Google Chrome Bugs and Features

September 4th, 2008

Everyone and his dog seems to be banging on about Google Chrome today, just a couple of days after launch, so this post will undoubtedly be lost in the sea of rants and raves on the subject. In the few hours I’ve been using it, I’ve found a few bugs:

  • The ‘Most Visited Pages’ front page only adds non-local-language pages if you visit the root domain name first. If you visit, for example, http://blah.jp/english/ then it won’t be added.
  • Disk access is horrendously excessive, bring smaller machines to a halt.
  • SELECT/OPTION elements with “background-color:transparent;”, or with a background image, appear black.

Sites not working:

  • BlueQuartz Control Panel
  • Hotmail.com *
  • KLM.com *

(* – Due to poor UserAgent Detection by the site.)

If you’ve got any, feel free to use the comments below.

Update: 10th November

Well it took a while, but as of version 0.3.154.9, I am comfy enough with Google Chrome for it to be the default browser on all of my machines.

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Plotting World Wide WebCams on Google Maps

April 29th, 2008

Google Maps provides a rather wonderful API that allows you to add details to a Google Maps window of your own design. There have been all kinds of things implemented using the MashUp approach, and since I was home all day I decided to look at doing something I have wanted to do for white a while – a world map of webcams using the familiar Google Maps interface.

Initially I set up a simple full-screen Google Map DIV. My first problem was to get around the lack of “height:100%;” functionality in FireFox (and possibly IE – I didn’t check) so I knocked together some Window Size Detection code and resized the DIV using onLoad and onResize. Throw in the relevent Google code to produce a map, and you’re off.

For my example cams, I chose a couple of simple refreshing images in Scotland, a WMV stream from London and an mJPEG cam from some Sushi restaurant in Tokyo. Each presented their own problems: JPEG cams need to be refreshed using JavaScript; WMV streams use and EMBED command; mJPEG has to be actively stopped to avoid run-on and so on. My first approach was to simply produce working code for each of these types.

With these working I took a break from technical stuff to add some header and footer bars. I initially decided I would have the centre map in an IFRAME or something similar, but changed my mind because, well, IFRAMEs. Yuck. I added a 50-high DIV to the top and a 30-high one to the bottom and just resized my map to WindowHeight-80 – nice and simple.

Lastly – for today at least – I moved the whole thing over to a database to allow me to add and delete WebCams more easily. I’ve gone for a two table approach for this:

  • camlist
    This table contains the list of cameras and everything specific to them: Title; Url; Width; Height; Lattitude; Longtitude and so on. Everything that is unique to a camera goes in this table, and it provides the basic listing of available WebCams.
  • camtype
    This uses a lookup from the camlist table to provide standard information on how to handle this particular type of webcam. If it’s an mJPEG stream for example, there’s no function to start the updates, but there’s one to stop it once the window is closed. These use a template approach with [VAR] fields to mark the position of data which is inserted when required.

Lastly I use a cross-table SQL query to produce a list of all active WebCams in the database with tailored usage information tagged on the end. Everything I need, from the title of the webcam to the HTML containing the unique URLs and JavaScript, comes out in one big fat array, making it easier – with a few conditions – to produce a list of Google Maps API calls that will draw my camera markers.

Today’s effort can be seen at:

It’s the front page only for the time being, but I will allow people to suggest webcams for including on the map at some point.

Wednesday 1st May, 11:41pm
I’ve added new WebCam types for Flash and Quicktime, plus added a few new cameras (mostly places where there’s a bit of daylight, heh)

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What’s my name, bitch?

August 30th, 2006

Being ever so slightly bored at work, what with an Internet that doesn’t do anything half the time and a list of boring jobs as long as my arm, I decided to search for my name on T’Internet. Google to be precise.

Previously, the number one result would be my company website. Pretty weird since I’m not entirely sure that I ever mentioned my name on there, but relevant nonetheless. If anyone searched for me, they’d find me, and all would be good.

Recently, however, I’ve seemingly dropped off the face of the Interent. Old nicknames and email addresses are still to be found if you know where to look, but my actual, real, picked-on-at-school name is nowhere to be found – at least none of them are me.

So I figure I’ll write up a quick []D [] []\/[] []D [] []\[] ” page and bang that on a subdomain of my name, and maybe that’ll get me back on at number one. It was only a few minutes work and it may get me in touch with people who don’t bother with Friends Reunited.

I put a counter on there as well, to see if anyone’s actually trying it out. I could keep a record of what position I appear in as well, but that’s just a little but sad. OTT as well, but mainly sad.

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Various Musings

April 20th, 2006

Various bits and bobs – general chunterings while having a break.

Fog on the Road!
A misty morning, guaranteed to get every nonce showing the world how wonderful their fog lights are. Great. I can see your car at least a hundred yards in front of me thanks to its car-shaped-ness, but put your fog lights on anyway – that’ll help!

Bulk Email Sender Hacking
OK so it’s not hacking as such, but I was playing about with a bulk email sender on the Mac and found that it didn’t check for strict HTML. Ordinarily it adds a TABLE to the bottom of all HTML emails containing something about using the unregistered version (cough!), and it does this by inserting a snippet of HTML just before the /BODY tag. If you do this:

    <DIV STYLE="visibility:hidden">
    </BODY>
    </HTML>
    </DIV>

at the end of your HTML email, this little bit of shareware branding gets hidden away.

Dinosaurs!
One of the reccurring dreams I have is of being chased around the streets by a Tyranosaurus Rex. I’ll hide in a room or an alleyway and it’ll appear outside the window or whatever, so I have so scurry off somewhere else. It never catches me, but I wake up rigid with fear. I’m 36 – why is this happening?

AOL Spam-Blocked – hahahah
Sweet, sweet justice. After revealing their Pay-to-Spam-Our-Users scheme recently, it was gratifying to see at least one AOL SMTP server cropping up on the BlockLists. It’s no longer on the SpamCop list which probably means it’s working in the majority of cases again, but it was nice while it lasted.

Googly Adsense
I managed to talk Foo info signing up to Google Adsense via my referral link (the big banner, here) and he’s already raking in the.. uh.. well a few cents here and there anyway. Presumably I get a tiny percentage for referring him as well.

The-Lottery.info
I added a chunk of code the The-Lottery.info last night to allow the owner to enter the prize breakdown for each draw and display it as part of the latest lottery results pages. After pondering it for, ooooh, a whole ten minutes, I eventually came up with a novel way of including default values for the various winning combinations. I though it was groovy, anyway.

Reformat Time!
Gah! I fired up the old laptop today and after it wheezed to a halt into Windows the wireless internet refused to work no matter what. Since I started working in Scunthorpe the laptop has been a dumping ground for all kinds of software (including bulk email stuff, actually) and is generally a mess – time to scrub it up!

Barry McGuigan in Cleethorpes
Barry McGuigan is in Cleethorpes on Monday 24th April at Joe Frater’s boxing night – more details here. I’ll be in attendance as usual. Amir Khan is due at the Christmas show – that should be a good one.

Site redesign
I know I mentioned the DHTML Window Thing (see right) a while ago and how I was going to implement it, but I’ve been thinking of cutting right back on the graphics and going back to plain text instead. The main reasons for this are compatibility and search engine optimisation – all those tables and shit just get in the way really.

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