plugin page 2 - Dave's Blog

Search
My timeline on Mastodon

NetFlix Media Center and Ong-Bak

2008 Jun 15, 7:57

Ong-Bak movie poster.I just installed vmcNetFlix which lets you watch your on demand NetFlix movies via your Vista Media Center or any Media Center Extenders like the Xbox 360. It works well but fails poorly with some cryptic error messages and long timeouts. Be sure to get NetFlix on demand movies working in your browser before installing this plugin. Once I did that everything worked very well.

To test it out I watched Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior in which Ting must travel from his country village to Bangkok where he works with his cousin in the city to recover his village's stolen religious artifact. Its a mix of Perfect Strangers, Street Fighter and Pad-See Ew. Martial arts movies, like porn and video games, aren't required to have a strong plot but Ong-Bak has a fine plot line and enjoyable Thai martial arts. I saw the Tiger Knee in there several times. An enjoyable movie that reminded me of watching martial arts movies with my friends in high school.

PermalinkCommentsmedia-center thai netflix ong-bak vista

Featured Windows Download: vmcNetFlix Streams Watch Now Videos to Your Xbox 360

2008 Jun 13, 12:52Stream NetFlix's on demand movies to your Vista Windows Media Center and all extenders including Xbox 360.PermalinkCommentsvia:dotjosh lifehacker movies vista xbox plugin mce windows netflix movie

PicLens | Immersive Views Across the Web

2008 Apr 29, 10:59A browser plugin that does an 'immersive 3d photo gallery' thing. Its neat looking but otherwise not sure how useful it is. However, they also provide an easy to use .js file that lets you easily do a lite javascript version of their gallery (no 3d but nPermalinkCommentsfree gallery photo tool browser plugin web piclens 3d

Vector Converter | Installation notes

2008 Mar 8, 11:14Perhaps an IE plugin to support SVG by converting to VML could use this?PermalinkCommentssvg vml image convert gif vector opensource

Feed Folder Deprecated; Use Internet Explorer 8

2008 Mar 7, 7:20

Internet Explorer 8 has made my plugin Feed Folder obselete in functionality and implementation -- which is good!

IE8's Feed Folder feature screen shot.IE7 Feed Folder plugin screen shot.

I made Feed Folder for IE7 because I wanted the Live Bookmarking feature from FireFox. The Feed Folder plugin for IE7 would allow you to display your feeds as virtual folders in your Links Bar. When your feed is updated the virtual folder is updated as well with the new feed items. I use del.icio.us to store all my links so I could add virtual folders of my daily links, my friends blogs links, quick reference links, etc. etc.

My plugin relied on shell folders to implement the virtual folders I described above, but IE8 doesn't support shell folders in the Favorites Bar. But I'm OK with Feed Folder not working in IE8 since there's a much better implementation already there. IE8 does better than my plugin on a number of points: First, there isn't the horrible perf. issue that my plugin had on Vista. Second, when a feed is updated the virtual folder flashes to note the change in status. Third, unread items are bolded and the bolding bubbles up from feeds contained in subfolders. And lastly, the middle click button is supported to open items in a new tab.

Accordingly, I don't plan to work on Feed Folder anymore unless someone comes up with a good reason. Instead I mark Feed Folder deprecated and suggest you use Internet Explorer 8 instead.

To use this feature in IE8 simply drag a feed from your feed list in your Favorites Center onto your Favorites Bar. Or, when viewing a feed, click on the 'Add to Favorites' Star Plus icon thing in the upper left, and select 'Monitor on Favorites Bar'. A .url Internet Shortcut file is produced as usual, but if you open up the .url file you'll see there's some additional info about the feed.

PermalinkCommentsie8 feed feedfolder plugin technical browser ie rss

Putting mathematics on the Web with MathML

2008 Mar 3, 9:19A howto from W3C on using MathML in a way that many people will be able to use.PermalinkCommentsmath mathml web w3c reference browser plugin

URI Addressable Text Adventure Games

2008 Mar 2, 9:18

This post is about creating a server side z-code interpreter that represents game progress in the URI. Try it with the game Lost Pig.

