Laptop future

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There are two things i think are wrong with the picture above, both the keyboard and the screen are too small.
Lately it seems all cellphones get a full keyboard but they suffer the same defect as the mini pc.

If you have a computer the input and output should be made for a human not for a mouse.



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This could be the future but i think the five parts that form a whole is too inflexible and you will not always have the possibility to project the keyboard or the screen.

I think the laptop of the future comes in three parts; the computer, the input device and the screen. This modularity makes the computer multifunctional.

Stan goes to work and he has a presentation to give. When he is dressed he puts the computer in one of his pockets and puts his projector and 24" rolled-up screen and alphanumeric keyboard with touchpad in his briefcase.
When he goes out of the door he puts on an ear piece and puts a hardcover touchscreen in another pocket.

Using his earpiece he recieves and makes calls while he does visual tasks on his touchscreen. When he arrives at work he places his 24" screen and keyboard on his desk.
Uh oh ten o'clock time to set up in the meeting room. He takes his projector and keyboard.

This is a computer orientated scenario but other input devices could be photo and video camera's, pens, cooking utilities, and so on. An other output device is a speaker.

I don't think we are that far of this picture of the future but it seems manufacturers rather want to make everything convenient then configurable.

locale number formating

With money_format you can do great things to display the number.

// Let's justify to the left, with 14 positions of width, 8 digits of
// left precision, 2 of right precision, withouth grouping character
// and using the international format for the de_DE locale.
setlocale(LC_MONETARY, 'de_DE');
echo money_format('%=*^-14#8.2i', 1234.56) . "\n";
// DEM 1234,56****

So it's very tempting to do

echo money_format('%!n',1234.56);

But the with the money function is that you either display decimals or you don't. I was looking for a function that has the possibility to only display decimals if the the number is floating.

After a few tries i came up with this

function locale_number($number,$decimals=2,$always_decimals=false)
{
if(is_int($number) && ! $always_decimals){ $decimals = 0; }
return number_format($number, $decimals, nl_langinfo(RADIXCHAR), nl_langinfo(THOUSEP));
}

I set the $always_decimals flag to FALSE because the money_format function will be faster if you always want to display decimals.

CI/php trick for easier to remember function names

Most of the people who use php, including me, are not so keen on the inconsistent naming of the functions but with a php trick and the help op CI you can create easier to remember function names without performance loss.

Maybe some people will find this awkward at first but in php it's possible to assign a function to a variable by adding the function name as a value to the variable.

$STR_REMOVE_BEFORE = 'strstr';


In CI 1.6.1 they added the constants.php file which gets loaded early on so you could misuse this file to add your function variables but at the same time you could use all upper-case letters to distinguish the function variables from all the other variables. See the example above which gives you the opportunity to do;

echo $STR_REMOVE_BEFORE('name@example.com','@');


There is one problem with using a variable as a function and that is that you can't use it with parameters that are passed on by reference.

$ARR_LAST_VALUE = 'end';

Using this variable as a function will result in an error.

Simple ubiquity commands

If you go to the command editor you can add these commands if you want.

// -------------------------------------
// firefox interfaces
// -------------------------------------
CmdUtils.CreateCommand({
name: "add-ons",
icon: "http://www.spreadfirefox.com/files/spreadfirefox_RCS_favicon.png",
execute: function(){
Utils.openUrlInBrowser( "chrome://mozapps/content/extensions/extensions.xul" );
}
});

CmdUtils.CreateCommand({
name: "downloads",
icon: "http://www.spreadfirefox.com/files/spreadfirefox_RCS_favicon.png",
execute: function(){
Utils.openUrlInBrowser( "chrome://mozapps/content/downloads/downloads.xul" );
}
});

CmdUtils.CreateCommand({
name: "places",
icon: "http://www.spreadfirefox.com/files/spreadfirefox_RCS_favicon.png",
execute: function(){
Utils.openUrlInBrowser( "chrome://browser/content/places/places.xul" );
}
});
// -------------------------------------
// website based functions
// -------------------------------------
CmdUtils.CreateCommand({
name: "copy-url",
icon: "http://www.spreadfirefox.com/files/spreadfirefox_RCS_favicon.png",
execute: function(){
Utils.openUrlInBrowser( context.focusedWindow.location.href );
}
});

As you can see the openUrlInBrowser function is the engine behind all of these functions. The firefox interface commands are based on the behavior of the vimperator, where the add-ons and downloads are presented in a tab.

