Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Jan 21, 2012, 10:03 am
On 5 October 2000, almost twelve years ago, Serbia has won its freedom. Its people have ousted Slobodan Milošević, and ended an almost ten-year-long rule of the Serbian Socialist Party (SPS). And then what? For the next twelve years, have the Serbs seen any improvement? The key to revolution’s ...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Oct 6, 2011, 7:18 pm
Apple laptop parody featuring Plum D series, an imaginary Serbian-made laptop with pretty cool specs.
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Oct 4, 2011, 5:18 am
After watching the Trigun series and the movie edition, I couldn’t resist recreating the sunglasses worn by the protagonist, Vash the Stampede. Used Blender as usual. Before you ask, yes, the internal renderer is still missing the caustics.
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Sep 13, 2011, 1:23 pm
Quit scratching your head already. Of course you’re doing it, scratching your head and mumbling to yourself, “What’s a browser language doing on the server?” In truth, JavaScript has a long and largely unknown history outside the browser. JavaScript is a programming language, just lik...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Sep 12, 2011, 11:26 am
Herman's Thought Soup: People who follow me on Twitter know about it, but I thought I’d leave a short note here as well. So anyway, there’s this thing, a blog about anything and everything Herd-Hound-related. There will be quite a few posts about the technical stuff that goes on under the hood,...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Sep 7, 2011, 1:16 pm
We have a new family member, the lovely Labrador Retriever we call Hatchin. :)
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Sep 7, 2011, 11:29 am
The 2011 Open Source Awards was launched today by Packt, inviting people to visit www.PacktPub.com and submit nominations for their favorite Open Source project. Now in its sixth year, the Awards continue in its aim of encouraging, supporting, recognizing and rewarding all Open Source projects. The...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Sep 7, 2011, 4:41 am
If you sign up for a social networking account, you can understand that the terms of service contain stuff like “you give us permission to publicly display your information for the purpose of providing you the service”. How would you feel if your email provider had the same in their TOS? I was ...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Aug 26, 2011, 10:13 am
Node.js is the new cool thing on the web, and everybody seems to be talking about it these days. And when everyone starts talking about something you start seeing books on the subject. Some time ago, I’ve caught David’s anouncement of the book he was writing, and was wondering about when it will...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Aug 17, 2011, 3:27 pm
JavaScript has two very handy methods that you can use on an object: __defineSetter__(), and __defineGetter__(). They allow you to write accessor functions for your objects. Here, I’ll show you how to write them so they are as tamper-free as possible. I needed a bullet-proof pattern for accessors...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Aug 13, 2011, 5:21 pm
So, you have an AJAX app that has to do a normal POST (not an AJAX post) using a regular web forms for whatever reason? While the solution outline here is not complete (it does not cover doing cross-domain requests), here’s a simple pattern I used to make Ashigaru jQuery plugin work with the Samur...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Aug 13, 2011, 4:31 pm
Tim Pope, known to many Vim (and Rails) users as just tpope, very well known for his many vim- projects (including the infamous pathogen plugin), has this to say about his Fugitive plugin for Vim: I’m not going to lie to you; fugitive.vim may very well be the best Git wrapper of all time. Chec...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Aug 12, 2011, 8:52 am
A thing that I’ve heard desktop application developers say about web developers is that web developers don’t know what phrases passing by value and passing by reference mean. I’m sure most of us, web developers, know what those mean. If you don’t, you should learn them ASAP! To recap, passi...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Aug 1, 2011, 8:01 pm
I’ve started using Danny Coates’ node-inspector recently. It works very well as a graphical debugger (runs in a webkit browser), and it can also serve as a profiler in conjunction with v8-profiler. I wanted a tool that would profile all requests for me, so I could browse and pick through the lo...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Jul 29, 2011, 9:41 pm
Most ads I’ve seen are inside an iframe. That makes them very easy to target and murder with a bit of JavaScript. Here’s a small bookmarklet that will do just that: iframe killer Drag that bookmarklet (link) to your bookmarks toolbar, and click it whenever you see too many flash or image banne...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Jul 29, 2011, 6:59 am
You might have heard of ‘user input validation’. That’s all cool and dandy, but have you heard of ‘user input sanitizing’? It is a concept as important as validation. The former checks for validity of the user input, and the latter prepares the user input for further processing by the soft...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Jul 27, 2011, 4:50 am
Node.js boasts real-time performance. Of course, depending on hardware, it may show some level od delay in responses, but it is usually able to handle requests as soon as they come in. I have built two simple hello world apps, one running on top of Node.js, and one running on top of Bottle/Bjoern. B...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Jul 26, 2011, 2:07 pm
