New sample page

http://www.ascii.com.pl/new.html
This time it's a jQuery/AJAX demo.

Flash is not a web technology

So what is flash? Hm... kind of cancer for me. Flash has nothing to do with www at all. So, why so many flash pages? And it's the most interesting aspect of flash.
Advice for all who want to have a nice looking flash page - educate yourself first :)
[I am wide open for all new technologies, but it has to make any sense]
Why such conclusion?
Well. Five hours long I was playing with two technologies - jQuery AJAX and flash equivalent. And? That's why such a post title.

System reinstallation

Today. Today I have to reinstall my system. I hate it but there are some problems with Skype and sound, I don't want to investigate it - easier method is to reinstall my Ubuntu.
As usual it will be USB installation to 4GB pendrive. Space is not large but with some tweaks it's enough.
(and after few hours)  - system reinstalled. Anyway, it wasn't Skype problem at all. Pulseaudio. So it was a Skype problem, but after switching sound in/out to hw:Intel,0 everything is ok back again. And I've got a brand new system...
Still working on http://www.ascii.com.pl/.  I wonder why AJAX cannot access files from external domains while PHP does? Where is the clue? I've placed a simple jQuery blog topics' list on my page but what I had to do was getting Atom content using PHP (and mod_alias). Why PHP can do it and JS cant?

Next battle with jQuery

Well, to be honest I cannot call it battle. It was a real cooperation.
Using jQuery is a real pleasure. To know everything about everything I've made some tests with mootools and prototype. But jQuery is the best.
Anyway my test site http://www.ascii.com.pl/ will be changed in a couple of days.
It will be AJAX as well, but the content will be placed in RSS (you know RSS and so).
And AJAX caching - it improves performance well.

Skype status (xml file), jQuery and Apache MIME

Well, maybe it was not so scary, but it took me a couple of minutes to solve it.
Skype provides information about user status on-line, for example:
http://mystatus.skype.com/telewizyjna.xml
It's ok, but status file is outside my domain, so browsers (unless you hack them to omit security rules) 'll refuse to process AJAX request.
Solution? Simple php file getting content of external xml just to display it locally.
Straight forward, isn't it? But then came famous MIME type problem, and jQuery couldn't parse my php file, because MIME was sent to browser as text/html, not as text/xml.
Finally what I did:
status.get file, to get xml file content and display it on local server as an xml
(in .htaccess directive AddHandler php5-script .get)
status.get code with header set to text/xml

header ("Content-type: text/xml");
$status = file('http://mystatus.skype.com/telewizyjna.xml');
foreach($status as $display) {
print($display);
}


And that's all. The most important - it works. (tested with Ubuntu Jaunty plus XAMPP and Firefox 3+ and Opera as browsers)

New Skype 4 Linux

It's probably my fault - I didn't have enough time to play with a new Skype 2.1 for Linux. But. I didn't have enough time to test it carefully enough - I had to stay online. The first impression was good, SMS feature integrated with the main application, I couldn't test video, nobody from my friend was online (3 a.m.), but sound - the new version is by default set to pulseaudio for all settings (sound in, sound out, ringing). But I need HDA Intel (hw:Intel,0) as a recording source. So after 20mins brand new Skype was removed and the old one 2.0.0.72 was installed back. Skysentials for SMSes is not so bad.

Web and Javascript

Tell me about Web interfaces before jQuery. OMG. I don't like horror films.
jQuery - it was just a revolution for me.
Ok, every developer should know JavaScript, but it was such a pain to develop anything - too much time for every simple task.
With jQuery it's a different story. This library changed my way of working. It's so simple to use.