New FF add-ons

Ubiquity is the first add-on that makes me want to dive in the firefox internals. I tried creating add-ons myself but i was turned off by all the files you need to maintain. Ubiquity makes it easier to start playing with firefox. For example this Ubiq, ubiquity is just too long to write it all the time, command

// speeddial, sqlitemanager, fireftp, firefly
CmdUtils.CreateCommand({
name: "add-on-gui",
icon: "https://addons.mozilla.org/img/favicon.ico",
takes: {name: noun_arb_text},
execute: function(name){
var addon = name.text;
Utils.openUrlInBrowser( "chrome://"+addon+"/content/"+addon+".xul" );
}
});

Ubiquity is a javascript powered addon, they even included jQuery. It has several functions to let the creation of commands not stand in your way, CreateCommand is the most basic. As you see it takes a YAML like syntax as an argument, in javascript it's know as JSON.

What this command does is opening the GUI for add-ons like speeddial, sqlitemanager, fireftp, firefly in a new tab by pressing ctrl+SPACE, typing add-on-gui speeddial and pressing return.
If you used one of those add-ons extensively you could have bookmarked the url but in my opinion that makes your bookmarks more browser bound. Maybe i'm just an old school bookmarker thinking that bookmarks are only for websites.

Now i'm talking about bookmarks, another recent add-on is tagmarks. Tagmarks adds a number of icons next to the bookmark star in the locationbar for easy tagging. There are a few read later add-ons that want to make your bookmarks easier to maintain but firefox 3 bookmarks are database powered so maintaining them already is easy if you use the tag feature.
It comes out-of-the-box with a few tags most people won't find useful; radiation, add, stop. But creating your own tags is not that hard if you are willing to do a little bit of graphic work.

The icons are stored in the profile\extentions\tagmarks@felipc.com\chrome\skin\icons directory. If you look at the icons they have a grey and color part. This is called in css programming a sprite. Only one part of the image is visible. So if you want to make your own tagmark you have to make a sprite. I use xnview and inkscape to do it but there will be one application solutions.

1. open the icon file you want to use in xnview


2. grayscale the icon and save it


3. import the color and gray icon in inkscape and position them next to eachother


4. Select the two images and export as bitmap

Now all you need to do is, put the icon in the icons directory and open ...\tagmarks@felipc.com\chrome\content\taglist.js in notepad or another editor. There you find again a JSON formatted list that you can modify.

If you don't want to go through all this trouble you just press ctrl+SPACE, type tag any-tags-you-like and press return. So we are back to Ubiquity with one of the build-in commands. The add-on still needs a bit more work but it already proves to be an essential add-on, certainly for the people who are used to command line like applications as launchy, quicksilver, and others. Ubiquity will make it possible to reduce the number of add-ons if you like to type. But people who like GUI extensions are not left in the cold because of it.

First FF3 bug

In all the heat of the world record download attempt i still experience the same bug that kept me away from using the FF beta versions.

Closing the browser using alt-F4 or the close button in the upper right corner gets me me an empty page on restarting the browser when the homepage value is set to open previous tabs.

The only the tabs are restored is by closing the the browser with the file menu exit option.

IE8 < IE5

It's been a long time ago that i visited the windows update site and now that i installed IE8 beta i wanted to visit the site for the SP3 service pack but i've got the message i had to install IE with a higher version number than 5.

Is IE8 IE4 in disguise?

php do

Recently i discovered you can't use do as a class method.

class Activate
{
function do()
{
return "it's good for you.";
}
}

if you want to use Activate::do() you will get an error.

simple word to number and number to word functions

I saw this python blog post and i wondered how the functions translate to php.

// to make the function language independent i put the array outside the functions
$array = array('zero','one','two','three','four','five','six','seven','eight','nine');
// number to words function
function d_to_w($digits,$array)
{
$temp = preg_split('//', $digits, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
$return = array();
foreach($temp as $check)
{
if(is_numeric($check))
{
$return[] = $array[$check];
}
}
return implode(' ',$return);
}
// words to number function
function w_to_d($word,$array)
{
$temp = preg_split('/(\.|,|;|:| )/',$word, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
$return = array();
foreach($temp as $check)
{
$temp2 = array_search(strtolower($check), $array);
if(is_numeric($temp2))
{
$return[] = $temp2;
}
}
return implode('',$return);
}

I've added a check to make the function more real world usable. An example use of the functions is;

echo d_to_w('100',$array).'
'.w_to_d('one zero zero',$array).'
';
echo d_to_w('1.00',$array).'
'.w_to_d('one,zero zero',$array).'
';


Strange loop behaviour in php

I was doing some minor adjustments and i was puzzled why i could only get the last item from the loop. I found out the behavoir was created by a semi colon behind the round brackets.

$array = array(1,2,3);
foreach($array as $item);
{
echo $item;
}

Produces 3 and not 123 as expected.