11 Apr 2002
Thu, 11 Apr 2002
Drummer takes a dive
Drummer takes a dive
Ouch. I can't watch this (AVI file) without laughing out loud. I hope the poor guy wasn't injured, though I'm sure the emotional injuries have outlived the physical ones.
Posted at: 20:03 | permalink
Thanks to Dave Winer
Thanks Dave!
Many thanks to Dave Winer for linking to my article on programming google via SOAP in VBScript. Ditto on the C++ article. Thanks Dave!
Posted at: 18:02 | permalink
Scripting the Google SOAP API via VBScript
Scripting the Google SOAP API via VBScript
Hopefully, there's someone out there besides me who was excited by Dave Winer's post of the Google SOAP API release! Here's a vbscript snippet to call the google spelling API for those of you looking to experiment on Windows XP, or any release of Windows that has the Windows Scripting Host (WSH) and the SOAP 2.0 Toolkit installed. I intend to post more significant examples later but this is all I have time for right now.
Go Google! Can I work there? Please? Pretty please? I promise to develop the most killin' search client on the planet. If you open up images.google.com to the SOAP API, I'll even make it work with this!
REM googlespeller.vbs
dim SOAPClient
set SOAPClient = createobject("MSSOAP.SOAPClient")
on error resume next
REM put the wsdl from the googleapi.zip in the same directory as the vbscript
SOAPClient.mssoapinit("GoogleSearch.wsdl")
if err then
wscript.echo "WSDL"
wscript.echo SOAPClient.faultString
wscript.echo SOAPClient.detail
end if
REM if you need proxy support keep the next 3 lines, if not, get rid of them
SOAPClient.ClientProperty("ServerHTTPRequest") = True
SOAPClient.ConnectorProperty("ProxyServer") = "your.proxy.goeshere.com"
SOAPClient.ConnectorProperty("ProxyPort") = 8080
outputText= SOAPClient.doSpellingSuggestion("YourGoogleKeyGoesHere", "Britney Spars")
if err then
wscript.echo "SOAP"
wscript.echo SOAPClient.faultString
wscript.echo SOAPClient.detail
else
MsgBox outputText
end if
Here's what you get:
Postscript: The guys at WebJives have done a wonderful job of extending my example here. See their article for more details.
Posted at: 16:56 | permalink
Hillary Rosen must end
Hillary Rosen must end
I have a strange feeling this is just the tip of the iceberg, that there's a real sea change underway here. Does anybody know anyone that still uses cassettes? I went to minidisc for that a while ago and it appears now even the average consumer is being encouraged to do similar things with CD-R. Cool.
Are Ads a Gateway to Illegal CDs?. Gateway is showing people how to download music and movies and burn them on to CD-Rs. Heck, it's even tossing in some free blank CDs. But it's against piracy. Gateway has a singing cow to prove it. By Brad King. [Wired News]
Posted at: 09:25 | permalink
Swingin' Google! - It's the End of the Browser As We Know It
Download Swingin' Google!
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You get the simple search field/button interface in the top tabbed pane. You enter your search text and hit the search button. The application populates the second row of tabbed panes with the search results in a list view. You click on a search result and the application populates yet another row of tabbed panes with the browser view. Originally, my prototype opened ALL of the search results in the tab view automatically but that was cumbersome due to the fact that, from a performance standpoint, doing it asynchronously in Swing did not yield the results I was hoping for.
Hopefully, the various proclamations that I've made won't have everyone's expectations running too high but anyhow, here goes. This is the first release of my Java Swing application using the Google SOAP API. You can find the full story here with screen shots, downloads, instructions, disclaimers, thanks, etc. You'll also find my editorial about the wonderful world of Swing programming. The code is an absolute train wreck because I've been hacking on it late into the night. Thus, you won't find any source here - yet. That doesn't mean there won't be source. That just means that I'm embarrassed by the state of it right now. Still, the binary's not as embarrassing. But it's not perfect. You'll find plenty of warts. You'll see that I struggled with layout management, and I even wrote a tutorial on layout management once. Suffice it to say that Swing's layout manager doesn't always do what I would have hoped it would do when running on the plethora of platforms that it supports. There are times when the slicing and dicing of the screen is, well, sub-optimal.
I could go into trying to call this alpha, beta, release .10, blah blah blah. In the Dave Winer spirit, let me put it this way: my software's garbage, your software's garbage, all software's garbage. But some software has less maggots than others.
Questions, comments, bug reports: send 
email. Thanks!
My poor little web server box is probably going to fall over in the middle of the night. You have my apologies if it's slow or dead. I'll do my best sysadmin impersonation to keep it alive.
Posted at: 00:00 | permalink
New Release of Swingin' Google!
Added support for launching external browsers, spelling interface, JDK 1.3 (Mac OS X), hyperlinks, etc. Check out the Mac OSX screenshot. Tasty! Thanks to my friend Jeff Zapotoczny for Mac OSX testing and the screen shot.
Get it here.
| Mac OSX | Windows 2000 | Linux | Windows XP |
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Posted at: 00:00 | permalink
Kartoo - a meta search engine, draws web maps
A mind-boggling array of cool new software today. I'm trying to keep up. From google: Kartoo is a meta search engine which draws web maps. I discovered this while looking at my referer listings this morning. Apparently someone hit upon one of my pages using this. The first couple of times, I tried it, it was getting slammed and didn't respond. Later, I managed to get this screenshot. It's one of the more impressive uses of flash that I've seen. Ultramod!
Posted at: 00:00 | permalink
Image of the week
Mount St. Helens overlooking Spirit Lake, Panorama - 1999
Posted at: 00:00 | permalink
