WebcamMax

A slick interface, simple installation, and tons of customization features make WebcamMax an excellent option for using your Webcam with multiple programs simultaneously.

Compatible with 16 programs, including CamFrog, PalTalk, all the major chatware apps like AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, and MSN, and others, WebcamMax is hassle-free. When installing the program, there are no pesky toolbars to opt-out of, and in fact the program lets you set it as the primary Webcam source for its list of compatible programs during setup. The interface is intuitive and pleasant to use, as well as being well-polished and professional. No worries here about paying for a program that doesn't look the part. We experienced no drags on system resources, but older machines could have problems.

There are freeware programs that offer a very similar experience to WebcamMax, but this app definitely has the larger built-in image library and the smoothest experience.

http://www.webcammax.com

Calculate page size and viewport position

Basically every browser except Internet Explorer agrees where the dimensions information is located. Can’t say that I’m particularly surprised, Microsoft has made it their mission to complicate these things.

For a nice visual list of available properties and browser support check out the W3C DOM CSS Object Model Compatibility article on QuirksMode. It’s a very nice list of many useful properties and methods as well as a chart of what browsers support them and how effective their support is.

View port dimensions

I found three possible objects that contain the view port size information. In most browsers the self object has the properties of innerWidth and innerHeight. However Internet Explorer has two other objects, IE6 keeps this information in the document.documentElement object and all new IEs use thedocument.body object. These objects have a clientWidth and clientHeight property.

Document dimensions

Once again, I found three different ways to get the document measurements. Most browsers agree that this information is stored in the document.body object. However Firefox’s best measurement of total document height seems to be window.innerHeight + window.scrollMaxY. The rest of the browsers respond to the scrollWidth/scrollHeight or offsetWidth/offsetHeight.

Scroll offset

Last but not least is the scroll offset, and again three different possible locations for this information. The general consensus is that scroll offset can be found in the pageYOffset and pageXOffset properties of the self or window objects. However IE uses scrollTop and scrollLeft properties on thedocument.body or document.documentElement objects.

http://stevenbenner.com/2010/04/calculate-page-size-and-view-port-position-in-javascript/

Rails 3.0 Released (And 22 Free Videos To Bring You Up To Speed)

Rails 3.0 has been underway for a good two years, so it’s with immense pleasure that we can declare it’s finally here. We’ve brought the work of more than 1,600 contributors together to make everything better, faster, cleaner, and more beautiful.

David Heinemeier Hansson

DHH rings the bell and announces that Rails 3.0 (final) has been released after two years of determined effort by the Rails core team (and, significantly, Merb team members, since Rails 3.0 is heavily influenced by the Merb merger). Grab it now with gem install rails --version 3.0.0 or, if you're in no rush, Rails 3.0.1 might come along within a week or two.

The Videos

DHH gives a quick roundup of some of Rails 3's new features but like Emma Watson's head PhotoShopped onto yet another naked body, it's nothing you haven't seen before. If you're really fresh to Rails 3.0, though, Gregg does an admirable job of boiling everything down into a digestible format with his (free!) Dive Into Rails 3.0 screencast series:

• Getting Started and Action Dispatch
• Bundler and Action Mailer
• Active Relation and Active Model
• Cross-site scripting and Unobtrusive JS
• The New Action Controller

Ryan Bates has also produced a fistful of his typically succinct but precise RailsCasts videos on a wide array of Rails 3.0 topics. Ryan always focuses on code and practicalities so these are a good place to start if you want to follow along and do some coding yourself:

• Upgrading to Rails 3.0: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3
• Routing in Rails 3
• Active Record Queries in Rails 3
• Advanced Queries in Rails 3
• Controllers in Rails 3
• Rack in Rails 3
• Subdomains in Rails 3
• Active Model
• Generators in Rails 3
• Making Generators in Rails 3
• Validations in Rails 3
• ERB Blocks in Rails 3
• Action Mailer in Rails 3
• XSS Protection in Rails 3
• Bundler

If you don't like videos, still follow the links, because there are links to the ASCIIcasts regular HTML versions of the Railscasts videos. These are regular blog posts that you can follow at your own pace.

