The flight of the Dauntless » Development

I made it!

demolitions — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 08:13:25 +0000

Speaking of the AR.Drone, I managed to compile the Android application putting the video feed in asynchronous mode, now it works as a charm as a remote control, while the video feed is amazingly slow…

Definitely the G1 (Dream) is not a suitable device to be receiving raw video from wifi.

Speaking of flying…

demolitions — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 09:22:50 +0000

My latest purchase, something that I really shouldn’t have bought, the Parrot AR.Drone:

A pretty sturdy, programmable, wi-fi controlled, quad-propeller flying object with cameras and sensors on board.

I had to borrow an iPod to try out the thing, since my Android-powered HTC Dream is a little slow to handle the example application, which is not optimized, and my Linux laptop didn’t want to connect to the drone (Closed wireless NIC drivers being the primary reason), but it flies very nicely, stable and easy, a eleven years old kid could pilot it without crashing… Actually an eleven years old boy (my brother) did fly it; and he – unlike me – avoided crashing…

This Article is also available in Italian.

IDE choosing

demolitions — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 11:47:44 +0000

I need help in choosing the IDE to use for my PHP / Java programming, I had gone with Eclipse for PHP and NetBeans for Java development, now that both have either possibilities, I really have to drop one, but which one?

The choice being between:

Eclipse Helios with
- PDT (PHP Developer Tools)
- JDT (Java Developer Tools)
- WindowBuilder pro (GUI builder)
- CDT (C/C++ Developer Tools)
NetBeans with
- PHP Module
- Java Module (with GUI builder integrated)
- C/C++ Module

The requirements are:

The IDE must be completely free, no proprietary licenses wanted, “Eclipse Public License (EPL)” and “Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL)” are both good for what I need.
The IDE must be cross-platform, I need to use it both on Windows and on Linux, Mac OS is a plus, but not actually needed.
Software written with it must be free from their licenses, I need to release both GPL licensed software and proprietary licensed software.
It must have a GUI Builder, since I don’t have the time to meddle with pixel by pixel positioning in code.

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IFRAMEs, IFRAMEs, IFRAMEs….

demolitions — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 17:55:00 +0000

Oggi ho dovuto particolarmente sbattere la testa contro un problema abbastanza conosciuto nel mondo della progettazione/programmazione web, i maledetti “nuovi” standard, che ovviamente vengono renderizzati esattamente allo stesso modo da tutti i browser esistenti eh…

Comunque, se dovete proporre dei files PDF generati da un software via web il sistema migliore è indubbiamente quello di presentarli all’interno di un IFRAME nella pagina che state scrivendo, nevvero?

Se siete ancora determinati a farlo, scoprirete che lo standard XHTML 1.0 ha “accidentalmente dimenticato” di includere uno specifico attributo per dimensionare il tag IFRAME; ergo potete inserire il tag, dimensionarlo come vi pare e piace, e comunque il browser lo farà grande quanto vuole lui; a meno che non vi mettiate a sbatterci la testa come ho fatto io e a recuperare un po’ di info e script dal nostro caro amico Google…

Vi risparmio la fatica, ho già uno script JS pronto e funzionante, testato su Firefox, IE6, IE7, Konqueror (e quindi Safari).

Potete trovarlo nella apposita sezione “script”, creata appositamente, oppure cliccare direttamente qui