It's not rocket science
In my previous post, I showed an example of a tile map in a viewport, but didn’t go into the details of explaining how the map was generated or loaded. In this post, we’re going to have a look at that.
The map file itself was created using an open source application called Tiled. It’s a neat application, and definitely beats writing out tile maps by hand. If you’re planning to do much work with tile maps, it’s worth checking out.
While I was tweaking the pathfinder from last time, the view started to look a bit cramped – the canvas had to show all the available information, regardless of scale or size. This got me thinking about viewports.
I’ve recently been playing with CoffeeScript, a neat little language that compiles to JavaScript. It’s a lot more concise than plain old javascript and can be organised much more tightly, so I’m really having a blast with it. That said, its conventions are a bit different to what I’m used to working with, so more bit of practice is in order.
One of the practice scripts I wrote is a very basic 2d pathfinder, hooked up to an html5 canvas element. The original idea was to get a good feel for the CoffeeScript syntax and then write a bit about it, but a screenshot of the finder on Facebook generated a bit of curiosity among some friends, so this post will be about the pathfinding algorithm instead; the CoffeeScript post will just have to wait a bit longer.
Every so often I like to revisit old projects of mine and refactor them a little, either using some new ideas I learnt in the meantime, or trying out some new technique or framework on familiar ground. This time, I’m going over a wordpress theme I made a couple of years ago and using Compass to organize the style sheets. Converting the existing style sheet (circa 8k uncompressed) to SCSS didn’t take long – only a few minutes by hand – and there are tools which you can use to automate the conversion, so it left me plenty of time to explore more Sass features which make style sheet management much easier. Today we’re going to look at command directives and a few basic spriting helpers. Continue reading “Easy CSS Management and Spriting With Sass and Compass”
In the last few weeks I was doing some work with client side templates. Since most of the webbies seemed to be unfamiliar with the concept and had a wee bit of bother wrapping their heads around it, here’s a short explanation of the whole idea. Continue reading “Templating in Javascript”
Magento is a whopping big platform – even the community edition is something of a beast. That gives it a nasty learning curve, and while, in most cases, it simply works, there are some places where it tries to be clever, with mixed results.
The product search is a case in point. A friend was recently trying to get it to cooperate, but the way the results were being returned made it quite unusable. By default, the search uses an OR comparison to find what you’re after, so if you look for “web development books”, it will give you any product whose description contains “web”, “development”, or “books”. Since the order or relation of the words is not considered, you might end up with Twilight as a top result, which I’m sure you’ll agree, is not conductive to your users not gutting you with a rusty fork.
The easiest way I found to fix this, is to change the search query, defined by the fulltext.php file (/app/code/core/Mage/CatalogSearch/Model/Mysql4/fulltext.php). Continue reading “Magento Search: Getting Better Results In Product Searches”
A few weeks ago, a club I’m a member of was updating its membership information. Since the data was being collected in a Google spread sheet, I thought it would be interesting to create a map visualization to show where the members come from. In this post, we’ll write a map overlay which will generate a display like the one in the following image using data drawn from a Google spread sheet. Basically, we’re going to give a map a nasty rash.
You can also see the map here, or download the files here. Note that the size of each location has been fudged and bears no relation to the values originally collected in the membership survey.
No, it’s not some kind of wierd coder pr0n. Just released some of my scripts on the jQuery plugin repository at http://plugins.jquery.com/users/karlagius/track
Aiming to release the contact list plugin on to the WordPress repository next, when and if I have time to clean it and update it to the latest version of wordpress and jQuery.
A few days ago, my next desk neighbour, Joe, put together a neat little Chrome extension which adds keyboard shortcuts for use in NeoGAF. It looked like fun, so I wanted to make one too, and, over the course of a smoking break, decided that it should tell me how many days are left until next St. Patrick’s day. Because hey, beer.
Version 0.1 of the plugin can be installed from its own page in the Chrome extensions repository. Enjoy!
The icons used in the plugin are from the Windows Beer Set from iconka.com.
A couple of months ago, we were tasked with creating an API to expose some functions in our system to third party developers. We chose to expose these functions as a series of REST web services. I got to play with Jersey, the reference implementation of JSR 311 (Java API for Restful Services); this turned out to be a nice surprise, as it proved to be extremely powerful and elegant. In this post, we’ll create a very simple REST web service using Jersey.
Continue reading “RESTful Web Applications with Jersey and Spring”