Author Archives: bcat

How To Fix a Broken NetBeans under Linux

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Yesterday something awful happened to my NetBeans IDE (version 7.3 PHP Linux x64 under Ubuntu 12.4 LTS) – it started to do all kinds of weird stuff, along with few visual bugs it also froze on code completion and hanged while preparing an SVN commit. All of a sudden it wasn’t possible to work any more and of course there were quite a few urgent things that I had to do with it.

So I quickly tried to fix it:

  • Killed all processes, restarted NetBeans few times, logged out/in, restarted the system
  • Reinstalled NetBeans, reinstalled it without saving any settings, installed newer version (7.3.1), tried latest beta
  • Started it with all the smart parameters that I could google
  • Installed few alternatives, didn’t have much time to play with these though

None of the things above fixed the problem which is somewhat strange – it’s not every day that you find cross-version bugs that just come out of the blue and wouldn’t go away. So after installing PHPStorm and seeing its warning about Java I got another idea about the root of the problem – NetBeans as well as other IDEs uses Java, that under Linux comes in two flavors: OpenJDK and Oracle Java (well, there are other options but these are not that relevant).

At the moment I had OpenJDK and I think it was just updated (yeah I might have clicked “update” button) causing all the weird bugs. Since the problem had little to do with the software itself, it could not be fixed by fixing the software. Download and install of NetBeans with Oracle Java solved the problem for me so if you have similar problems you might want to give it a try.

Update: jQuery Background Image Switcher

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Updated our Unobtrusive Background Image Switcher jQuery plugin: added support for multiple instances per page. This means it can be called from multiple elements on the same page like that:

<div id="bg-body"></div>

<script type="text/javascript">
var srcBgArray = [
  "/path/to/image1.jpg",
  "/path/to/image2.jpg",
  "/path/to/image3.jpg"
];

$(document).ready(function() {
  $('#bg-body').bcatBGSwitcher({
    urls: srcBgArray,
    alt: 'Alt text'
  });
});
</script>

/* some other stuff here */

<div id="content-slider"></div>

<script type="text/javascript">
var srcContentImgArray = [
  "/path/to/content-image1.jpg",
  "/path/to/content-image2.jpg",
  "/path/to/content-image3.jpg"
];

$(document).ready(function() {
  $('#content-slider').bcatBGSwitcher({
    urls: srcContentImgArray,
    alt: 'Alt text'
  });
});
</script>

Not really useful for background images, but if you have a background image switcher as well as a content image slider and wouldn’t want to load too much scripts this might just be your thing, was also our reason for this update.

Demo and download links remain the same:

Quantum Artificial Intelligence Is Under Way

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Quantum Processor

D-Wave is a perfect example of a niche business: company that sells the world’s only commercial quantum computer. They just scored their second client – a collaboration between Google, NASA and the non-profit Universities Space Research Association.

These guys will explore machine learning and other stuff, probably with the usual ultimate goal to create a super-intelligent computer and make it rule the world.

Source: nature.com.

jQuery Unobtrusive Background Image Switcher

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Since our MooTools class worked well on many projects we went ahead and rewritten it for jQuery (after all it’s a jQuery world out there).

The idea as well as functionality remains pretty much the same: we need to use as many (probably background) images as we want no matter how heavy they are, while minimizing their influence on load times.

Here are the basic requirements:

  • Only the first image has to be loaded, the rest must “wait for their turn” and load as needed.
  • The image has to be preloaded and only shown after the load is completed. We now use fade effect for every image including the first one.
  • Support for responsive full screen background feature without breaking the image’s proportions on any screen/window size.
  • It has to be lightweight and play well with other front end features.

So here is the jQuery version:

No need to pass the full screen option any more, for jQuery version of this plugin it is handled entirely by the CSS – again if you want the full screen feature to work, download the whole package and take a look at our bare bones style.css. The CSS part is based on Perfect Full Page Background Image / CSS-Only Technique #2 from css-tricks.

Images used in this demo are copyrighted and only intended for this demo.

Further information, usage and options: Continue reading →

Google Mirror API

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Welcome to the future of mobile development – Google rolls out the Mirror API for future Glass developers.

Glass is a unique platform that is mobile but fundamentally different than existing mobile platforms in both design and use. To develop great experiences and effectively test them, you need to have Glass and use it in your everyday life. This is why the Google Mirror API is in a Developer Preview and actual access to the API service will be rolled out slowly, starting with the Glass Explorers as they get their Glass.

In the meantime, start reading about the Google Mirror API and start dreaming about the next, great, mobile experience. We hope you are as excited as we are, and we can’t wait to see the great things you’ll build!

Sounds like fun, let’s hope they wouldn’t close it in a year like other not-so-lucky projects…

πfs – Store All Your Data in Pi

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Here is a weird and beautiful repository: πfs file system. The idea is pretty simple as far as math goes – π contains all possible sequences of numbers which means all possible data. So why not just get it from the “π” as we need it using index/length combo as meta data?

One of the properties that π is conjectured to have is that it is normal, which is to say that its digits are all distributed evenly, with the implication that it is a disjunctive sequence, meaning that all possible finite sequences of digits will be present somewhere in it. If we consider π in base 16 (hexadecimal) , it is trivial to see that if this conjecture is true, then all possible finite files must exist within π. The first record of this observation dates back to 2001.

Tumblr Fcheckr – Follower / Unfollower Checker App For Tumblr

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Merry Xmas and happy New Year everybody!

Wouldn’t it be a geeky celebration without playing with some kind of tricky API and finding out how stuff works? Totally not, so today we looked under Tumblr’s hood cause they wouldn’t show you who doesn’t follow you back, which would be a really welcome feature.

Additionally there seem to be no working app out there, that can do the trick, so here is one we made: Tumblr Fcheckr. Just give it the access (needed for the follower/following lists) and it’ll show you the all your followers dirty secrets.

UPD 12.2013: At the moment after another Tumblr API change it is not possible to authenticate into the application. We’ll look into it as soon as we get a minute or an hour 🙂

UPD 07.2013: Since it came up more then once – there is an issue with the “Don’t follow back” list for users who have a lot of followers.
Initially everything worked just fine, but after few updates the system started to close connection before giving up all the followers, so only the first thousand or so would be shown. Since these followers are then used to generate the Don’t Follow Back list, it gets some honest followers too. So if you have a lot of followers – double check “Don’t follow back” list, sorry for that.