A solid Firefox extension for turning any textarea into a rich editor

I’m still looking for a Firefox extension that will turn any textarea (such as those found in forms) into a powerful text editor. Meanwhile, I just found Xinha Here! It turns any textarea into a pretty decent HTML editor. The little secret is that an HTML editor is also a text editor. Not a very powerful text editor, but you have search and replace!

In a day and age when I start wondering whether my kids will not learn about programming in a browser, a good browser-based text editor is really needed. We need more tools like Xinha.

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BASIC for Javascript

Will Whim points us to a BASIC interpreter working in your Firefox 1.5+ browser. I tried it and it took a really long time to start and the fonts are just way too small for my tired eyes, but it works and reminds me of the good old Microsoft BASIC implementation from when Microsoft meant command line software.

Yesterday, I found the an online Ruby shell and Will points us to an online Lisp interpreter.

Maybe my sons will learn to program in a browser… if there are still browsers in 10 to 15 years.

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Try Ruby: Online Interactive Tutorial

Standard Deviations suggests we try the Online Interactive Ruby Tutorial. If you don’t know the programming language Ruby and want to get a taste, this is really worth your time. Beautiful. We need to do the same thing for Python.

I’m not switching to Ruby any time soon. Python and Ruby are pretty much equivalent, but both of them are order of magnitudes more interesting than C++ and Java. It is a wonder that job postings never mention either Ruby or Python. Who is running these businesses? Even MBAs ought to know about the relative productivity of a programming language. In fact, they are the ones that should be most worried about all this Java and C++ work going on, just think about all these Enterprise Java Beans we will have to worry about in 10 years!

Disclaimer: I program in C++ and Java almost daily, by choice, and also, because most students only know Java. By using Java in my courses, I actually encourage students to learn to program using Java. No, I’m not contradicting myself.

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AJAX RSS Display

Using JavaScript only without any server-side script, you want to be able to display a RSS feed? Easy! (But it took me 3 hours of hacking.) First setup a web page like this (write your own HTML, this is only an example):

<html> <head> <title>JavaScript RSS Reader</title> <script language="JavaScript" xsrc="rss.js" mce_src="rss.js" ></script> </head> <body> <h1>JavaScript RSS Reader</h1> <div id="rss"></div> <script language="JavaScript"> displayRSS("http://www.domain.com/rssfeed"); </script> </body>

You can download the rss.js script.

Voilà! No need for any server-side processing of the RSS feeds. You can magically display RSS feeds everywhere. Of course, this will only work with recent browsers.

Why is this useful? I found that the typical PHP-based solutions to parse RSS feeds were a pain to setup.

The downside? The RSS feed is read each time the page is displayed. However, the browser does a lot of the work (XML parsing) so I suspect this is an acceptable solution.

Any limitations? The only limitation is that the RSS feed must come from the same domain name as the HTML page because of the JavaScript security model. You can get around this limitation by making local copies of the RSS feeds using simple tools like wget and cron. I really wish the security model could be relaxed as it would make JavaScript much more potent.

Here’s an excellent reference on AJAX: using the XMLHttpRequest object. It is a bit technical, and it is not complete, but it is the most concise and useful reference I found.

Update: Stephen Downes reported this script in his newsletter.

Update 2: Please do not load the script from my server, make a copy! You are stealing my bandwidth! If so many people keep doing it, I will have to get nasty.

Update 3: No, this will not work with Atom. Nor will it work with all versions of RSS. You need to hack the JavaScript if you want to support anything but RSS 2.0. I have nothing against Atom, I just didn’t need to support it.

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Multisite lecturing on a budget using webhuddle

Here is our current plan for this Spring’s CS6905 Advanced Technology on E-business course. The course will be offered in Fredericton and Saint John, and there are three lecturers: Yuhong Yan, Owen Kaser and myself (and I reside near Montreal). Also, while Owen and I are Linux addicts, Yuhong only uses Windows.

Our experiments show that gnomemeeting is quite capable, but unfortunately, it is point-to-point and doesn’t multicast. This means I can’t lecture to both Fredericton and Saint John simultaneously. I also do not know if gnomemeeting works perfectly with netmeeting, but I hope so.

Because I’m not so insanely pretty, we can do without the video stream. On the other hand, multisite teleconferencing is supported both by my employer and by NRC through the normal phone services.

What about slides? You need a tool that will project your slides to several sites. It needs to be cheap, simple and cross-platform. So far, the best tool in this domain is webhuddle. We tested it rather extensively and whereas the audio support is not very credible (the tool has no “settings” to specify which devices are used for audio input/output), it is a brilliant implementation as far as slides are concerned. In theory, you can install it on your own server, though I’m too lazy to do so.