I wrote up a blog post there about how to speed up SQLite insert operations.
Check it out over at VG Tech.

I decided to create a “What is my IP-address” service (I know, there are plenty) and have it give you the IP in morse code as well as in plain text, here’s the result.

It took a little longer than I thought it would to create a wav-file through PHP with all the dits and dahs, wav-headers and whatnot – but I got there in the end.
Didn’t expect it to be so hard to get it to play on a website either; I am now using three layers:

• HTML5 audio for browsers that support it
• <bgsound> for IE5, 6, 7
• Flash, for others

Unfortunately, I have not managed to get it to play on my Android phone yet – I hear Gingerbread has support for HTML5 audio though.

Not at all satisfied with the look of the site, I just threw something together in a hurry – so it will be prettier at some point. Have a look at http://morsemyip.com/

The fix was pretty simple, and would be easy to find if you’re smart enough to poke around the documentation a little – but I ended up Googling for it, so maybe someone else will do the same. Here’s how I made it work on Ubuntu 10.10:

• Create a file /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules as root.
• Open up your favourite editor and put the following line in the file:
  SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="04e8", MODE="0666"
• Make it executable: chmod a+r /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules

That’s all it took. The above should work for all Samsung devices, the Android documentation has a reference to other vendor IDs that you might use if you don’t have a Samsung device.

For months now, we’ve had regular games of the Agricola board game at work. It’s a real gem of a game, and in my opinion perfect for “thinkers” – like programmers usually are.

The application helps you with calculating the score for each player in the game, which is done at the end of each game. While far from a necessity when playing, it provided me with an opportunity to create and release an application of limited size and complexity.

You can find the application on the Android Market, just search for “Agricola Buddy” or scan the QR-code to the right.

In the future, I hope to add lots of cool features to it – a way to store results over time, submit to a webservice, easily share the results with others, occupation/minor improvement reference and so on. If you have an Android phone, give it a go

Here are some screenshots:

A popular one in Europe is the X10 Mini, from Sony Ericsson which has a QVGA resolution.

When you are creating Android applications, you should make sure that it works well on various resolutions, which the emulator helps you with. However, the built in QVGA skin is rather ugly, so I decided to try and whip up a skin based on the X10 Mini. Here’s what I ended up with:

I quite like it, and it also works fairly well on low-resolution monitors, such as on netbooks (at least it does on mine). I zipped it up and put it up for download. To use it:

1. Extract the zip file into your Android/platforms/android-<version>/skins folder.
2. Create a new AVD with the AVD Manager and select X10Mini from the skins dropdown.
3. If you want to get as close to the X10 Mini software, use the 1.6 image (android-4, I believe).
4. Enjoy!

Note: I forgot to include the hardware.ini file required for 1.6+. Should work better now

Integrating Silverlight into a rich, Javascript-driven website, I found myself wanting to call Javascript functions from Silverlight. A quick Google search told me this was possible, using the HtmlPage.Window.Invoke method. You could also use the Eval method, but it feels like a dirty hack,
so let’s not go there.

private void displayDialog(string message)
{
	HtmlPage.Window.Invoke("showSomeDialog", message);
}

Easy, right? But like a good Javascript-coder, I like to “namespace” my methods, instead of leaving lots of global functions around. The invoke method seems to call global objects only, so I can’t do Invoke(“Rexxars.showSomeDialog”, “message”) – which is a shame. So I thought to myself, I’ll just create a “proxy” function which calls methods in my namespace. Simple:

function slBridge(method, arg) {
	if(Rexxars[method]) {
		Rexxars[method](arg);
	}
}

Now I can do: HtmlPage.Window.Invoke(“slBridge”, “showSomeDialog”, message); – cool. But what if I want to call a function with more than one argument? I further improved my Silverlight-Javascript “bridge” to support a variable number of arguments:

function slBridge() {
	// Turn the arguments object into a regular, usable array
	var args = Array.prototype.slice.call(arguments);
	// Method name is the first argument and should not be included
	var method = args.shift();
	// Make sure the method exists inside our namespace
	if(Rexxars[method]) {
		// Call the method with the arguments passed
		Rexxars[method].apply(null, args);
	}
}

Simple, eh? Now I can use the slBridge function to call any method inside my Rexxars namespace, with different number of arguments in each. Sweet!

It’s now online at codenameeagle.net – I suggest you check out the unofficial multiplayer demo – it’s a real blast at any LAN party. Definitely worth a try!

A couple of months ago I came across Nick Zakas’ YUI approach to this problem, and recently I found Paul Irish’s jQuery plugin which was based on Nick’s work.

This is my attempt at creating a Mootools class that uses the same approach. Quite simply, it fires a timer that activates a callback after a given amount of time. The timer is reset if the user moves the mouse, presses a key, scrolls using the scroll wheel or clicks any mouse button. This has to be done over the active document, obviously.

Key features:

• Can be attached to a single element on the page or the entire document/window.
• Lets you set up multiple instances with different timeouts and events.
• Easily retrieve the idle status from the instance using the isIdle property.
• Find the number of milliseconds since the user was last active.
• Allows you to call the active() method to manually reset the idle state – useful for Flash and other overlays that lets you communicate with Javascript.
• Easily retrieve an IdleTimer instance using element.get(‘idle’, { options });
• Free and open source. MIT-licensed.

Check out the demo page for more details. The source is available on Github as well as in the recently opened MooTools Forge.

“Ønsker Seg” is a service that lets you create and share wishlists with people you know. Each user gets a simple and easy to remember URL, x.onskerseg.no. For now, the service is only available in Norwegian, but if I have enough time it would be fun to make it “international”.

It’s not often I have the time or dedication to finish a project like this, so I’m very happy to see it online and I’m going to keep adding features to it. So if you’re Norwegian and you’re looking for a simple way to create and share wishlists, take a look!

My latest project, ØnskerSeg.no

Fairly common..?

How many times have you had to do one of these things? A group of items, each with a checkbox. You want a button/checkbox to select all the checkboxes within that group.

I ran across this again today, and making the javascript to do the work I was once again reminded why I love Mootools so much:

With just three lines of code (1 line to do the actual checking/unchecking), I had this up and running. It couldn’t have taken longer than 30 seconds to write. I love quick snippets

Obviously, this wouldn’t be hard to do in jQuery or any other JS framework, but I love how elegant and intuitive Mootools does it. I shudder when I think of how many times I’ve done things similar to this in plain old Javascript.

Anyway, there’s a demo page available, and here’s the code I ended up with, for anyone interested:

$$('li.head input[type=checkbox]').addEvent('click', function() {
	this.getParent('ul').getElements('input[type=checkbox]').setProperty('checked', this.checked);
});