blog-post-frequency

This post has been hinted at by the past few blog posts, but I guess eventually it has to be written. But the basic gist is that rather than making this the home of random announcements of mostly finished projects, it’ll be the home of mostly daily (or weekly, whenever significant progress is made) and probably shorter updates on the progress certain projects. That is, the blog is transitioning back into something more like the olden days (circa 2008-ish) but without falling into the trap of using this as an alternative to having commit messages and still supporting the fact I’m now working on quite a bit more than one project at a time.

The problem is that I can’t exactly stay true to that because I actually have quite a bit of backlog in terms of stuff I have to write about, stuff which is for the most part done (so it’s not particularly viable for me to make up progress updates retroactively, and I’ll probably have to stick with writing a big blog post about it).

This should be the culmination of tons of factors and trends building up for the past year or so. I’ve always felt that the blog needed to be overhauled eventually (or end up rotting as nothing more than a backup kept in the eternal resting spot which is the Internet Archive, leaching fluids into the soil as bacterium leave the corpse punctured by holes and missing vital organs, a sure sign that I’m probably going too far into this metaphor, but in the end that’s the way many of the forums I used to visit have become). But the real spark came in the form of a migration to a new web host, something which I still alas have yet to blog about despite it happening over a week ago.

Those changes are hardly precipitous (however much anyone wants to unveil something in one flash of an instant in order to feign the appearance that everything happened suddenly and approached new heights of grandeur, that never actually happens, and it’s simply harder to work in that sort of manner - slow and steady doesn’t always lose the race). The first part was the change of the web host itself which was actually not exactly planned (I was testing out it, and unexpectedly on a whim cancelled my old web host and migrated over over the course of an afternoon and left the site down for a few hours). The second front at which this evolution occurred was a slight redesign, changing the color scheme a bit, upgrading the theme, reorganizing the categories and menus (this is meant to be chronicled in detail in some other blog post which I have yet to written). And the third and last one (which was meant to be the topic of this blog post) is a change in content.

In summary, three inevitable changes on three different fronts. Content, Frontend, and Backend. All in a not-so-grand gesture to save this blog from decaying into a moldy blob of feces on the internet’s great sidewalk.

Wikipedia - Google Chrome_019

Offline Wiki for Chrome is now on the Web Store. The app that started a few months ago and took forms as Offline Dictionary. The chrome app version is much more refined, aesthetically and functionally. The search bar and autocomplete are much less obtrusive, and there’s gradients and box shadows, a sure indication of progress :)

Description

The most significant difference, is that it includes the entire English Wikipedia, a pretty close approximation of the sum of all human knowledge. Uncompressed, it’s something like 30 gigabytes of raw text, and the compressed version that I’ve compiled for this app clocks in at around 3.7 gigabytes (3.4GB for the actual compressed dump and 0.3 for the search index file). Hosting and serving up all those gigabytes does cost money, so that’s why the app isn’t free. But it’s still a pretty good value considering the equivalent apps for iOS are twice the price.

It includes an index which lists every single article in Wikipedia, paginated and navigable through a scroll bar. There are something like 50,000 pages of the index (the exact number depends on the size of your screen), and articles are divided into columns. There’s a button which sends you to a random article, and a search bar.

However the notion of this app is pretty strange: A webapp which only serves its function when offline. However, the ease of installation and use of this app is somewhat unparalleled on the desktop space. This app allows the browsing of the database instantly after the download has begun, rather than nearly all other such apps which require the entire dump to be downloaded first. There’s no conversion process. Everything pretty much hopefully just works.

HTML5 is awesome.

The interface is done entirely with CSS and HTML, no images except the obligatory xkcd reference. The toolbar is a css3 gradient and enclosed with HTML5 tags like <article>, <header> and <footer>. The download progress is indicated by a native <progress> bar element. The index is navigable through a slider bar created using <input type=range> and all the page titles are put automatically into columns by the css3 column layout properties.

The really cool stuff is what’s in the javascript. Probably the most significant development which has enabled this app is an awesome thing called the FileSystem API which exposes a special persistent sandboxed read/write directory which can be modified through the File API. When the page is first loaded, the process of downloading begins, and it uses the responseType attribute of the XMLHttpRequest to get the downloaded chunk (it just sets the request header to specify a range of one megabyte) as an array buffer. Array Buffers are a part of the WebGL specification which enables the storage and manipulation of binary data. It then uses BlobBuilder to convert that array buffer into Blob which can then be written using the File API to the hard disk.

