Category Archives: Uncategorized

Opera 10 and the Microsoft Silverlight plugin

Leave a reply

Just in case anyone is wondering…

If you don't know, SilverLight is the Microsoft answer to Flash.
If there's some website that has videos or other content that you want to see but they chose to use SilverLight, not all hope is lost.

Just go to the download page for the SilverLight plugin. If you are using Opera, it will tell you that "This browser is not supported blah blah blah…".

Ignore that bullshit and just download it. Then close Opera and install it.
Be sure to remove any pre-existing version first, or it won't work.

After the installation takes place, reopen Opera and go to the plugins page. You should see the SilverLight plugin already enabled. Congratulations, and welcome to the fantastic world of SilverLight content. :-|

YouTube is implementing OEmbed

Leave a reply

That's good news. For once, we were faster than YouTube to implement something :-)
Anyway, if you look at any video page source code, you will find something like:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/json+oembed" href="http://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=http%3A//www.youtube.com/watch?v%3Da1Y73sPHKxw&format=json" title="Dramatic Chipmunk" />
<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml+oembed" href="http://www.youtube.com/oembed?url=http%3A//www.youtube.com/watch?v%3Da1Y73sPHKxw&format=xml" title="Dramatic Chipmunk" />

And, by looking at one of these URLs, for example the JSON one, you can see:

{
  "provider_url": "http://www.youtube.com/",
  "title": "Dramatic Chipmunk",
  "html": "<object width="384" height="313"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/a1Y73sPHKxw&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/a1Y73sPHKxw&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="384" height="313" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object>",
  "author_name": "cregets",
  "height": 313,
  "width": 384,
  "version": "1.0",
  "author_url": "http://www.youtube.com/user/cregets",
  "provider_name": "YouTube",
  "type": "video"
}

So, from now on, you don't have to guess what's the HTML code to correctly embed a YouTube video (like we on My Opera did for the Embed Video button on the new blog post form, but you have the full, and always updated, HTML code in the OEmbed JSON content.

Nice, I think.

European Perl Conference, Day 1

Leave a reply

Every YAPC::EU (Yet Another Perl Conference Europe) is a really big event in the Perl world, with lots of people from every part of the planet. I got to know some of them already, so we just meet like good friends :-) This year's theme was Corporate Perl, how Perl is used in the corporate world.

This time though I was presenting a talk during the first day of the conference: How Opera uses Perl, that's up on Slideshare right now. If you take a look at it, you will find out that we actually use Perl for a lot of systems, from the very tiny to very complex, mission-critical ones. It's been quite some fun preparing the talk, and I think it also went decently.

There were lots of other interesting talks, even lightning talks, like Giuseppe Maxia's MySQL Sandbox, or Sue Spencer's talk about "Perl at Cisco Systems". There was also a talk on roles and inheritance in OO systems by Curtis Poe of the BBC, and a really funny lightning talk by Alex Kapranoff, a russian guy, but I don't remember the title. Merijn Brand presented lots of ways to improve your Perl modules. This guy's amazing. Also avid Opera user.

During lunch we met up with Martin Berends and Carl Mäsak and talked about Perl 6 syntax, CPAN 6, etc… really cool people.

CSS Frameworks

Leave a reply

The other day I was trying to make sense of all my feeds, that is, keeping up with the enormous amount of unread news, and I saw an article on IBM DeveloperWorks, "Weaving a better web page".

It's really interesting and I suggest you to read it. I've certainly heard about web frameworks, and javascript frameworks are not uncommon nowadays, but it was the first time that I saw mentioned "CSS frameworks".

Turns out this is a very useful concept. Abstracting away browser differences (Internet Explorer, anyone?), layout and typography are the main areas where these kind of frameworks shine. The one mentioned in the article is Blueprint, but there's tons of others, like yaml.

When I'll have time to redesign my personal page, I'm sure I will try out one of these tools…

LWP::Simple for Perl 6

Leave a reply

During the last Perl 6 hackaton in Oslo, I got to meet in person some very cool folks from the Perl Community, and we had a lot of brainstorming fun, as usual.

I went there with the ambitious (and out of my skills, most probably) goal of implementing a Socket interface for Perl 6. Talking to the various smart folks there, I realized that we didn't need to write that much, because Parrot, on which the current Perl 6 implementation is based on, already had sockets support.

After much nagging, I wrote a quick & dirty wrapper that mimicked the existing Perl5's IO::Socket library, that Carl and Martin improved. And on top of that, we were able to write a really tiny LWP::Simple-like class for Perl 6.

Now it's on up on github, go fetch it!, before it's too late :)

And finally, Ubiquity for Opera v2.0!

Leave a reply

Yes, I'm still working on this. It's so cool… :-)

This version, named 2.0, is a partial rewrite that allows most native Firefox Ubiquity commands to run unaltered. If you like Ubiquity, check out the UserJS forum announcement, or read the help page (with screenshot).

Download Ubiquity.js v2.0 and if you have suggestions for new commands, tell me!

Yet another post about Ubiquity

Leave a reply

Yeah, sorry, but it's so exciting… :-)

In my development version now I'm able to run unmodified Firefox Ubiquity commands!
Yes, original Firefox Ubiquity JS commands can be run in the Opera version.

That's great! Of course, not all of them can work. Most of the Ubiquity internal objects are mocked, but nonetheless they work. So now I'm going to rewrite the command list as they were pB]native[/B] ubiquity commands and adapt all the code to this new structure.
This is an example of a native Ubiquity command:


CmdUtils.CreateCommand({
  name: "validate",
  icon: "http://www.imageboo.com/files/uhee2ii315oxd8akq0nm.ico",
  description: "Checks the markup validity of the current Web document",
  preview: "Sends this page to the W3C validator",
  execute: function() {
    var url = "http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=" + Application.activeWindow.activeTab.document.location.href;
    Utils.openUrlInBrowser( url );
  }
})

Cool!

Ubiquity for Opera 1.0 released!

Leave a reply

The "nightly experiment" now is something more. Actually I am very surprised to see the amount of stuff I could do with "just" user javascript. It's already beyond my initial thoughts.

So now the plan is to convert it to a widget and get the full widget power, XHR, notifications, sticky preferences, and all that. Then, to complete the Opera version, I would only need to load real Ubiquity command RSS feeds. But that's probably not going to happen anytime soon…

Download Ubiquity for Opera v1.0

The usual warning about the default ubiquity shortcut, CTRL + SPACE, which is used by default in Opera as "homepage" shortcut. You have to remove it, or modify the javascript to assign it another shortcut.

Enjoy!