Or some books

Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial book is the #1 (and only, in my opinion) place to start when it comes to books about learning Rails 3.0. Not only is it available to read for free online, but you can buy a well formatted PDF too. It's an amazing piece of work and, unusually, walks you through building a Rails app from start to finish with testing. If you want to just read one book/site and feel like a Rails 3.0 master by the end of it, pick RailsTutorial.org.
If you speak German, though, check out this "Ruby on Rails 3" book by Michael Voigt and Stefan Tennigkeit. It's one of the first Rails 3.0 specific books to hit the presses.

Or just dive into some code

If you want to just "get started" and check out a working Rails 3.0 application, try Daniel Kehoe's Rails3-Subdomain-Devise app. It's a basic Rails 3.0 app that demonstrates using the Devise authentication system, as well as custom subdomain access. Not just that, but Daniel has put together a walkthrough of how the app works and how it was put together.

http://www.rubyinside.com/rails-3-0-released-and-22-free-videos-to-bring-you-up-to-speed-3733.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RubyInside+%28Ruby+Inside%29

QuickSand

Reorder and filter items with a nice shuffling animation. Just specify source container and destination collection which will replace the source collection. New elements will appear with fancy scaling+alpha effect, deleted elements (non-existant in destination collection) will scale out and rearranged items will move to their destination positions.

http://razorjack.net/quicksand/

PaintbrushJS

PaintbrushJS is a lightweight, browser-based image processing library
that can apply various visual filters to images within a web page.

You use it by applying a class to an element on the page and setting
a few parameters with some extra HTML attributes. If the element is
an img or it has a background-image set in your CSS, PaintbrushJS
will create a temporary canvas element and manipulate the image
there, before finally saving it back out to the original element.

See PaintbrushJS in action: http://mezzoblue.github.com/PaintbrushJS/demo/
Documentation: http://wiki.github.com/mezzoblue/PaintbrushJS/documentation
PaintbrushJS on GitHub: http://github.com/mezzoblue/PaintbrushJS

Polymaps

Polymaps is a free JavaScript library for making dynamic, interactive maps in modern web browsers.

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Polymaps provides speedy display of multi-zoom datasets over maps, and supports a variety of visual presentations for tiled vector data, in addition to the usual cartography from OpenStreetMap, CloudMade, Bing, and other providers of image-based web maps.
Because Polymaps can load data at a full range of scales, it’s ideal for showing information from country level on down to states, cities, neighborhoods, and individual streets. Because Polymaps uses SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) to display information, you can use familiar, comfortable CSS rules to define the design of your data. And because Polymaps uses the well known spherical mercator tile format for its imagery and its data, publishing information is a snap.

http://polymaps.org/

Fossil. Simple, high-reliability, distributed software configuration management

There are plenty of open-source version control systems available on the internet these days. What makes Fossil worthy of attention?

1. Bug Tracking And Wiki - In addition to doing distributed version control like Git and Mercurial, Fossil also supports distributed bug tracking and distributed wiki all in a single integrated package.

2. Web Interface - Fossil has a built-in and easy-to-use web interface that simplifies project tracking and promotes situational awareness. Simply type "fossil ui" from within any check-out and Fossil automatically opens your web browser in a page that gives detailed history and status information on that project.

3. Autosync - Fossil supports "autosync" mode which helps to keep projects moving forward by reducing the amount of needless forking and merging often associated with distributed projects.

4. Self-Contained - Fossil is a single stand-alone executable that contains everything needed to do configuration management. Installation is trivial: simply download a precompiled binary for Linux, Mac, or Windows and put it on your $PATH. Easy-to-compile source code is available for users on other platforms. Fossil sources are also mostly self-contained, requiring only the "zlib" library and the standard C library to build.

5. Simple Networking - Fossil uses plain old HTTP (with proxy support) for all network communications, meaning that it works fine from behind restrictive firewalls. The protocol is bandwidth efficient to the point that Fossil can be used comfortably over a dial-up internet connection.

6. CGI Enabled - No server is required to use fossil. But a server does make collaboration easier. Fossil supports three different yet simple server configurations. The most popular is a 2-line CGI script. This is the approach used by the self-hosting fossil repositories.

7. Robust & Reliable - Fossil stores content using an enduring file format in an SQLite database so that transactions are atomic even if interrupted by a power loss or system crash. Furthermore, automatic self-checks verify that all aspects of the repository are consistent prior to each commit. In nearly three years of operation, no work has ever been lost after having been committed to a Fossil repository.

http://www.fossil-scm.org/fossil/doc/tip/www/index.wiki