Yup! That’s right folks, I have a DIY 3D printer in the mail. It has been almost a 2 month wait, but I can’t wait to start playing around with it.
I plan to stain and varnish the wood pieces to give it a nice finish that will make it look sharp. Putting it together will be a lot of fun. Lego for grown ups. 
Oh, by the way, did I mention I have a Thing-O-Matic on order? 3D printing here I come!
Ever needed to convert a PowerPoint presentation to a Flash SWF file? Well, Open Office Impress is your solution!
Simply, open your PowerPoint file in Impress, choose to export the presentation. When the dialog box appears, change the file format to Macromedia Flash (SWF). Impress then creates a flash file that has all your slides and includes functionality to advance by clicking on a slide.
Impress does a fine job and for most people that would be good enough in most situations. A recent project the presentation flash file was almost 2 MB and I wasn’t satisfied with the usability of just clicking on the slide. I used SWF Decompiler to extract the SWF file into a FLA file that would allow me to customize the presentation.
Once inside the flash file, I removed the hidden layer that allowed the user to click on the presentation. Each slide takes up 3 key frames, I reduced the keyframes to one per slide, this will be helpful when using ActionScript to advanced the slides. In the first keyframe of the actions layer, include stop(); to prevent the presentation from animating through all the slides.
Just be aware that when you are using SWF Decomplier some graphics and/or text might get altered or blocked from being created.
I then created a simple Flash holder that has a loader and a control module to allow the user to click through the presentation and go fullscreen.
You can see this work in action at Curriculum Commons.
If you haven’t heard about HTML5 Boilerplate yet, I recommend you watch this video and then try it out for yourself.
Go to HTML5 Boilerplate
Throughout the day I am a heavy user of my Chrome browser (version 5). I open, search, flip, close, rotate my tabs on a regular basis and I notice after doing this with the browser for a couple of days (without closing the browser) webpages start to slow done and stop working or even crashing. This is noticeable with webpages that utilize a lot of AJAX such Gmail, Google Calendar or Google Reader.
The only solution I find that works when webpages begin to crash is to close down the browser and re-start it. It seems to be a pain and something Google needs to address.
One theory I have is Chrome has an interesting feature that allows you to re-open a recently closed tab. Once re-opened all the history for that tab remains so you can go back or forth if necessary.
Could this collection of history be adding up and causing the browser to slow down and eventually crash?
Has anyone else experienced this with their Chrome browser?
I have been creating a form that I want to validate. However if the user clicks on the enter key it submits the form before it is finished. I found a simple jQuery script that does exactly what I need:
I modified this from Code Snippets.
A while ago I discovered that Google offered a tool on Google Code that lets you compress/optimize the code to almost half the size of the original script.
I had always noticed that a lot of libraries such as jQuery, Moo Tools and various plugins have regular and optimized versions. It wasn’t clear to me how this compression was achieved. Then I stumbled upon Closure Tools by Google.
The Closure Compiler compiles JavaScript into compact, high-performance code. The compiler removes dead code and rewrites and minimizes what’s left so that it downloads and runs quickly. It also also checks syntax, variable references, and types, and warns about common JavaScript pitfalls. These checks and optimizations help you write apps that are less buggy and easier to maintain. You can use the compiler with Closure Inspector, a Firebug extension that makes debugging the obfuscated code almost as easy as debugging the human-readable source.
I was able to successfully use the complier to apply simple compression to my code. There is an advance setting, however, my code isn’t good enough for that level of optimization yet. 
You can try the complier yourself at Google Code.
