounds like a great idea for a third party app...

BTW, the comments are "textile formatted":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile. I shall try and fix your comment for you.

Re: Cuppadev » Testing a little Haiku

James Urquhart — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 23:15:00 -0000

Gary,

The only thing i could get Haiku working in was "Q":http://www.kju-app.org/kju/ - sadly VirtualBox made it kernel panic (something to do with the kernel acceleration module), and Parallels Desktop 3 didn't even want to boot the disk image.

Sadly i currently do not have VMWare Fusion installed, although i pretty much guess that it should work fine there.

With regards to networking, good luck. I hear it should work, although i have yet to see definitive proof - haha. :)

Oddly enough i didn't notice any development stuff on the test image - i guess the Haiku guy's aren't confident enough to build Haiku on Haiku yet. So i reckon you might be stuck with either building a cross-compiler or building on BeOS (though i have not tried either yet since i have yet to dabble with BeOS/Haiku development).

Thanks for the input.

- James

Re: Cuppadev » QuickSilver on Linux

James Urquhart — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 16:31:00 -0000

Gary,

I thought i recalled seeing a Gnome equivalent for QuickSilver. Thanks for reminding me of it! :)

As for iTunes, i have grown a liking to using the remote control which came with my macbook to control it. Though of course, performing more advanced actions (i.e. those not on the darn controller) it sounds like a good idea to use QuickSilver.

Regards, James.

Re: Running into OpenLaszlo Limitations

James Urquhart — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 00:42:00 -0000

Henry,

Thanks very much for the suggestion. It seems to work rather nicely. :)

Regards,

James

Re: Cuppadev » OpenID in RailsCollab

James Urquhart — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 19:12:00 -0000

Jason,

I partly followed the "best practices" concept and just made each user have an OpenID field which is checked against when logging in via OpenID.

Although i didn't go so far as to allow them to have multiple OpenID's, as considering they could still login with a regular username + password it seemed a bit silly.

IMO, if one wants to use multiple OpenID providers with a single app, they should just setup their own OpenID page which links to any one of the various providers they want to use.

Regards,

James

Re: Scattergories Meme

James Urquhart — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 22:58:00 -0000

Jaffa Orange? *doh*!

Re: Cuppadev » Can you solve this river crossing puzzle?

James Urquhart — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 15:07:00 -0000

Nirav,

I eventually figured it out. It's actually quite simple - answer below! :)

<pre>
POLICE, CRIMINAL
POLICE
POLICE, BOY
POLICE, CRIMINAL
MAN, BOY
MAN
MAN, WOMAN
WOMAN
POLICE, CRIMINAL
MAN
MAN, WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN, GIRL
POLICE, CRIMINAL
POLICE, GIRL
POLICE
POLICE, CRIMINAL
</pre>

- James

Re: Cuppadev » HaXe - Web oriented universal language!

James Urquhart — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 21:12:00 -0000

Gaz,

HaXe isn't that complicated a language. It is essentially just like ActionScript, which in turn is similar to JavaScript. So i think there is still some hope for you yet. :)

~ James

Re: Cuppadev » Flex-style dialog blur in OpenLaszlo

James Urquhart — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 17:04:00 -0000

Gaz,

If you load the .swf manually and set it to a small size, the dialog should appear in a more favorable location above the content, which in hindsight is what i should have made sure would happen in the first place. Oh well. :)

Glad to see you like the effect.

~ James

Re: Rotating OpenLaszlo with Webkit

James Urquhart — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 22:24:00 -0000

henry,

That's on my TODO list. However it is worth noting that since Webkit transform's have yet to be standardised and thus implemented in other web browsers, so it might be a bit premature to implement such functionality now.

After a quick look around the mozilla docs, there sadly doesn't seem to be equivalent functionality for rotating elements, unless perhaps you make use of OpenLaszlo's incomplete SVG kernel.

As for Internet Explorer, there seems to be a way you can apply transforms to elements as described "here":http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms532847.aspx.

In any case, thanks for your interest! :)

~ James

Re: Rotating OpenLaszlo with Internet Explorer

James Urquhart — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 17:36:00 -0000

raju,

I suspect they don't support arbitrary angles as they probably don't have support for detecting mouse events within rotated elements. And of course there are the bugs which would really stand out.

Also note that when the element is "rotated", it is more like a combination of horizontal and vertical flips rather than a true rotation.

~ James

Re: cre8Buzz Criticisms

James Urquhart — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 20:24:00 -0000

James,

Sure thing. Just sent you an invite to your address.