To search, it reads a small portion of the index file by using a particular slice of the file, which is the equivalent of seeking on a disk. It implements binary search to quickly locate a certain article on the disk and then reads a chunk from the dump in much the same way. Then it uses a javascript implementation of the LZMA compression algorithm to decode a certain hundred-kilobyte block into raw WikiText which is then parsed into HTML.

Finally, the pushState and replaceState methods from the History API are used to handle the navigation of pages without reloading,.

Get it now

Offline Wiki for Chrome

Fluidizered

Fixed Width

This is another old one, something I made february fifteenth of this year.

One of the purely theoretical things that have always annoyed me, were fixed width themes. Because I love being a hypocrite, this blog right now is using a fixed width theme. Though I probably could make up an excuse, like to serve as a decent test case for Fluidizer in part of my grand scheme detailed via embedded steganographic messages inside all of my screenshots. Of course that’s all a lie (however much I would like otherwise).

It’s always bothered me how some web sites have these fixed-width layouts, sometimes with insanely thin boxes allocated to content. The vast majority of my screen becomes this orange blob of text. Chrome’s visual appearance motto is “Content not chrome”. That doesn’t help if the content is being obscured by the presentation of the content (gopher) might have solved that problem). Less chrome just means my eyes start to drown in +/- 1,732,405 pixels of orange. Even outside the extreme case, having a fixed-width layout isn’t efficient, and using something like Readability to only show the content removes the personality of the site or author, and only works on articles.

Fluidizer automatically resizes themes semi-pseudo-intelligently, and works with a lot of themes. It has several algorithms it uses, which are sort of alchemy-like and strange. I have no clue how it works, but there’s lots of strange stuff that goes on to magically do stuff. I think it even somehow has a CSS parser that uses CORS to load css through a server-side proxy.

Only tested in Chrome: [Fluidize]

javascript:(function(){function k(a){return(a||"").replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g,"")}function u(a,g){var b=new XMLHttpRequest;b.open("GET","http://anti15.chemicalservers.com/cssproxy.php?cssurl="+encodeURIComponent(a),true);b.onreadystatechange=function(){b.readyState==4&&b.status==200&&g(b.responseText)};b.send()}function o(){for(var a=0,g=0,b=false,h="*,div,p,body,span".split(",");!b&&g++<20;){if(document.body.scrollWidth>window.innerWidth){b=true;a-=100}else a+=100;for(var c=d.length;c--;){var f=d[c].text;try{for(var i=document.querySelectorAll(f),l=i.length;l--;){var n=i[l],p=parseFloat(d[c].width,10),q=d[c].width.replace(/^[\-\d\.]+/,"");if(q!="px")if(q=="em")p*=16;else console.warn("not used to handling non-px units");if(p>400&&h.indexOf(f)==-1){if(!n.a)n.a=p;n.style.width=n.a+a+"px"}}}catch(x){}}}try{c=d.length;a=0;for(var r;c--;)if(h.indexOf(d[c].text)==-1)try{var j=document.querySelectorAll(d[c].text);if(j.length==1&&j[0].getElementsByTagName("*").length>15&&(j[0]==document.body||j[0].parentNode==document.body||j[0].parentNode.parentNode==document.body))if(parseInt(d[c].width,10)>a){a=parseInt(d[c].width,10);r=j[0]}}catch(y){}if(a>500)r.style.width="100%"}catch(z){}}function v(a){function g(){var i=h.split(";").map(function(l){if(k(l.split(":")[0])=="width")return k(l.split(":")[1]);return""}).join("");b&&k(b)&&i&&k(i)&&d.push({text:k(b),width:i});h=b=""}for(var b="",h="",c=0,f=0;f<a.length;f++)if(a[f]=="{")c=1;else if(a[f]=="}"){g();c=0}else if(c==0)b+=a[f];else if(c==1)h+=a[f];g();o()}for(var d=[],s=document.styleSheets,t=s.length;t--;){var e=s[t];if(e.href&&!e.cssRules){console.log(e.href);u(e.href,v)}else{e=e.cssRules;for(var m=e.length;m--;){var w=e[m].selectorText;e[m].style&&e[m].style.width&&d.push({text:w,width:e[m].style.width})}}}window.addEventListener("resize",function(){setTimeout(function(){o()},100)});o()})();

HostMonster_thumb.jpg

So I guess it’s done, the DNS may still be propagating, but it should be not too bumpy.

Every year at about this time, I switch hosts, now I’m switching to Host Monster. This site may probably be down for the next day or so.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

I’ve decided to keep this, it’s a nice marker of when exactly this blog transitioned to a different platform.