Disqus - Latest Comments for russellbeattie

Re: LitElement with Rollup, Babel & Karma

Russ — Tue, 09 Oct 2018 20:13:12 -0000

This is actually super helpful!

One small thing: "node_modules/.bin/babel src -d lib" can be done with npx, which is nicer to read/use/remember: 'npx babel src -d lib'

Re: How to build a reactive engine in JavaScript. Part 1: Observable objects

Russ — Mon, 31 Oct 2016 14:46:10 -0000

Ever do a search and find a blog post that was exactly what you were looking for and then some? Thst just happened for me. Great post - clear, concise and super useful. Thanks! (P.S. it's been a few months now, write up part 2!)

Re: NES Classic Hands-On: This Tiny Console Is 8 Bits of Awesome

Russ — Fri, 30 Sep 2016 23:26:46 -0000

Whippersnapper. Reagan's second term ended in 1989... Double Dragon II didn't hit consoles until 1990...

Re: Throttling function calls

Russ — Wed, 22 Jun 2016 22:59:41 -0000

Commenting on a 6yo post... Yikes.

Rather than using just 'threshold' as the delay in the setTimeout, use 'threshold + last - now'. This prevents the last event from firing at an oddly spaced time by calculating how much time is left until the next event was going to be allowed to fire and using that. This stops phantom key presses that occur because a final repeated event was fired just at the end of the current threshold, thus causing the last event to happen after a weird delay.

Here's the minor tweak in a copy/pastable chunk:


function throttle(fn, threshhold, scope) {
  threshhold || (threshhold = 250);
  var last,
      deferTimer;
  return function () {
    var context = scope || this;

    var now = +new Date,
        args = arguments;
    if (last && now < last + threshhold) {
      // hold on to it
      clearTimeout(deferTimer);
      deferTimer = setTimeout(function () {
        last = now;
        fn.apply(context, args);
      }, threshhold + last - now);
    } else {
      last = now;
      fn.apply(context, args);
    }
  };
}

-Russ

Re: FreeNAS Home Server Build

Russ — Fri, 15 Jan 2016 12:27:40 -0000

Nice job! I'm not sure where you live, but I'm in California so having all that precious data perched up on top of a wooden stand makes me a bit nervous just looking at it! One 3.4 tremblor and bad things could happen!

Re: Winding down at Nokia - RussellBeattie.com

Russ — Thu, 28 May 2015 03:57:43 -0000

Soam

Re: Flip.io - An open HTML5 word puzzle game - Russell Beattie

Russ — Sun, 28 Sep 2014 15:36:57 -0000

Do you have the vocabulary words? That's the hard bit. Check out the source and you'll see there's a file with all the vocabulary words pulled from WordNet. You need to replace that with your custom dictionary and run the generator script. Email me if you have problems. (I'm not going to do it for you, but I'll help you figure it out if you need it).

Re: Opera for Android: Revamped Discover feature

Russ — Fri, 25 Apr 2014 02:15:14 -0000

Opera is such a nice browser. But I use it on my tablet the most and don't need nor want the tabs to disappear while scrolling. Please consider adding the option to just keep them in place.

Re: Coding an HTML5-game for 30 minutes, or an introduction to the Phaser framework

Russ — Mon, 28 Oct 2013 03:34:50 -0000

Just curious... Is "bet" short for "ball racquet" or a misspelling of "bat"? I'm not trying to be pedantic - it actually makes it a bit confusing to read.

Re: Readerpocalypse - The Alternatives - Russell Beattie

Russ — Sat, 12 Oct 2013 11:48:09 -0000

When I wrote this post, it was accurate. "BazQux Reader allows you to read up to 15 subscriptions for free. Paid usage costs $30 yearly." I didn't make it up. I have no idea how much it costs now.

Re: Angry Nerd: Why Exactly Is Pro Wrestling on Syfy?

Russ — Fri, 04 Oct 2013 04:25:22 -0000

"Information Ochlocracy" - Look it up. :-)

Re: Twitterfeed.php - Get your authenticated Twitter stream as an Atom feed - RussellBeattie.com

Russ — Fri, 09 Aug 2013 02:29:24 -0000

Actually, I've been meaning to update my code for a while, here: https://github.com/russellb... - This uses the entities in the Twitter API results to replace most of the short codes, cleaning up the feed considerably.

Re: Readerpocalypse - The Alternatives - Russell Beattie

Russ — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 15:02:45 -0000

Added. Thanks!

Re: Brain Dump 2013 - Russell Beattie

Russ — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 18:15:42 -0000

To anyone who comes to this post later, I noticed that I repeated myself a couple times, forgot to add some links and spread out my Android thoughts all over, so I de-duped and moved a few ideas around. It's mostly the same though.

