grack.com

UPDATE: It’s live! The open-source project is up on Google Code and I’ve blogged a more about it.

I’m getting closer to having the GWT bindings that we wrote for Firefox ready for public release. What we’ve got is more than enough to write a complex extension. The bindings were even enough to write a prototype of an OOPHM server, itself written in GWT!

For now, just a taste of what extension development is like GWT, complete with strong typing, syntax checks, auto-completion and hosted mode support:

After receiving my Google Voice invite tonight and picking a phone number, seemingly at random, I discovered that I had picked a number with the same last four digits as one of my friends’ numbers.  If you are familiar with the Birthday Paradox, you might recognize the form of the problem.

Every developer has a different opinion of stored procedures. If you’ve worked on a few projects that involve databases, you’ll inevitably come across the as part of a project.

I’ve personally had a love/hate relationship with them. They require maintenance scripts like your regular table structure, but they aren’t structure. Generally, databases don’t give you good introspection ability for stored procedures either - fire-and-forget management.

If you’re not familiar with video4all, let me start off with a quick intro: It allows you to use the standards-compliant HTML5 <video> tag on any browser, freeing you from the complexity of configuring markup for multiple video formats.

I’ve been tweaking the video4all source a bit since last night’s late release to fix some issues with other browsers and clean up some of the code. Adding support for browsers without binding languages was pretty simple - a setInterval runs and checks for new video elements every few seconds, converting them to flash embeds as needed. It’s not ideal (DOM mutation events would be great here), but it does a decent enough job.

I’ve been working on a small project to bring support for the HTML5 <video> tag to older browsers, hoping to encourage use of this tag.  The idea is to use Flash’s video/mp4 support as a “downlevel” emulator for the video tag.

It uses an HTC binding in IE and an XBL binding in Mozilla to create a flash video in place of the video tag itself. The flash video support is provided by the excellent FlowPlayer, which supports playing mp4 videos out-of-the-box.