I enjoy working on URIs and have the mug to prove it. Along those lines I've combined thoughts on URIs with interactive fiction. I have a limited amount of experience with Inform which generates Z-Code so I'll focus on pieces written in that. Of course we can already have URIs identifying the Z-Code files themselves, but I want URIs to identify my place in a piece of interactive fiction. The proper way to do this would be to give Z-Code its own mimetype and associate with that mimetype the format of a fragment that would contain the save state of user's interactive fiction session. A user would install a browser plugin that would generate URIs containing the appropriate fragment while you play the IF piece and be able to load URIs identifying Z-Code files and load the save state that appears in the fragment.

But all of that would be a lot of work, so I made a server side version that approximates this. On the Web Frotz Interpreter page, enter the URI of a Z-Code file to start a game. Enter your commands into the input text box at the bottom and you get a new URI after every command. For example, here's the beginning of Zork. I'm running a slightly modified version of the Unix version of Frotz. Baf's Guide to the IF Archive has lists of IF games to try out.

There are two issues with this thought, the first being the security issues with running arbitrary z-code and the second is the practical URI length limit of about 2K in IE. From the Z-Code standard and the Frotz source it looks like 'save' and 'restore' are the only commands that could do anything interesting outside of the Z-Code virtual machine. As for the length-limit on URIs I'm not sure that much can be done about that. I'm using a base64 encoded copy of the compressed input stream in the URI now. Switching to the actual save state might be smaller after enough user input.

PermalinkCommentszork frotz interactive-fiction zcode if technical uri fragment

VRML Plugin and Browser Detector

2008 Feb 27, 3:14This page helps you determine if you have a VRML plugin and lists plugins available.PermalinkComments3d browser firefox ie plugin vrml tool

Download and Install the Cosmo Player VRML Plugin

2008 Feb 27, 3:13Cosmo VRML player plugin for IE and Firefox.PermalinkComments3d plugin visualization vrml firefox cosmo ie browser web

Chumby will be cool, despite its name

2008 Feb 19, 1:51PermalinkCommentschumby review flash linux

formsPlayer | XForms processor from formsPlayer

2007 Nov 28, 11:24Download for formsPlayer the XForms plugin for IEPermalinkCommentsmashup web forms xforms ie internet plugin download

Zune Software Update

2007 Nov 19, 3:47PermalinkCommentsmicrosoft technical music zune social

Gmail S/MIME for Firefox

2007 Oct 15, 1:33Info on a plugin for FireFox that gives GMail S/MIME support. This is a similar idea to the last but these folks have executed the idea in a different fashion.PermalinkCommentsarticle browser blog cryptography crypto mail mime mozilla pgp privacy security extension firefox gmail google

e-ignite: Webmail With Encryption and Signing

2007 Oct 15, 1:31This is a howto on using encryption with web based mail clients. This article suggests a FireFox plugin. I should look into doing this in IE.PermalinkCommentsemail secure webmail google gmail pgp encryption howto article

Ad Blocking built into IE7

2007 Sep 11, 2:55There's been some news recently on some guy hating on FireFox for its ad-blocking.

On a similar note here's a fun tip for IE7 users I got from Eric. You can get decent ad-blocking in IE7 by putting ad servers in the restricted zone. By default script inclusion is blocked between different zones so you can put domains that serve up ads in your restricted zone after which, normal internet zone sites won't be able to include script from them. This covers most of the ads I run into these days.

I use Fiddler to figure out the domains that are serving up ads which incidentally also has an ad-blocking^H^H^H^H general purpose content blocking plugin. Here's a screenshot of Slashdot and ArsTechnica from my browser. Notice the large blank areas in the screenshots:
PermalinkCommentsad-blocking personal ad ie7 technical browser tip ie

Lifehacker Code: About This Site add-on (Firefox) - Lifehacker

2007 Aug 21, 10:19More URI related stuff in a FF plugin.PermalinkCommentslifehacker mozilla reference extension firefox review article

Creating OpenSearch plugins for Firefox - MDC

2007 Jun 5, 5:50Firefox's notes on their implementation of the OpenSearch description.PermalinkCommentsapi browser firefox internet search opensearch programming reference mozilla mycroft specification

Write a VIM Compiler Plugin

2006 Sep 19, 12:52PermalinkCommentsvim programming howto
Older EntriesNewer Entries Creative Commons License Some rights reserved.