20120121 A hack to parse RSS feeds with php

Just happened to assemble this script hack recently, out of the requirement for a quick’n’dirty feed parsing feature: $feed_contents = file_get_contents($feed_url); $xml = simplexml_load_string($feed_contents, LIBXML_NOCDATA); $feed_array = json_decode(json_encode($xml)); print_r($feed_array); // Surprise!! Now this evidently is not SimplePie or Magpie RSS or whatever feed reader library tickles your fancy*, but assuming the feed will never be [...]

20110801 Fix the “fluxgui is already running, exiting” error

It seems fluxgui had crashed previously, or maybe I had killed it some days ago and forgot about it entirely. When I tried to restart it, it didn’t do anything. Launching it from the command line returned the “Fix the “fluxgui is already running, exiting”” message. Looking at the most recent version of fluxgui code, [...]

20110614 Android’s activity stack and pressing HOME

I was having a huge issue with the application I’m working on. The idea is to have a MainActivity and a GameActivity; when you’re in MainActivity and click on a certain button, you get GameActivity. So far so good. The problem was that if I pressed HOME and then clicked again on the application launcher, [...]

20110407 How to hide the camera preview in Android

It actually was something that intrigued me to no end. No tutorial that I’ve read explained how to do it; there were only vague (and incorrect) mentions to not setting PUSH_BUFFERS in the SurfaceHolder, but yet there were apps who were totally hiding the camera preview, such as the famous “spy camera” style apps (those [...]

20110126 Using shared network printers in Ubuntu

NOTE: Full credit should go to mrdoob, who found out about this. I’m just documenting it! Our home server is a Mac Mini running Ubuntu (yes, this one) with a RAID external disk for backups, and it’s also got a printer connected to it. We always wondered why did we have to install drivers in [...]