I think the best way to describe how this differs to traditional OO would be to say that it is a form of mass mixin/multiple inheritance. Entities have no properties or methods. Instead they are decorated with components that describe their characteristics. These components contain the properties that pertain to that characteristic: for example, a Health component will need to have a “hitpoints” property. By adding multiple component instances to an entity, you can imbue it with characteristics in a very dynamic way that would be clumsy to do with classical inheritance.

And so I created Nugget, an entity system implementation in JavaScript. It’s early days, but the core building blocks are there and I have a roadmap of features I’d like to add.

Check it out on GitHub.

I often use Google Search to give me quick exchange rate calculations by typing “1 GBP in ZAR” into my Chrome URL bar, and Google Calculator does the rest. I did some searching and found this blog post where the author wrote a C# wrapper for Google Calculator to provide this functionality.

I need my wrapper in JavaScript, so I wrote one quickly, using jQuery. Note that Google Calculator returns an invalid JSON object (the object keys are not quoted), so I had to eval a fixed response (potentially unsafe) or just treat the response as a string and run some regex against it. Also, for numbers larger than 1000, Google returns spaces in the number, so you have to cater for whitespace as well.

function forex(val, from, to, callback) {
    $.ajax({
        url: 'http://www.google.com/ig/calculator?hl=en&q='+val+from+'%3D%3F'+to,
        type: 'GET',
        datatype: 'string',
        success: function(data) {
            var json = eval("(" + data+ ")"), output;
            if (typeof json == 'object' && json.rhs) {
                output = json.rhs.match(/[0-9.\s]+/ig);
                output = output[0] || false;
            } else {
                output = data.match(/[0-9.\s]+/ig);
                output = output[1] || false;
            }
            output = (output !== false) ? Number(output.replace(/\s/,'')) : output;
            callback(output);
        },
        error: function() {
            callback(false);
        }
    });
}

function output(data) {
    $('#output').html(data);   
}
    
forex(100, 'GBP', 'ZAR', output);

You can see it in action on JSFiddle.

Update:
I had to port this to PHP, so here is a PHP version as well:

private function convert($val, $from, $to) {
  $url = "http://www.google.com/ig/calculator?hl=en&q={$val}{$from}%3D%3F{$to}";
  $json = file_get_contents($url);
  if ($json) {
    // fix google's json mess
    $json = preg_replace('/([{,])([^"\'\:]+)\:/', '$1"$2":', $json);
    $data = json_decode($json);
    if ($data !== null) {
      preg_match('/[0-9.]+/i', $data->rhs, $matches);
      if ($matches && count($matches) === 1) {
        $val = (float) $matches[0];
        if (is_float($val)) {
          return $val;
        }
      }
    }
  }
  return false;
}

Almost … because it doesn’t have global hotkeys. Now, at home Spotify recognises my keyboard’s dedicated media keys and responds accordingly. But on my work laptop I have no way of pausing, resuming and skipping. A little Googling revealed this gem: AutoHotkey.

It’s basically a script-driven hotkey application for Windows, and it’s fairly simple to use. Each script has a “.ahk” extension, and they can be stored anywhere. To activate a script, simply double-click it and it runs in your system tray. If you want to run a script on startup, just create a shortcut to it in your Start » Programs » Startup folder.

Here is the custom script I made for Spotify, based on code I found in this thread. The keys should be fairly obvious from the code and comments. The “Info” action basically copies the currently playing song’s information to your clipboard, so you can paste it into Twitter, for example.

I’m quite keen to see what else I can automate with this useful little app.

SetTitleMatchMode 2 

;#############################################################
; Application: Spotify
;-------------------------------------------------------------
; Ctrl-PageUp = Previous Track
; Ctrl-PageDn = Next Track
; Ctrl-Home   = Pause/Play
; Ctrl-End    = Info
;
;#############################################################

; "CTRL + PAGE UP"  for previous 
^PgUP::
DetectHiddenWindows, On 
ControlSend, ahk_parent, ^{Left}, ahk_class SpotifyMainWindow 
DetectHiddenWindows, Off 
return 

; "CTRL + PAGE DOWN"  for next 
^PgDn:: 
{ 
DetectHiddenWindows, On 
ControlSend, ahk_parent, ^{Right}, ahk_class SpotifyMainWindow 
DetectHiddenWindows, Off 
return 
} 

; "CTRL + HOME"  for pause
^Home::
{ 
DetectHiddenWindows, On 
ControlSend, ahk_parent, {space}, ahk_class SpotifyMainWindow 
DetectHiddenWindows, Off 
return 
} 

; "CTRL + DOWN"  for info 
^End:: 
{ 
DetectHiddenWindows, On 
SetTitleMatchMode 2 
WinGetTitle, now_playing, ahk_class SpotifyMainWindow 
StringTrimLeft, playing, now_playing, 10 
DetectHiddenWindows, Off 
clipboard = %playing%`r`n
return 
} 

Check it out at LazyGamer.

All women love ABBA & the Grease soundtrack.
All men hate them.

This post was prompted when I was sent the new Vodacom Summer TV ad:

Before the opening words “Summer loving” could be completed, I had already become the victim of a mini-sick. My body seems to reject this music. And I don’t think I’m alone.