Expresso is a test runner for Node.js. It boasts “high speed parallel testing”. It means it can run your whole test suite of a couple of thousands of tests in less than a second… but this post is not about that. This post is about taking it slow, and running tests one by one like you might be ...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Jul 23, 2011, 5:17 pm
Have you ever noticed that, when you have line numbers enabled in Vim, you can’t select just the code? You know, the numbers get selected as well. I was too lazy to fix that problem for a while now, and today I took a stab at it finally. Solution was deceivingly simple. One method mentioned invol...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Jul 18, 2011, 10:57 am
I’ve never been a Twitter addict, mostly because my short notes were public there. But I do need to write shit down as it happens. So I decided to write my own microjournaling app as part of my quest to learn more about Bash scripting. Thus MicroJournal has been born. It’s a small app, that all...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Jul 13, 2011, 10:59 pm
My Ubuntu 11.04 system recently begun showing signs of Redmondism, freezing up from time to time, and also breaking software with updates. When the MongoDB server refused to start after I asked it politely, I’ve decided to reinstall Arch Linux as was my original intent anyway. The pure geek awesom...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Jul 12, 2011, 8:04 am
Mongoose, MongoDB ORM for node.js, allows you to create virtual fields. However, virtual fields cannot be validated using the standard method of field validation. I will first explain how to add validation to normal, non-virtual fields, and then describe a method for handling virtual fields. Suppos...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Jul 10, 2011, 8:02 pm
I’m one of those guys that get fired up about new shiny toys every now and then. And the latest shiny toy is Node.js. Aaah, shiny! A few years of web development experience behind me now allows me to make a slightly more informed opinion, however, and I would like to share it here with you. First...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Jul 5, 2011, 5:58 pm
A modified piece of artwork for something I’m working on right now. A bird holding a wacom pen in it’s hand, right. :) And it’s left-handed. So it’s not me, definitely. :)
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Jul 3, 2011, 12:28 am
I love and drink coffee every day. Sometimes, I desperately need it, and other times I just enjoy it. So it’s occurred to me, for health reasons and otherwise, that I might want to keep track of how much of it I actually drink. The beta version of Loveffee was thus born. UPDATE: The official Love...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Jul 1, 2011, 12:23 pm
Have you ever hear of the Acme corporation? If you grew up on Warner Bros’ animation like i have, you’ve probably seen a large number of Acme stuff, and you couldn’t really decide if you liked them or not. Since then, I’ve learned that there are other Acme as well, never nearly as popular or...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Jul 1, 2011, 7:07 am
“A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the word you first thought of.” - Burt Bacharach
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Jun 21, 2011, 6:27 pm
One performance recommendation I’ve seen was about concatenating really long strings. Unless you are using bits of JavaScript to prettify your pages, AJAX+DHTML web apps use tons of these long strings as templates, just as a server-side web framework would do. Unfortunately, JavaScript has no supp...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Jun 21, 2011, 4:22 pm
It’s been said over and over again that the standard method of looping through array items in JavaScript (the for loop) is not very efficient. I wanted to check this for myself so I ran three implementations of array loop through the firebug profiler. While testing only in FireFox 4 is certainly n...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Jun 19, 2011, 9:53 pm
I’ve done some adjustments to the Herd Hound app to make it run a bit faster, and here are two tips you can use to optimize performance of your datastore queries. Use of limit with count method There are two reasons (that I can think of right now) you might call count. One is when you want to kn...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Jun 17, 2011, 5:59 pm
Google app engine apps are fairly easy to profile, thanks to the Appstats library. I’ll show you here how to configure the Appstats for use with your bottle app here. First you need to enable the appstats built-in component in the builtins: section in app.yaml: builtins: .... - appstats: on You...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Jun 17, 2011, 5:44 pm
While I have my own home-brewed auth system for Herd Hound, there are a couple of situations where I needed to authenticate using Google account. In particular, those are some built-in functionalities like datastore admin, or mapreduce. These things have a built-in interface and they need a way to a...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Jun 13, 2011, 7:41 am
Inevitable fate of all web apps is evolution (the only other option being death, that is). During the lifetime of a web app, you will constantly modify it, add new features, remove old ones, and reconsider bad choices you’ve made in the past. The bad choices may not necessarily be bad, but merely ...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Jun 11, 2011, 1:05 pm
So, Vim is one of the most advanced programmers’ editors around. One of the features I was missing for a long time was the ability to list all TODO and FIXME lines in my code. Well, turns out you can do this pretty easily even without a special plugin. The command that does it is lvimgrep. It use...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Jun 7, 2011, 9:12 am