Re: Brain Dump 2013 - Russell Beattie

Russ — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 18:14:27 -0000

Very cool! I saw that Pistach.io favorited a complaint I made yesterday (or the day before) about Evernote's constantly changing iPad UI. I'm sure it's a great product, but as I wrote (somewhere) above, I hate being burned by relying on third parties - now you want me to rely on TWO? ;-)

Re: Brain Dump 2013 - Russell Beattie

Russ — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 18:12:44 -0000

Thanks, I forgot to add that link (and one to the MIT Tech Review above it). I just added them now. I actually had to use a bit.ly link as I've got a brain-dead javascript running that re-writes 'fuck' and 'shit' for those people with extreme sensibilities and it broke the link. ;-)

Re: Brain Dump 2013 - Russell Beattie

Russ — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 18:10:17 -0000

I've seen QR codes be very useful, but my point is that if you put some well-known, standard markers around a chunk of text, your phone's OCR capabilities would be able to suck in the same information with the same level of clarity without the crazy obfuscation of the information that's inherent in QR encoding.

Re: Brain Dump 2013 - Russell Beattie

Russ — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 18:08:37 -0000

A node.js server-side app isn't the same as a PHP based one. It's just a whole other level of complexity. Anyone can thrown a WordPress install on a basic GoDaddy-hosted PHP server. Node is much more complex than just unzipping a file and reloading a web page.

Re: Brain Dump 2013 - Russell Beattie

Russ — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 18:07:20 -0000

As much as I like Homebrew for what it is, it's far, far from the utility of Apt or Yum.

Re: U.S. Lawmaker Proposes New Criteria for Choosing NSF Grants

Russ — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 03:11:52 -0000

There is absolutely ZERO debate that the Internet was a direct result of government funding. Don't let revisionist Republican idiots corrupt your knowledge of this easily verifiable fact. There are no 'opinions' favoring one side or another, because there are no sides - only outright partisan lies and the actual truth.

Re: Readerpocalypse - The players - Russell Beattie

Russ — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 03:05:33 -0000

Added, thanks!

Re: A few thoughts about RSS news readers from someone who thinks about them way more than you probably do - Russell Beattie

Russ — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 00:33:26 -0000

Hey Julian!

Thanks for chiming in - I'd love to hear a more detailed thoughts from you if you ever feel like writing it up. Hopefully the JSON I was thinking about would be in some sort of standard format, but like I said I wasn't trying to come up with a new spec in this post, just to point out that I think it's pretty evident that the old one is irretrievably broken.

-R

Re: A few thoughts about RSS news readers from someone who thinks about them way more than you probably do - Russell Beattie

Russ — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 17:55:00 -0000

I remember the arguments for/against hosting static files when Atom was being developed. But I truly believe it's just the wrong solution for 2013 - the vast, vast, vast majority of content out there isn't self-hosted Moveable Type blogs that are statically generated any more. Who would serve a news feeds from a CDN nowadays? Content is updated way too fast for that.

Besides, there's nothing that says it has to be all or nothing, especially for feed deltas. Say you have an end-point named feed.json. Great, you poll for it like it's done now and pass eTags and Last Modified and hope they've set up Apache correctly. But when you poll the server, you should be able to pass last fetched IDs, dates, user names and passwords, etc. and expect a more sophisticated response like delta updates, etc. Again, I'm not defining a spec right this second, but my point is that there's more than can and should be done. Compare *every* modern web API out there using JSON to how feed requests work currently and you can see there's serious improvements to be made.

I mean, step back and think about *why* we include the last 10 or 20 or whatever posts in our RSS/Atom feed now: It's because there's no mechanism in place for getting older entries otherwise. Yet, the vast majority of feed bots out there are polling at least every hour, sometimes 10 times as often and they just suck down the same response over and over and over again - either because the bot writers are stupid or they assume the publishers are stupid. This doesn't happen with the Twitter API for example, because they'll simply ban the client if there's too many requests.

Anyways, IMHO, it's too late for doubling down in my opinion - there's just too many problems with the current system. A new one should be developed along side it, starting from scratch based on the reality of how we consume content today.

Thanks again for taking the time to parse that wall of text! I'm sure it probably stretched a few muscles that have atrophied from so many Twitter posts and Tumblr quotes. ;-)

-R

Re: Readerpocalypse - The players - Russell Beattie

Russ — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 17:50:18 -0000

Sorry! I was just about asleep when I wrote that (my schedule is a bit flipped at the moment). I see how it works now. I've updated the post with a link and description. :-)

Re: Readerpocalypse - The players - Russell Beattie

Russ — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 08:30:44 -0000

Sure, Dave! Which category do you think it best belongs in? I guess Native Apps seems to fit best, yeah?