Antonio Licon's blog

Firefox 4 won’t let you disable middle mouse button!

 

We found a bug in a web app we have been working on.  Even though we’ve disabled the right and middle mouse buttons, and set overflow to hidden (to prevent scroll bars), Firefox allows the user to click that darned middle mouse button, and scroll all over the place.

It appears the bug is in fact in Firefox.  Chrome, IE, and Safari all play nicely with our app.

Although this is a bug we are filing with the Firefox team, some of you may be asking: “How do I disable the middle mouse button click in Firefox?”

Consider this (horrible) hack (that works):

resetScroll = function() {
    $(contentWindow).scrollTop(0);
    $(contentWindow).scrollLeft(0);
}
setInterval(resetScroll,1);

What this does is set the scrollTop and scrollLeft to 0.  EVERY MILLISECOND.  Although this does not prevent the user from clicking the middle mouse button and scrolling off the screen, it very quickly puts them back where you want them, which is better than nothing.

We haven’t found any major performance hit for using this hack, but there are no guarantees.  It may well eat your kittens.

Let’s hope the Firefox team address this soon.  In the meantime we are detecting for Firefox and applying this band-aid fix.

Have you found this trick useful?  Do you have a better solution?  Hit me up... I would love to hear about it!

 

Play with WebGL render stretch on a live site!

I gleaned a cool WebGL take-away from yesterday’s Google IO sessions (Gregg Tavares http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfQ8rKGTVlg).  Apparently you can set the WebGL render size to something relatively small, say 512 by 512, but stretch it across 100% of the screen.  In theory, this could speed up rendering on scenes with complex shaders (as Gregg mentions: http://webglsamples.googlecode.com/hg/aquarium/aquarium.html ).

What I found fun is that with very little hackery you can see in real time what effect this would have on a page with WebGL content on it.  Try it for yourself (instructions are for Chrome):

1. Go to the Aquarium demo
2. Adjust settings until framerate starts to drop (for me, that’s 500 fishies)
3. Right-click; Select “Inspect Element”
4. ***optional*** “Undock into a separate window” (icon on bottom left corner of your browser, looks like two pages)
5. Find the <canvas> tag: <canvas style="width: 100%; height: 100%;" height="1024" width="1024" id="canvas"></canvas>
6. Change ‘1024’ in height and width to higher or lower values
7. Observe as framerate and quality change according to the height and width of your WebGL content.

Setting width to 3072 and 300% brought my frame rate from roughly 50 fps to 40 fps. I should point out that setting these values too high may crash your video driver (attempting both height and width at 3072 killed mine).  Setting them too low will just look nasty.

I haven’t yet found a practical use for this tip, but if you find one (or know of a practical example) please share!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Android on my iPod Touch?

 [Edit- these rough screen shots taken at Nikkio and Michael's request!  Click for larger version]

All this fuss lately about tablets, smartphones, and touch based interface devices in general got me to thinking about a device I have at home that has been gathering dust, neglected for some time now: My 1rst generation iPod Touch.  It was such a sexy device when it came out.  I got the top model, the 32 gig version, as a birthday present.

It’s funny because it was the perfect present too.  It’s NOT something I would have bought myself.  I would have probably gone for the Archos or Zune.  Apple’s device design and UI are nice, but I prefer a little more control over my software ecosystem than Apple wants me to have.  But I learned to love my little iDevice a little more after jailbreaking it.  In fact, I used it a LOT.  It was a fun toy.

Alas, an update for iOS came along.  There was no jailbreak, and all the cool new apps did not work on my version.  I had to make the choice between keeping my currently installed apps or paying Apple for the privilege of being restricted to only Apple approved apps.

I did not upgrade, and over time I used my iPod Touch less and less.  

Later, a jailbreak came out, and my love affair with this sleek little electronic wonder heated up once again.  Wash, rinse, repeat.  This year, I think I may have used it twice (to dj parties at my house).

About a year ago, I heard that there was a project (iDroid) to port Android to the iPod Touch and iPhone hardware.  That was great news, particularly since Apple decided they would no longer offer OS upgrades for my device.  So now if I go to the App Store to download Angry Birds, it let’s me get as far as clicking ‘install’ before giving me the “application not compatible” notification.  Boo.  At the very least let me filter by stuff I can actually install.  But I digress.

The point is, I find it exciting and encouraging that someone out there is crazy enough to try to port Android to iDevices.

And I am crazy enough to install it on my iPod Touch, which now triple boots- iOS 3.1.3, Android Console, and Android 2.3.  It’s slow as hell, and definitely rough around the edges, but somehow that doesn’t detract much from the awesomeness of being able to run something other than iOS.


According to this mad scientist, http://www.projectix.org, I could even run Ubuntu!  Again, I would expect a less than polished experience.  But who knows?  Maybe someone will actually continue this work and I will discover new and interesting things to do with this hardware.  Or maybe I just have an obsession for misfit toys.  ;)

Speaking of which, I had to share this:

Disruptive Tech - computer on a stick for only $25
http://news.cnet.com/raspberry-pi-computer-on-a-stick-for-only-$25/8301-17938_105-20060489-1.html?tag=TOCmoreStories.0