a javascript / html live-preview editor in your browser

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

This whole web developing thing is getting somewhere. Take a look at that great implementation of a html / javascript editor with built-in live preview. It got syntax highlighting and all and best of all: it runs directly in your browser. You don’t have to install anything.

Some more information directly from the readme file:

“JS Bin is a webapp specifically designed to help JavaScript and CSS folk test snippets of code, within some context, and debug the code collaboratively.

JS Bin allows you to edit and test JavaScript and HTML (reloading the URL also maintains the state of your code – new tabs doesn’t). Once you’re happy you can save, and send the URL to a peer for review or help. They can then make further changes saving anew if required.

The original idea spawned from a conversation with another developer in trying to help him debug an Ajax issue. The original aim was to build it using Google’s app engine, but in the end, it was John Resig‘s Learning app that inspired me to build the whole solution in JavaScript with liberal dashes of jQuery and a tiny bit of LAMP for the saving process.

Version 1 of JS Bin took me the best part of 4 hours to develop, but version 2, this version, has been rewritten from the ground up and is completely open source.”

Source 1: http://jsbin.com/#source
Source 2: http://jsbin.tumblr.com/
Source 3: https://github.com/remy/jsbin

a delicious raspberry pi

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Just a couple of days ago – after a waiting time of more than half a year – my personal raspberry pi board arrived. Fantastic!

It’s small. Oh yes, it’s very very small.

What is the Raspberry Pi you may ask:

“The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming.”

For under 40 Euro you get a huge choice of I/O interfaces like USB, Ethernet, HDMI, Audio and Multi Purpose IO pins you can play with if you’re into hardware hacking. This small card is running a fully blown linux and because it has a dedicated graphics core which can hardware decode and encode 1080p h264 it’s definitely a good choice for a home mediacenter (yes, XBMC runs on it.)

It draws so little power that you could use solar panels to power it. It’s all open and sourced and I will use it for a couple of things in the household. Like a cheap Airplay node. Or a more intelligent sensor node for home automation. This thing seriously rocks – finally a device to play with – with reasonable horse-power.

Source 1: http://www.raspberrypi.org
Source 2: http://www.raspbmc.com