Put in the day, month, and year, and this simple script will find the day of the week and output an RSS compliant string for the pubDate field. Just add the time and timezone and you are set!

CSS, Google API, HTML

Map created to show the Metro lines in Washington, DC. I built this because, while the simplified map is nice, is doesn’t really give you a feel for how the lines are actually laid out geographically within the city.

Download the source code.

I have had a chance to mess around some more with the earlier VR effect I had posted. Since then, the powers of the universe have granted me access to Flash CS3 and thus, AS 3. You can see this new, uber powerful code being put to use on this very site! Check it out!

This differs from the original VR file in many ways. Take it away, bullet list!

• Rebuilt using AS 3
• Preloader
• Rotation is now controlled by holding the mouse down and moving left or right rather than just moving to the left or right. This allows you to “pause” the VR by letting go of the mouse.
• The speed can be controlled by changing a variable in the fla (dragSpeed; frame 2, line 2).

I am planning some more updates to this file in the future, including: loading from an XML, y-scrolling, and zooming. Joy!

Download the source code! [ 8K ]

Building on the earlier example of listing all the files within a directory on a webpage, we can now add some nifty sorting features to make the experience all the better.

Just put both files in a directory with the rest of the files and you’re done! Easy as cakes.

Here is an example of the code in action.

View the source code!
Download the source code! [ 6k ]

I created this simple little color converter using JavaScript. It’s main purpose is to convert numbers to a 0-1 scale, as that is what 3D Max uses, while Photoshop uses a 0-255 scale. I can’t do the math in my head, so I force my computer slave to do it for me. Hope it is useful to you too…

Ant Renamer is a free program that makes easier the renaming of lots of files and folders by using specified settings.

• It supports Unicode names.
• This program can rename large amounts of files and folders in few clicks.
• It only modifies files/folders names.
• Changing extension.
• Replacing character strings by others.
• Inserting a character string.
• Moving characters.
• Deleting several characters.
• Enumeration.
• Name creation with mp3’s Tag (ID v1.1).
• Name creation with file’s last modified date and time.
• Random names creation.
• Case change (uppercase, lowercase, first letter of each word in uppercase, …).
• Take names from a list/file.
• Use of EXIF info.
• Regular expressions.
• Available in 11 languages : English (default), Belarusian, Chinese (simplified & traditional), Czech, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish.

Strengths

• Batch renaming.
• Runs on all current versions of windows.
• Very quick.
• Free.
• A variety of options when renaming files.
• Can include or exclude the extension in operations.

Weaknesses

• Only one level of undo.

Download Ant Renamer via http://www.antp.be

Ant Renamer is copyrighted by Antoine Potten and I make no claim that I have anything to do with it or want any money because of it. I just think it is a great program and you should use it.

Today I am giving away a simple Flash VR file. You will need to create images at the various angles of your subject. Then simply import all of your images into this Flash file, adjust the speed to your tastes, and you will have a simple VR effect for the web or wherever.

Move your mouse to the right and the model will rotate counter-clockwise. Move the mouse to the left and the model will rotate clockwise.

Plan for further development include:

• adding vertical rotation
• smoother rotation
• on the fly updating (no need to have Flash to edit the content)
• a simple GUI

Model taken from 3dtotal.

All the ActionScript is on the first frame. It is as follows:

stop();

// Edit topSpeed to modify how fast the VR can rotate
var topSpeed:Number = 2;
var frameSpeed:Number;
var frame:Number = _root._currentframe;

// Functions, no need to edit these
onEnterFrame = function () {
	frameSpeed = Math.round(topSpeed*(_xmouse-Stage.width/2)/(Stage.width/2));
	newFrame = _root._currentframe+frameSpeed;
	if (newFrame>_root._totalframes) {
		newFrame = newFrame-_root._totalframes;
	} else if (newFrame<=0) {
		newFrame = _root._totalframes+newFrame;
	}
	gotoAndStop(newFrame);
	frame = _root._currentframe;
};

Download the source code! [ 1.5M ]

There have been occasions where I have needed to just dump some files in a hidden directory of a website for internal use or to preview to a client. I don’t want to create a whole preview site for just this instance, and I want to keep directory browsing off for the rest of the site.

ASP offers some simple tools to list all the files in a specific folder and any sub-folders. The following code wasn’t written by me, credit goes to Mike Hall. I did however make some modifications to his original code. He had it set up in such a way as that you needed to manually enter which folders would be listed. I wanted something simpler. Something you could just drop in a folder on your site and it would automatically load and list all the files. I also didn’t want the index file to appear in this list.

Here is an example of the code in action.

View the source code!
Download the source code! [ 1k ]

Check out the updated version as well.

So I was working on a fairly simple site today, and it is looking mighty fine in Firefox and IE7 and Netscape and such, but then I saw it in IE6 and it was rubbish! Instead of having a fixed width and being centered horizontally in the browser, it filled the browser from edge to edge.

My first couple of attempts fixed the width problem, but it would always align itself right on the left edge.

Turns out IE6 is pretty quirky. A simple change to the DocType info fixed the problem and it all looks as it should now.

What I had (which was causing alignment problems in IE6):

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”iso-8859-1″?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>

<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en” lang=”en”>
<head>
…

What I have now (and works everywhere):

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224″>

<html>
<head>
…