Fellas: ever remember being on a dance floor at a club somewhere when an ABBA or Grease tune comes on and all the girls squeal with excitement? If you ever thought “Wow, I love this song. I’m so excited and I know exactly how to dance to this without feeling like a complete tool”, please let me know so we can disprove the conjecture.

That’s right, folks. You’re looking at the first watch I ever owned. The enigma known as the Casio W23 that was bequeathed to me upon the occasion of the celebration of my 8th year. According to the legend, my mom got it at the Pick ‘n Pay Hypermarket in Durban North.

Of course, anyone who lived in Durban in the 80s knows that when you bought a new watch, you removed the rubber “factory” wrist strap IMMEDIATELY and bought a Gotcha, Rip Curl or Billabong velcro strap from your local surf store. You then spent the entire afternoon trying to install your new watch strap, which usually involved fruitlessly attempting to squeeze those annoying metal pins that hold the strap in place back into the holes in the watch body with a butter knife; holes which were about 3 microns in diameter, and required an electron microscope to find. The fact that the velcro strap was about 3 times the thickness of the original strap didn’t help much either. Ultimately, you’d end up standing in the driveway waiting for your dad to come home, clutching the watch body, velcro strap and 2 slightly bent pins in your bleeding fingers.

I wore it from the age of 8 until my 20th birthday, when I was presented with a Rip Curl Tidemaster watch. The only reason I agreed to take the Casio off my arm was because the Rip Curl knew the exact tidal movements and phase of the moon at any given time, which seemed like pure witchcraft.

This watch was so awesome. It had local and alternate date, time and day of the week, a stop watch, countdown, alarm and a light. It took 12 years of abuse, and came out the other side with only a slight chip in the glass face, and a light that no longer worked. And, believe it or not, I only changed the battery twice in the entire time that I owned it.

Come to think of it, I only changed the velcro straps about 3 times as well, which sometimes resulted in a tangy aroma around left wrist area. Don’t judge me.

And as I type this, the date and time just hit 11th November, 11:11:11, an occasion which I waited for all year round when I wore the W23. Why? Because, due to the layout of the display, the watch would read:

11-11
11:11:11

Why that was (and still is) so fascinating is beyond me, but I hope you enjoyed that little bit of nostalgia.

I looked for a few quick solutions online and all of them seemed like too much work, in particular a solution that created JavaScript listeners with ExternalInterface to monitor the mouse position on the containing document. That is a bridge too far for me I’m afraid.

In AS2 you can monitor the rollOver and rollOut events of a MovieClip as long as the mouse doesn’t leave the stage. For example, if a movieclip is the same size as the stage and positioned at 0,0 the rollOut event doesn’t fire because the mouse leaves the stage at the same instant that it leaves the movieclip. However, if the movieclip was slightly smaller than the stage, the rollOut event would still fire because the mouse cursor would still be within the bounds of the stage when it left that movieclip.

So, my solution is to place a transparent movieclip over the movie, with a very slight border around it (say, 2 pixels). That gives Flash enough time to relase that the mouse is just about to leave the stage, before it actually does. Here is the code:

// create the mouse detection movieclip
var mouseLeave_mc:MovieClip = _root.createEmptyMovieClip('mouseLeave_mc', 9999);
var border:Number = 2;
mouseLeave_mc.beginFill(0x000000, 0);
mouseLeave_mc.moveTo(bdr, bdr);
mouseLeave_mc.lineTo(Stage.width - bdr, bdr);
mouseLeave_mc.lineTo(Stage.width - bdr, Stage.height - bdr);
mouseLeave_mc.lineTo(bdr, Stage.height - bdr);
mouseLeave_mc.lineTo(bdr, bdr);
mouseLeave_mc.endFill();

// set event listeners
mouseLeave_mc.onRollOut = Delegate.create(this, function() {
	// the mouse is about to leave the stage
})
mouseLeave_mc.onRollOver = Delegate.create(this, function() {
	// the mouse is about to enter the stage
})

My previous solution to this problem was FTP. Any files I always wanted a current copy of I would put in the FTP shared folder on my home computer. When I wanted to work on anything remotely I’d log in to get the latest copy, update it, and FTP it back to my home machine.

The other day, thanks to LifeHacker, I discovered Dropbox. Dropbox is a freeware utility that installs on as many machines you like, and will keep a specified folder on all linked machines in sync. Create, update or delete a file on one machine, and the action is replicated across all others.

The Dropbox software basically informs the Dropbox server of all file changes, and sends differential updates back and forward. The server also keeps a version history of every file update, and you can always access your files from your own private area on the Dropbox website. There is also a feature to share files with people by placing them in a special public folder, and entering their email addresses in a form – Dropbox sends them an email with a secure URL to view the files.

I’ve found it incredibly useful, and I really don’t miss having to open up my FTP client twice every time I want to update something. I just double-click on the Dropbox icon in my system tray (which opens my local Dropbox folder), make the change, save and close. Dropbox does the rest.

Now, I have had to get access to a file on my home machine that was not in my Dropbox. This is where a free LogMeIn account comes in real handy. LogMeIn is a web-based remote desktop solution that is absolutely brilliant and I recommend you sign up for an account immediately. I just log into my home desktop and copy the require files into my Dropbox. Seconds later, my work machine has the files automatically. Sweet.