Actually you'd be rather surprised how many James Urquhart's there are out there. ;)

Re: cre8Buzz Criticisms

James Urquhart — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 18:05:47 -0000

Sent another invite. Hope you enjoy! :)

Re: Cuppadev » Using MacFUSE to replace FileVault

James Urquhart — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 15:19:28 -0000

Hey Frederico!

I was looking for a way to automount my encfs home when logging in. It seems that the solution you linked to might just be the solution i was looking for! :)

Many thanks.

~ James

Re: Heroku - Online Ruby on Rails IDE

James Urquhart — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 10:57:44 -0000

Hey Stan!

Actually i already received an invite a while ago. But thanks for the offer. :)

As for running RailsCollab on it, make sure all the necessary gem's are installed. You might also have an issue with gd2, which is used to resize images for the company logo's and user avatar's - which you can disable quite easily by commenting out the relevant code.

~ James

Re: What not to write in haXe

James Urquhart — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 00:12:46 -0000

Many thanks for the suggestions, Nicholas! :)

I'm surprised that i didn't figure that sticking the #ifdef'd stuff in Common.hx would be possible with haXe. Still, now i have an excuse to take a second look. :)

Re: Running into OpenLaszlo Limitations

James Urquhart — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 23:45:32 -0000

Héryk,

I've not played about with OpenLaszlo for months, but i'll see what i can recall.

If you take a look at one of my other posts, specifically http://www.cuppadev.co.uk/2007/08/08/openlaszlo-version-of-the-previous-flex-example/ , then i eventually figured out that the "lzpostbody" parameter was the key.

The code i ended up with is http://www.cuppadev.co.uk/assets/2007/8/8/manage_test.txt .

Keep in mine though that if you are running your app in SOLO mode, then in all likelihood your POST data will automagically be escaped. My solution to that snag here -> http://www.cuppadev.co.uk/2007/08/09/openlaszlo-xml-workaround/ .

Good luck. :)

Re: Heroku - Online Ruby on Rails IDE

James Urquhart — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 23:09:43 -0000

Thanks a lot, Ted.

Your IDE seems very promising... will have to check it out.

Re: Yet another RailsCollab demo

James Urquhart — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 15:42:32 -0000

mpolito,

To help? Well, at the moment i've not really got any roadmap defined, so that is really an open ended question.

Things i can think of off the top of my head:
<ul>
<li>Use it and find all of the bugs</li>
<li>Implement the configuration option for changing the current theme (so one can easily use all of those lovely ProjectPier themes)</li>
<li>Make a simple plugin system (To keep up with ProjectPier, perhaps something like in Retrospectiva)</li>
<li>Write some unit tests (as of yet, i haven't really bothered with this)</li>
</ul>

Thanks for your interest.

~ James

Re: Yet another RailsCollab demo

James Urquhart — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 22:23:46 -0000

Larry,

Thanks for trying out RailsCollab.

The configuration options for Administration -> System have not been localized, thus the localization errors. In ActiveCollab they are usually hidden, thus why i haven't localized them yet.

Nice to hear you got the Basecamp Migration working. Since i only had one free Basecamp account, i didn't have much to test the feature with. So it's no surprise that it is a little bit slow.

Re: Yet another RailsCollab demo

James Urquhart — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:32:58 -0000

Larry,

I would be very interested in the changes made to the import script, especially if they improve the accuracy of the import.

Thanks again.

~ James

Re: Double Entry Accounting in Rails

James Urquhart — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 17:14:34 -0000

John,

A Journal binds together several Posting's. Typically you'd have one per full account transaction - e.g. DEBIT Bank 100, CREDIT Revenue 100 could be linked to a single journal of the type "Deposit". In theory it makes it easy to track complex transactions which consist of transfers to/from multiple accounts.

The linked article does indeed make Journals a bit confusing by referring to them by letters (a,b,c,d). Instead you should just refer to them by key number (1,2,3,4) and the whole thing becomes much more clearer.

My above example could be recorded in the POSTINGS table as follows (assuming Bank == 100 and Revenue == 50):

Id,Account Id,Journal Id,Asset Type,Amount
1,100,1,£,100
2,50,1,£,-100

100 + -100 == 0, thus satisfying the requirements in the article.

Hope that helps. :)

Re: Super simple image resizing

James Urquhart — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 05:25:00 -0000

For the user and company avatars in RailsCollab, i just installed the GD2 bindings for ruby and ended up with this relatively simple code.

max_width = AppConfig.max_logo_width
max_height = AppConfig.max_logo_height

begin
data = value.read
image = GD2::Image.load(data)
image.resize!(image.width > max_width ? max_width : image.width,
image.height > max_height ? max_height : image.height)
rescue
self.errors.add(:avatar, "Invalid data")
return
end

Granted, could be simpler. But it works. ;)

Re: ActiveRecord != DataMapper