2013-11-16

[Technology] Permanent flux and brokenness

So Google Hangouts for Android now supports SMS and IM.  That's great.  Except for when my friend Kevin is messaging me and then half of his messages appear in one app (texts) and the other half another (IMs) indiscriminately and inconsistently.  Trying to chat with him from G+ Hangouts results in me missing random messages, since G+ Hangouts doesn't catch texts.



So, obviously, the next feature we need is letting GMail/G+ manage your texts too.  That would actually be nice, if I could send a text to any friend from my web browser.  My SwiftKey virtual keyboard on my phone is pretty great, but it's still painful have long conversations through compared to a full keyboard.



It's amusing how quickly I stop considering the privacy impact of letting all my communications be hosted remotely together in the same location.



Anyway, it's sad how people have been solving the problem of digital messaging for over thirty years and it's no better now than it was before, or it's worse.

2013-11-06

[General] Helping others and learning stuffs

Today I made a website for a group on campus, Guelph Queer Equality.  It's not published yet, but here's a screenshot:





As you can see, it's fabulous.  I volunteered to do this because I support their work on campus and it benefits good friends of mine.  They didn't have a website before, but wanted one, so I thought my skills could be useful to them.



I'm not brilliant at visual design, but they didn't have any website before, and what I can provide for free is (hopefully) preferable to nothing.



I enjoyed doing this because it did not take too long and was a break from my regular work (thesis, TAing, GRAing, etc).  Here are some fun things I got to play with


  • HTML Canvas.  I've poked at it a couple times before, but never really  made it far.  It felt like one of those weird things I might never quite understand.  Basically it gives you a space on your page to draw on.  You have a context that you can use to draw shapes, letters, images, etc.  In this screen shot, the name "Guelph Queer Quality" is drawn on the canvas, and the rainbow and the whitespace are drawn too.


  • Web fonts.  The header and the URLs are done in Snippet:
    http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Snippet

  • PHP.  The elements of the site that are consistent across pages are in template PHP files that get included into the primarily-content-based named pages (Updates, Events, FAQ, etc).  Also, the blog posts are actually just a feed from a Blogger blog, whose atom feed is getting parsed.

  • JavaScript and CSS.  This was used to position content in the right place, and required many calculations.


I also briefly was using neat stuff like CSS transforms but that was too much for the group. :D

Dieses Blog durchsuchen

Labels

#Technology #GNOME gnome gxml fedora bugs linux vala google #General firefox gsoc security GUADEC android bug xml fedora 18 libxml2 programming web blogger encryption fedora 17 gdom javascript git libgdata memory mozilla open source serialisation upgrade API Spain design evolution fedora 16 fedora 20 fedora 22 fedup file systems friends future glib gnome shell internet luks music performance phone photos preupgrade tablet testing web development yum #Microblog Network Manager adb art automation bash brno catastrophe css data loss deja-dup disaster emacs emusic errors ext4 facebook fedora 19 gee gir gitorious gmail gobject google talk google+ html libxml mail microsoft mtp namespaces nautilus php picasaweb ptp resizing rpm school selinux sms speech dispatcher technology texting time management uoguelph usability video web design youtube #Tech Air Canada C Empathy Europe GError GNOME 3 GNOME Files Go Google Play Music Grimes IRC Mac OS X Mario Kart Memento Nintendo Nintendo Switch PEAP Selenium Splatoon UI VPN Xiki accessibility advertising ai albums anaconda anonymity apache apple ask asus eee top automake autonomous automobiles b43 backup battery berlin bit rot broadcom browsers browsing canada canadian english cars chrome clarity comments communication compiler complaints computer computers configuration console constructive criticism customisation dataloss dconf debug symbols debugging design patterns desktop summit development discoverability distribution diy dnf documentation drm duplicity e-mail efficiency email english environment estate experimenting ext3 fedora 11 festival file formats flac forgottotagit freedom friendship fuse galaxy nexus gay rights gdb german germany gimp gio gitlab gjs gnome software gnome-control-center google assistant google calendar google chrome google hangouts google reader gqe graphviz growth gtest gtg gtk gvfs gvfs metadata hard drive hard drives hardware help hp humour identity instagram installation instant messaging integration intel interactivity introspection jabber java java 13 jobs kernel keyboard language languages law learning lenovo letsencrypt libreoffice librpm life livecd liveusb login macbook maintainership mario memory leaks messaging mounting mouse mysql netflix new zealand nodelist numix obama ogg oggenc oh the humanity open open standards openoffice optimisation organisation package management packagekit paint shedding parallelism pdo perl pipelight pitivi privacy productivity progress progressive web apps pumpkin pwa python quality recursion redhat refactoring repairs report rhythmbox scheduling screenshots self-navigating car shell signal sleep smartphones software software engineering speed sql ssd synergy systemd tabs test tests themes thesis tracker travel triumf turtles tv tweak twist university update usb user experience valadoc volunteering vpnc waf warm wayland weather web apps website wifi wiki wireless wishes work xinput xmpp xorg xpath
Powered by Blogger.