It looks like the nomination for San Luis Obispo to get Google Fiber is gaining a lot of support. I have no idea how other cities or communities are doing, but here at SLO seems like a lot of people is getting involved. Having Google Fiber in San Luis Obispo would be awesome.
There is a group on Facebook (Bring Google Fiber to San Luis Obispo) with more than 1300 members right now, mostly from the tech companies and CalPoly.
If you want to nominate San Luis Obispo, please do it here.
Back in November 2008 I had a chance to work with Dojo on a project for Cisco WebEx. I didn’t like it at all. I was used to the simplicity of jQuery and Mootools and I couldn’t understand how Dojo had been designed so complicated. Well, one year later I just realized that it is not that Dojo was that complicated. It is that I wasn’t ready for it. Now it is time to give it another chance.
Some cool stuff about Dojo
Reading Dojo’s documentation I have finally understood something that I was wondering how it works. It’s nothing really complicated, but it’s actually very cool: dojo.require
Javascript requests to the server are asynchronous (not sure if synchronous request can be done). So we depend on callback functions to continue the flow of your program. That means that when we put dojo.require('somefancyjs'); on a line, the execution does not stop and it continues to the next line of code while the browser downloads that file from the server in the background.
Looks like Dojo puts those requests on some kind of array, array that is checked when you use dojo.addOnLoad() which does not execute your callback function until all elements of the array have been downloaded. That is very cool because that means you can do as many dojo.require’s as you need. The down side is that you need to put your code inside a callback function, which is not very bad when working with objects.
Next, I have to find out how goog.require works ;)
To do list:
That’s it for now. Let’s see if I can find time to do all those.
Updated
I was watching one of the video tutorials from Apple last night about some custom JS available on Safari, only on the iPhone 3.0, that let’s you interact with the phone and obtain data like the current location, etc.
So I built a little page to see how it works. I included Mootools 1.2.3 from Google servers and the Google Maps API. And voilá, with a few lines of code we have a totally functional web based GSP navigation system. A little bit ugly, but functional. Currenlty it only centers the map on the coordinates given by the phone, and also does a reverse geolocation to obtain the address (actually city, state and country). But it could be easily extended to add markers to the map, or even paths to track the movement.
If you have an iPhone (or an iPhone simulator) go to:
http://enekoalonso.com/research/iphone/geolocation.html
The source code:
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var Navigator = new Class({
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initialize: function() {
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// Listen for position changes
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this.watchId = navigator.geolocation.watchPosition(
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function(position){ this.position(position) }.bind(this),
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function() {},
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{ enableHighAccuracy: true, timeout: 1000, maximumAge: 10000 }
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);
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this.infoPanel = $('info');
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// Create the Geocoder and the Map
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this.geocoder = new google.maps.Geocoder();
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this.map = new google.maps.Map($('map'), {
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zoom: 12,
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mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.ROADMAP
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});
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},
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position: function(position) {
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// Update labels
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this.infoPanel.getElement('p.date').set('text', position.timestamp);
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this.infoPanel.getElement('p.coords').set('text', position.coords.latitude + ', ' + position.coords.longitude);
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this.infoPanel.getElement('p.altitude').set('text', position.coords.altitude);
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this.infoPanel.getElement('p.heading').set('text', position.coords.heading);
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this.infoPanel.getElement('p.speed').set('text', position.coords.speed);
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// Center map
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var latLng = new google.maps.LatLng(position.coords.latitude, position.coords.longitude);
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this.map.set_center(latLng);
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// Reverse geolocation (get current address)
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this.geocoder.geocode({'latLng': latLng},
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function(results, status) {
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if (google.maps.GeocoderStatus.OK) this.showAddress(results)
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}.bind(this)
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);
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},
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showAddress: function(results) {
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// console.dir(response);
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if (results[1]) {
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this.infoPanel.getElement('p.location').set('text', results[1].formatted_address);
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}
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}
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});
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window.addEvent('load', function() {
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new Navigator();
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});
Enjoy.
Almost a year ago I was learning some Cocoa and I decided it will be fun to implement a Cocoa based version of Conway’s Game of Life. Back then I didn’t publish the source code, not for any special reason. So now I have just uploaded it to Google Code. It’s not fully functional, since the last time I worked on it I was creating an structure editor. My idea was to create a library of structures, with drag&drop and import/export options.
If you are interested on working on the project, let me know :)
http://code.google.com/p/my-gameoflife