(Photo: ell brown) There’s a joke that is going around for quite some time now in Serbia. “Who needs hooligans when you have elderly citizens?” If you’ve seen Polanksy’s Tenant, you get the idea. Recently, I’ve been subject of a complaint filed by one of our neighbors. It was something ...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Jun 5, 2011, 9:54 am
A new gaming mouse deisgn I came up with after suffering a minor finger ache playing games for a few hours. You can see more pictures of this mouse in the new product design section of my flickr stream
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Jun 4, 2011, 2:13 pm
I won’t lie to you, Herd Hound is the largest codebase I’ve ever written. Nope, not bragging. Just saying I’ve never written large stuff. So I was wondering, how many lines of code it has exactly. That’s how I found the CLOC (Count Lines of Code) tool to aid me in this. I must say I was quit...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Jun 4, 2011, 9:42 am
Sharpen the Axe: the Dark Side : “Folks like me who have made tool-making a big part of their life lean on it all the time. Sometimes, too much. There are a couple of dark sides: the one that people talk about most is that it’s important to actually finish sharpening the axe and get back to cho...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - May 28, 2011, 7:37 pm
When someone buys a product, he usually wants it to get a job done. For him, and not anyone else. Yes, we’re all selfish like that, and I’m sure you’re not too different either. You don’t buy stuff that won’t primarily work for you, even if it’s a gift that is supposed to make YOUR loved...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - May 28, 2011, 7:22 am
Yes, I’ve seen your whinage about the blidness of the googlebot to web 2.0 content. So I wanted to write a line or two here, since comments on your blog are disabled. AJAX != Flash. The reason those are not the same is that AJAX is a mix of standard technologies with open specs, whereas that is ...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - May 22, 2011, 8:00 pm
So, I ran Windows for a while on my new DELL Inspiron N-series laptop. It features a funky new gizmo called Optimus (and no, again, it doesn’t transform into a truck). This tech gave me a lot of headache with the older Ubuntu release (10.10), and also Arch Linux. Finally found a solution today, an...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - May 22, 2011, 6:20 am
Beautiful green. Wife’s done an amazing job of improving our living environment. I really love it. Now I don’t really subscribe to the stories about green having some psychological effect on us. I think it’s more about green replacing white being a nice change. And also the wood looks very nic...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - May 22, 2011, 5:41 am
Today, I was reading about the onbeforeunload event. I have a custom event system for Herd Hound app, so I wanted to destroy all event handlers before allowing the browser to navigate away from the page. For this I thought I’d use the onbeforeunload event, but then I read it wasn’t widely suppor...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - May 14, 2011, 7:17 am
JavaScript indentation doesn’t seem to be an easy thing to implement. I don’t know why, but there are so many plugins that get it wrong. I’ve struggled with some of the quirks in such plugins, but I think I’ve finally found the one that works. I won’t bother you with details. Go check out ...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - May 13, 2011, 7:03 pm
After a complete reconstruction of Herd Hound core, I’ve come to some conclusions I want to note down here, in case I decide to revisit them some time in future. Event-driven is good Web apps are mostly asynchronous, and concurrent most of the time. Event-driven design the the best match for thi...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - May 8, 2011, 5:43 pm
When i started coding on Herd Hound, working 15 to 17 hours a day on average (including the day job), under a lot of pressure, and very tired all the time (no shit, right?), I’ve started with a very vague notion of what the app would look like. What I knew was that the backend would be a very simp...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - May 2, 2011, 7:20 am
Do you need to discover whether you’re on a development server and do something with that information in your code? Well, here’s how to do it: IS_LOCAL = os.environ['SERVER_SOFTWARE'].startswith('Development') It’s a no-brainer, right? So obviously GAE defines the SERVER_SOFTWARE environment...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Apr 29, 2011, 8:12 pm
Ok, so I just quit my day job the other day. Damn, it felt great. It felt like… better than any anti-depressant. I’ve been hired full-time by a product that I’ve worked on from the first wireframes. I actually worked on it for the past three weeks (has it already been three weeks? longer? I d...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Apr 12, 2011, 6:53 am
I’m currently developing a very cool site, called Herd Hound. Can’t tell you what it does just yet, but if you like surprises, you can register for the Alpha release (due in less than a month). Most of the development happens in jQuery, as it builds and displays the entire UI of the site (well, ...
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Branko V. posted an article on Idea Machine - Apr 8, 2011, 8:43 am
I’ve kept distance from GAE for a long time. I don’t know. I guess I just don’t like Google’s stuff all that much. No particular reason. Just a matter of taste. This time round, though, I had been asked to develop an application specifically for GAE (not really at gunpoint, but still, you ha...
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