Adventures in HTML overlaying

Wow, the demand for articles about Silverlight is overwhelming! I've just been featured on Silverlight Cream #342 and I don't have that much to share yet. But, don't worry, my Silverlight masterpiece will be released soon and I'm learning everyday, so more goodies are to come.

I was saying I would try HTML overlay - I did and it works great. The most useful resource was this thread on silverlight.net, which is about displaying pdf files, but HTML overlay works in exactly the same way. (And why not gifs or Flash while we're at it?)

So here's what I did:
The grey rounded border is in Silverlight (as the stuff outside of it), and everything inside is HTML+CSS displayed in an iframe. The orange thingy is a link to a Wikipedia page, so let's click it.

Wow! That looks funny! It shouldn't be a surprise, but the link opened in the iframe. I know exactly how to prevent this, but... it looks kinda cool! Okay, let's close this window to ensure the iframe will disappear with it.
Ooops! Recognize those rectangles from the previous picture? They're tables and they disappear in FF, but IE has to be IE and cause issues. Fortunately, that was easy to work around (reset the iframe source while hiding it), but why, oh why, when I try to make peace with the M-corporation products, do they have to remind me how annoying they can be?

Writing my Google SoC application, part 1

Storytime, kids. I spend most of this week preparing my application for the Google Summer of Code and will tell you a bit about it.

So, on Tuesday, I started looking at the list of organisations and their ideas (they were published on Monday). One definitely stood out for me: One Laptop Per Child. I already wrote about my enthousiasm towards this initiative a few days ago. Although some others had interesting ideas, I decided to stick with OLPC, for two reasons: first, I'm really enthousiatic for it (and would do something for them even without the SoC), and second, with 175 organisations with a dozen of ideas each, you have to narrow it down somehow.

I also registered to their wiki, did a little bit of translating - you can't reach me better than give an opportinity to help with "Only have five minutes?".

On Wednesday, I kinda picked my project. A few ideas looked interesting to me, namely some language and finance teaching software. But, some people already expressed their wish to write these things and had some ideas about it. I had no ideas and didn't really hope for suddenly having any, as I am exhausted and my creativity is dead. Plus, I decided not to get into competition, these people were there first, but to pick something else.

Then I noticed DrGeo, program that lets kids learn geometry. I loved geometry in high school, know SmallTalk and French (in which the program and the documentation are written), and there's a nice to-do list - I decided to go for DrGeo.

Okay, once the project was picked, I had to write the application, and teherefore figure out what exactly I would do. I knew I was able to do whatever was required (if I can just take the Linux kernel's sources, read them and start modyfing them - is there something I can't?), but couldn't really estimate how long each task would take (if you don't pick enough, you won't get selected, if you pick too much, you won't make it and won't ghet the cash) and still was pretty blurry about what was to be done. I e-mailed one of the authors asking for advice about it.

To be continued.

What the geek is doing

You might be wondering what I'm doing when I'm not working on my operating systems lab projects. Well, I am studying for my operating systems exam. I set up a personal wiki for that purpose with Wiki on a Stick. By the way, I learned a bit of the wiki syntax, so I will most probably make a good use of it soon.

I am so looking forward for this semester to be over. The operating systems are a real pain-in-the-brain (and a legend in my school). All I wish for right now is pass. They're not my biggest passion, they don't inspire me to anything (ever wondered why there is no post here starting with "hey guys, did you know that the slab allocator..."?). How I long for some high-level programming... And some "code what you want" programming... I fortunately will have those next semester.

So the exam is tomorrow. On Friday, there's the correcting codes exam. I'll start studying revising after the OS. Today is Ash Wednesday. Fasting when you're supposed to study as hard as you can is not cool. (Okay, fasting is not supposed to be cool, by definition.) There's no milk and I can't stand coffee without it... poor little me studying computer science, forced by... er... wait... That's it! I can quit, not have to study OS and have time to buy milk! Still, there's a reason I'm much better off the way things are (better by far).