The Firefox browser’s WebRTC and MediaRecorder functionality can handle H.264 (Advanced Video Codec) coding and decoding, but only with H.264’s constrained baseline profile. Other, higher, profiles just don’t work. And in Firefox’s WebRTC implementation (v87) attempts to use higher profiles fail more-or-less silently. Firefox works around all the patent issues with H.264 by using an automatically downloaded plugin called “OpenH264… Read more →
The WebRTC standard has landed. At last!
The WebRTC (browser-to-browser realtime conferencing) standard landed as a W3C recommendation version 1.0 on 26-January-2021. Thanks everybody who worked on it! Maybe there’s a future without adapter.js ! Read more →
Web Beacon API
There’s a sweet little function in web browsers called the Web Beacon API. It’s a simplified version of the XHR or Fetch API that does a fire-and-forget POST operation to a server. It’s nice for a few reasons. First, browser Javascript (front-end Javascript) can use it without any need to process results coming back. Just call navigator.sendBeacon(). If your page… Read more →
Something I learned
This is a series of posts about something new I learned. Read more →
Javascript exception tracebacks
Working with browser Javascript on mobile devices, I found myself needing to report exceptions back to a server. (It’s hard to see the browser console log on a mobile device without connecting it to a desktop machine). Here’s what I did to make a suitable object that can be serialized. To use this you’ll need stacktrace.js loaded in your web… Read more →
Database programming
In the last section, we populated our us_counties table and used it for some queries. Now it’s time to create some views of the data. With views we’ll be able to do more interesting things without retyping huge queries. We can use views as a foundation for more analysis. The first view we need is the one to give us… Read more →
Find peak cases
Back in the Database Programming section of this series, we created the view named us_counties_new, showing the daily new case load. Recall that we first computed the seven-day running average of the total case loads in the us_counties_avg7 view, then used those numbers for the daily case loads. Having the daily case loads available lets us do some interesting analysis.… Read more →
Getting started with the data
The Times’s data is here. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nytimes/covid-19-data/master/us-counties.csv If you’re using a browser, open the context menu (right-click) on that link and use the Save Link As … operation to put it into a file on your system. We’ll use it later to load the database. Use your database interface program to log in to your database server, and figure out which… Read more →
Explore pandemic data with SQL
The New York Times newspaper publishes, every day, a file showing COVID-19 cases and fatalities for each county in the USA. They put their file on github here for anyone to use. So, let’s use it. Let’s download it and learn a few things about using SQL to explore data as we dig into it. Their file is called us-counties.csv.… Read more →
Donald J. T***** will you please go now!
With credit to Dr. Seuss and newspaper columnist Art Buchwald: The time has come. The time has come. The time is now. Just go. Go. GO! I don’t care how. You can go by foot. You can go by cow. Donald J. T****, will you please go now! You can go on skates. You can go on skis. You can… Read more →
