YouTubeFilter is a simple tool that scrapes the MetaFilter RSS feed and embeds the YouTube videos inline. I wrote it to make it easier to find cool videos to watch on my Wii.

Unfortunately, the Wii runs out memory when loading YouTubeFilter! And of course, Firefox bugs on the mac prevent some of the embedded videos from showing up unless you resize the window just right. Stupid firefox.

The code is checked into SourceForge. I use Beautiful Soup for parsing the RSS. Someone please help me make it work on the wii!

Filed under: code code, video | 2 Comments
Tagged: BeautifulSoup , opensource , python , youtube , YouTubeFilter

I was inspired by peliom’s web-2.0 Japanese flashcards, so I made some Hindi flashcards this weekend. Or rather, I made an open-source framework for javascript-powered flashcards called TikiCards, and pre-populated it with vocabulary words from the awesome Door Into Hindi lessons that I’ve been working on. I’ll work on adding more words and more languages soon. The code is checked in here.

Unfortunately, Firefox on the Mac doesn’t ship with a Devanagari fonts, and it doesn’t use the OS X system font, so all the characters show up as question marks. And unlike peliom’s Japanese flashcards that work great on the iPhone, the Devanagari characters show up as square boxes on the iPhone. So if you want to use these for Hindi, use Safari on a Mac or FF on unix.

Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think.

Filed under: code code | 4 Comments
Tagged: flashcards , hindi , opensource , TikiCards

I’ve finally made it easy to post good-looking iChat transcripts to the blog! We use CSS to style DIVs to look like iChat speech balloons.

Cool! Where I can get the CSS?

All the code is checked into SourceForge. You can browse it here.

But how does it work?

A brief description is here. Scott Schiller came up with the Even More Rounded Corners technique that we use. There is a CSS file to include and a python script that turns transcripts into html that you can paste into a blog post. We need more documentation, CSS cleanup, cross-bowswer support, and more speech balloon colors, if you feel like contributing patches.

Doesn’t WordPress completely bork the formatting in Safari by adding unmatched </p> tags?

Yup! WordPress is crap! You can use the wp-unformatted plugin to disable autop() on posts that contain ChatBubbles.

Filed under: code code | 3 Comments
Tagged: ChatBubble , css , iChat , opensource , python

I hacked up a front end to google charts api using jquery. You can play with it at TikiChart.com. It’s GPLed, so please help make it better!

Filed under: code code, science | 2 Comments
Tagged: GoogleCharts , GPL , javascript , jquery , opensource , TikiChart

QuickSilver is now open source! Check it out on Google Code..

Filed under: code code, lifehacking, osx | 0 Comments
Tagged: apps , cocoa , opensource , QuickSilver

Shoes is a new project by the infamous why:

Shoes is a very informal GUI toolkit. It’s for making regular old windowing apps. It’s a blend of my favorite things from the Web, some Ruby style, and a sprinkling of cross-platform widgets. (More in the README.)

Check out the book reader tutorial on Hackety.org

simple screenshots:

Filed under: code code, osx | 1 Comment
Tagged: neat , opensource , ruby , WhyTheLuckyStiff

SourceForge is great for project hosting, but let’s face it.. their bug tracker is slow, clunky, and barely usable. Same for the SF.net support forums. Today I found LaunchPad. It’s a project by Canonical, the people behind Ubuntu.

LaunchPad has a bug tracker, support forums, project planning, and a translation wiki for your open source project, all free.

They also do code hosting, but they also let you link your LaunchPad project to your SourceForge project. Hooray open source collaboration! LaunchPad code hosting requires that you use Bazaar, but offers svn/cvs import.

Filed under: support | 0 Comments
Tagged: opensource

reCaptcha is a project by Prof. Luis van Ahn at CMU.

Over 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved every day by people around the world. reCAPTCHA channels this human effort into helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive. When you solve a reCAPTCHA, you help preserve literature by deciphering a word that was not readable by computers.

reCAPTCHA is a great project. I added the WordPress plugin to TikiRobot, which will hopefully reduce all the crap that Akismet fails to catch. If you haven’t seen Prof. van Ahn’s TechTalk on Human Computation, check it out. It’s very good!

His other projects are The ESP Game and PeekABoom.

Update: Here is a quote from Brewster:

“I think it’s a brilliant idea — using the Internet to correct OCR mistakes,” said Brewster Kahle, director of the Internet Archive, in a statement. “This is an example of why having open collections in the public domain is important. People are working together to build a good, open system.”

Filed under: archive, books, code code | 4 Comments
Tagged: neat , opensource

This video of a canvas3d/javascript demo in Firefox gives me hope. Some parts of my canvas(2d) web app runs 100x slower in Firefox/linux than Safari/OSX. It looks like they have hardware acceleration working, finally :)

Here is some info on Canvas3d in javascript.

Filed under: code code, video | 0 Comments
Tagged: canvas , javascript , opensource

I’m embracing my inner corporate whore and digging my new BlackBerry. I don’t use BlackBerry push email though, and I don’t use POP or IMAP or gmail either. I use mutt, and I love it, but that means I need a ssh client so I can check my mail.

Fortunately for me, there is a great open source ssh client for the BlackBerry (and other J2ME devices) called MidpSSH. Although there are more polished commercial ssh clients available, MidpSSH works great for me, and you definitely want your SSH client to be OSS.

Shag asked what the terminal window size was. stty -a reports the default window size is 40 rows X 80 columns, but the font is really tiny. I prefer using the 5×9px LCD font, which gives a terminal size of 26 rows x 64 columns. It looks much sharper than the sidekick ssh client.

Check out this bit about subpel fonts on J2ME devices:

On MIDP 2 devices there are additional font options provided by Roar Lauritzsen. These fonts exploit the spatial separation of the RGB components within one pixel (similar to Microsoft’s ClearType). They double the horizontal resolution of the font by treating the G component as one pixel, and the R+B components combined as another. Basically they are more readable but still very small.

Filed under: gadgets | 0 Comments
Tagged: opensource , pocket pc

A while back I posted a perl script that would update your Twitter status whenever you changed your iChat status message. Unfortunately, you had to configure launchd or cron to use it, which no one wanted to do. So I made an open-source Cocoa app that is easy to use! It’s called TikiTwit, and you can download it for free!

Download it here! This is a very early version, so please help me test it!

Filed under: code code, osx | 26 Comments
Tagged: cocoa , opensource