kstruct

I played with Macrovision’s InstallShield for the first time last week in my new job. Pretty impressive UI compared to InstallBuilder which I’d used previosuly. Obviously the problem is made a lot simpler by the fact that InstallShield doesn’t really work cross platform (and from my experience, Macrovision’s InstallAnywhere’s UI crashed so much it was more of a liability).

In a way though, the name find and replace change I was making would have been a bunch simpler in InstallBuilder, where the installer is pretty much configured with a big XML file (once you very quickly hit the limits of the token UI editor provided).

I guess I should try opening the InstallShield file in a text editor to see what under the hood there…

Just worked it out…You need to hold down option, then drag around one of the circles which appears (under your cursor, and in the opposite corner relate to the screen’s centre). The other moves in the opposite direction relative to the centre of the touchpad. If you hold down option and shift, you can move both circles together in the same direction (though I’m not sure what that’s for).What’s surprising is that I only now realise that you can’t pinch into a specific part of the screen (even on a real iPod touch), it always zooms into the centre.

I won an iPod touch for my 5 minute lightning talk about One-JAR at CJUG a couple of weeks ago. The interface is fantastic, and and of the guys at work has already bought one after briefly trying mine.

The guy who beat me out of first place in the talks (and then chose to take the second prize Asus Eee PC instead) is expanding his talk on Selenium for the next CJUG meeting on Wednesday March the 12th, which should be an interesting one.

I was playing with selenium to try testing a web app I work on earlier today, but ran into the following error pretty much straight away…

input [error] Unexpected Exception: message ->
  element.ownerDocument.createEventObject is not a function
...

From a bit of digging, it looks like the current version of Selenium (0.8.3 as of Jan 15, 2008) isn’t compatible with mootools.

The mootools forums have a fairly simple patch to fix the issue.

Apparently Selenium is checking for the fireEvent method, normally only available in IE, but which mootools adds to other browsers. As a result, mootools thinks it’s running in IE, and tries to call createEventObject, which really is only available in IE.

Having made it over that hurdle, selenium is looking like quite a nice tool.

Crossed my mind while chatting with a friend earlier today… How far can you browse without a keyboard. If you’ve got a browser home page with a search box, or a bookmark to Google, you could go there, copy some word on the page, paste it in, search, grab some letters from the summaries, construct words to search for.

For example, copy the word about from Google’s home page, and paste it in, then search.

Ok that page were more than enough letters to make the word kstruct and hence make my way here.

There is a linked list of numbers of length N. N is very large and you don’t know N. You have to write a function that will return k random numbers from the list. Numbers should be completely random.

This one seems pretty simple. Walk the list, generating a new random number for each entry. Keep a ‘top k’ chart of the highest random numbers, and their associated entries. When we hit the end of the list, the numbers in the chart are the required random numbers.

Anyone have better methods?

Apparently Apple is giving all Apple employees a free iPhone. Pretty cool, but I’ve got to wonder if that applies to employees outside the USA. And if so, are they usable (since they’re locked to AT&T in the USA)?

Technorati Tags: iphone, at&t, apple, free

Thanks to Eric for point out that the two marbles solution I presented previously isn’t optimal. I’m pretty confident that allowing the first pass windows size to vary will fix it up, but haven’t found the time to site down and work it through.

On the other hand, it crossed my mind this morning that the question didn’t state what we should optimise for. I imagine the number of marble drops is what’s expected, but if you took into account the running up and down stairs involved that may well affect the solution…

Hmmmm…

Yes, yes, I’d much rather see a proper API with access to the hardware for the iPhone instead of an Ajax one, but at Google’s devloper day, they claimed Safari support would be released for Google Gears very soon.

If Safari on the iPhone supports Gears, the Ajax only limitation seems a lot less limiting (even if it means we’ll never have Skype). Lots of people seem very upset about the idea that widgets on the iPhone will only work with a network connection, but gears should pretty easily circumvent that limitation.

That said, I’m not too hopeful if it doesn’t support flash movies. That, and, it will probably go through a revision or two before we can get them here in Australia anyway.

Technorati Tags: iPhone, google, gears, api, apple, safari, ajax

Google Gears (Google’s toolkit for off-line web applications) looks really cool (thought it’s a pity it has to be installed as a plug-in and there are a lot of “We have nothing to announce at this time” type responses floating around. A lot of people seem to be asking about things like conflict resolution etc. which is being left as an application concern for now. The few web developers around seem to be underestimating the amount of rework which would be required, but for new web applications it looks like it will be quite easy to produce a radically better off-line experience.

Maplets look cute, but I’ve not really played with maps much, so it doesn’t seem to radical to me. The ‘coming soon’ mention of AdSense for maps is interesting – looks like you’ll be able to make a call with your id and a number of ads to display and have them shown along with whatever other map content your maplet/mashup is adding.

Food’s been pretty good, got a very cool notepad which has a picture of the earth on the cover then zooms in as you tilt it forward.

…And why do they always have conference name tags designed so they turn backwards accidentally so easily. Surely it would be simple to attach it to the lanyard at two corners rather than just at the centre…

Technorati Tags: GDD07, GDD07au, google, gears, maplet