Rendering PDF in HTML5 Canvas

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pdf.js is an HTML5 technology experiment from Mozilla that explores building a faithful and efficient Portable Document Format (PDF) renderer using Canvas without any native code support. The goal of the project is to create a general-purpose, web standards-based platform for parsing and rendering PDFs, and eventually to release a PDF reader extension powered by pdf.js. Integration with Firefox is a possibility if the experiment proves successful.

Building a adjacency matrix of a graph

Posted in: algorithms |   ( 1 ) Comment

In the last post we constructed a graph structure using the Structure_Graph Pear library. But building a graph is not enough; we also need the ability to search through it. To make it easier to build search algorithms, it is useful if we can represent the graph and its connections in a different way; adjacency matrix being one such representation.

Building a Graph data structure in PHP

Posted in: algorithms |   ( 3 ) Comments

Graphs are one of the most frequently used data structures,along with linked lists and trees. In a recent PHP project I needed to build a Graph structure to analyze some interlinked urls. The problem was of a simple nature, so rather than writing my own code, I went with the one available in the Pear repository.

The Pear Structures_Graph package allows creating and manipulating graph data structures. It allows building of either directed or undirected graphs, with data and metadata stored in nodes. The library provides functions for graph traversing as well as for characteristic extraction from the graph topology.

FFmpeg: A beginners guide – part 2

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Continuing the last post on FFmpeg, here we will discusses various fundamental tasks you can accomplish with the audio stream in FFmpeg.

2.1.1 Introduction to Transcoding

One of the basic tasks you can perform on an audio track in FFmpeg is to convert it into another format. This process known as Transcoding, is the direct digital-to-digital conversion of one stream encoding to another, whether video or audio. Transcoding is usually done in cases where a target device – media player such as iPod, iPAD, DVD players or a software application, does not support the format or has limited storage capacity that requires a condensed file size. Transcoding can also be used to convert an incompatible or obsolete format to a better-supported format.

FFmpeg: A beginners guide – part 1

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The idea for this posts arose from my frustration on not finding any organized documentation for learning FFmpeg. Thus, my aim in writing this series has been to provide newbie learners to quickly get up-and-running with FFmpeg.

Using the new Page visibility API in your apps

Posted in: interface,javascript |   ( 2 ) Comments

One of the features lacking in the current browser api is that of determining whether the web page is currently visible to the user or is hidden (either in another tab or window).

The new Page Visibility API allows you to do just that – determine whether your web page is visible to the user, is hidden in a background tab or window, or is prerendering. It allows the developer to use the page visibility state in JavaScript logic to make the user experience more friendly; for example, by stopping video, animation or slideshow playback whenever the user switches to another browser tab or window, and resuming whenever the user switches back. Also if your page is doing some ajax processing periodically, which consumes precious system resources, we can pause it when the page is not in focus. Other use can be in analytics, checking how long the page had been in actual user focus, rather then as a hidden tab or window.

Check the below demo page to see how this works. The demo was tested in Safari, Opera 11.10, Chrome and Firefox.

Generating clean URLs with javascript

Posted in: javascript |   ( 2 ) Comments

In a recent project I needed to generate clean search urls on a form submit. There are basically two ways to do that. One is to post the search variables to the same page, and generate a clean url using PHP and then redirect it to the new url. The other way is to generate clean urls using JavaScript and immediately direct the page to the new url. This saves some processing on the server and one redirection, and also allows us to generate a url without a page refresh. I decided to go with the JavaScript solution.

Rejecting unwanted characters from input

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It seems that some common elements of programming stump us from time to time. Take the task of filtering a input search string in PHP to remove unwanted characters. Using a RegEx many developers find it easy to search for a substring, but find it difficult to use the same to reject some particular characters from a string. A simple solution is shown below, which rejects all the characters from the input except alphanumeric and a space.

Amazon Advertising API BrowseNodes

Posted in: libraries |   ( 1 ) Comment

Amazon uses a hierarchy of nodes to organize its various items. Each node represents a collection of items, such as Harry Potter books, not the items themselves. Browse node IDs are positive integers that uniquely identify product collections, for example, Literature & Fiction: (17), Medicine: (13996), Mystery & Thrillers: (18), Nonfiction: (53), Outdoors & Nature: (290060). Amazon uses over 120,000 browse node IDs in the US locale alone.

The BrowseNodes tool automatically gets all the child BrowseNodes and their names. The program recursively traverses the BrowserNode hierarchy and returns all the BrowseNodes and their respective names. You can display the nodes on the console or save it to a CSV file. You can also include the library in your existing projects to process BrowseNodes.