Converting binary to signed decimal in Actionscript
If you’re like me, you may have been living these past few years taking advantage of the luxury of new sleek programming languages that rarely require you to do low level operations. One of the old skills I seem to always let get rusty enough is bitwise operation. Most code written with the help of frameworks doesn’t require this type of code and most programmers probably don’t even bother to learn it anymore.
Picture Pump
About five years ago Ben Sisto had an idea for an application that I thought would be useful. The idea being that if you want to download images from Google image search — it takes forever to go through the results, wait for them to load, and save the images that aren’t 404. The application Ben envisioned, would simply download every result and ignore the ones that were 404 or took too long to load. Once you have all the results on your hard drive it is a lot easier to sift through them.
Font Reader
I’ve been doing some work with Five3D lately. I extended it so I could render text with proper kerning pairs. I hit a bit of a wall though with converting my fonts to as3 since the way Mathieu does it doesn’t lend itself well to getting kerning pairs from flash itself.
Howto set the cookie policy with Apache http client 4.0
The Apache Http Components client changed quite a bit from 3.0 to 4.0 beta. It wasn’t entirely clear to me from the documentation how to set request headers and cookie policies with the new client. After a lot of fishing around I was able to figure it out, here is the code for anyone trying to do the same thing.
Finding a good web based Excel-like grid
I’ve been searching for a good Excel-like grid widget that can be embedded in web-apps. I essentially need something like Google Docs but open so I can alter and self host it.