Year: 2014

Google Chromecast digisign references

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These are notes on digital signage on the Google Chromecast. Google’s docs https://cast.google.com/publish/#/overview   Console https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/custom_receiver   Writeup SaaS vendors. https://www.signsimple.com/ (local launch) http://launch.signagely.com/  (not up yet) Chromecast code repos https://github.com/pjjanak/chromecast-hello-world "C" is for Chromecast: hacking digital signage Limitations The Chromecast device does a good job of displaying media at 1080p resolution.  However, any web … Read more

Starting a new web site or blogging project? Read this! Seriously.

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Mr. Ognjen Duraskovic first got in touch with me with an offer to translate my MMWW WordPress plugin to Spanish and Serbian, which of course, I gratefully accepted. Gracias! хвала! It was an extra-cool offer because MMWW contains all kinds of readable text strings for the photographic details embedded in Exif metatdata. He dealt with all … Read more

Provisioning Windows to do RiseVision development

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These are my notes on provisioning Windows (W7PRO, SP1 x64) for working on the open source RiseVision stuff. Here’s where the RiseVision stuff lives on GitHub. https://github.com/Rise-Vision Here are Donna Peplinski’s instructions for provisioning your machine. Get GIT. Get node.js from http:://nodejs.org/ and install it. Use the Windows binary. Run a simple node.js acceptance test … Read more

Digital signage vendor list

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This is a list of vendors for digital signage, in no particular order. RiseVision  Free as in kittens, free as in speech, SaaS, some premium products. WonderSign   $40 per month plus $20 per extra display. DigitalSignage.com SoCal, SaaS, Freemium, hardware systems are offered. 11Giraffes  Prices not published. Deep retail communications products. DISE  Lots of multi-screen support, … Read more

Using SQL to report by time intervals in Oracle

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This is an Oracle-specific edition of the article explaining the same subject for MySQL. It’s often helpful to use SQL to group and summarize information by periods of time. For example, we might like to examine sales data. For example, we might have a table of individual sales transactions like so. Sales: sales_id int sales_time date net … Read more

Fast nearest-location finder for Oracle

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Elsewhere I have written an article on fast location finding for the MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. This article shows an adaptation of that work for the Oracle database. If you need data to work with, here’s a US Zip Code table in SQL suitable for an Oracle database. Please don’t use this data in production. The … Read more

Fast nearest-location finder for SQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server)

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I’ve spent enough time goofing around with location-finder software that it’s worth writing up how to do it.   Of course, finding distances on the surface of the earth means using Great Circle distances, worked out with the Haversine formula, also called the Spherical Cosine Law formula. The problem is this: Given a table of … Read more

Transcoding JPEG optimizer from Mozilla

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The people at Mozilla have produced a transcoding JPEG optimizer. https://github.com/mozilla/mozjpeg/releases This thing is sweet: it takes ordinary JPEG files and recompresses them much more efficiently without making the images deteriorate. It uses the long-standing and well-tested Independent JPEG Group reference implementation, and adds a bunch of optimizations. It’s not built for GUI users; it’s … Read more