Using the power of WebGL and some JavaScript Chris Milk, the US music video producer and some smart friends of his at Google have created some impressive visuals that play in real-time within a web browser without needing any plugins. These stunning graphics use the next round of HTML5 features that are sweeping across browsers now.
Fabrice Bellard has written an impressive PC emulator that actually emulates a PC with a 32 bit x86 compatible CPU. This is some really imaginative use of pure JavaScript which I’m sure no-one would have every dreamed of as it allows you to run a virtual instance of Linux inside a browser window!
It currently only works in Google Chrome 11 or Firefox 4 as it uses part of the WebGL HTML5 spec that Safari hasn’t implemented yet but is definitely worth playing around with. You can even compile C files!
Symphony is a powerful CMS system that is used by many of the world’s most recognisable brands. It’s a great system that lets the developer focus on XHTML and data they are creating rather than much of the back-end code. It does have it’s flaws though and one of them is that it’s very easy for Symphony ‘sections’ and ‘pages’ to get out of sync between production and staging servers.
Sure, the pages themselves can be version-controlled but much of the metadata about the pages such as which datasources are attached are stored in the database and previously this data was only really accessible by clicking on each page within Symphony individually. Now this is fine if you have just a couple of pages but on some of the sites I’ve worked on this involved 50 pages or more with almost as many sections…
My solution was to create a Symphony extension called Blueprint Metadata that pulled this metadata out of the database and export it as an XML file conveniently time-stamped containing the server hostname. This allows you to quickly ‘diff’ the changes between two servers and quickly see the differences so you can apply them manually. I wrote this extension quite a few years ago but still find myself using this even today and have decided to make it open source under a very flexible BSD license.
Feel free to grab the Blueprint Metadata extension on Github now.
If you ever find yourself deep within the console of a remote Unix/Linux server, locked down by a thousand firewalls and in quick need of saving a log file for later analysis then your best friend could be the mail command! Just type the following, replacing me@example.com with your email address, naturally 
cat secret.log | mail -s "Secret API Log File" me@example.com
Imagine you have a huge list of names in a spreadsheet and you’d like to get this data into an Apple plist file to use in your iPhone/Mac app or import into a Core Data model. Such a long list of data would take forever to cut and paste so here is a really quick way to build that plist.
