http://www.chrisspen.com/blog Just another WordPress weblog Sat, 20 Dec 2008 18:38:23 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en It's a trivial fix, and it took them over a month to get around to it (hey, I'm sure they're busy), but Google's App Engine team finally accepted my patch. With that, the development datastore can be specified with a relative path, making app-engine related scripts easier to share with ... http://www.chrisspen.com/blog/google-app-engine-patch-accepted.html I found a convenient method for creating elements with rounded corners and a drop shadow. Previously, I had been using Steffen Rusitschka's ShadedBorder script to accomplish this effect with minimal overhead. While his script is an impressive piece of work, it can be a little slow to render since it ... http://www.chrisspen.com/blog/simple-cross-browser-rounded-corners-with-drop-shadow.html I decided to try my hand at making a Flash game using Actionscript 3. I have mixed feelings towards Adobe technologies, but AS3 is a significant improvement over AS2. The syntax is now much closer to that of Java, with cleaner object-orientation and strict type checking. They also released their ... http://www.chrisspen.com/blog/swarmastica-a-flash-game.html The Problem I recently found myself writing a custom Javascript API to integrate a Flash widget written by an external vendor. I was making the API object oriented, so it could be instantiated and controlled simply like: var myWidget = new FlashWidget() myWidget.doStuff() Things were going well, until I realized I had overlooked a ... http://www.chrisspen.com/blog/how-to-make-a-generic-javascript-method-closure.html The Idea I had an idea to make a personalized news feed reader. Basically, I'd register a bunch of feeds with the application, and rate a few stories as either "good" or "bad". The application would then use my ratings and the article text to generate a statistical model, apply that ... http://www.chrisspen.com/blog/how-to-extract-a-webpages-main-article-content.html To familiarize myself with the Pylons framework, I wrote a simple app that uses Wordnet to randomly generate very obscure names in the format "adjective noun". Try it out below by clicking "Generate!". http://www.chrisspen.com/blog/a-simple-pylons-wordnet-name-generator.html