Goatstone

Theme:

About Goatstone

Goatstone is involved in the development of web sites and web applications. Goatstone is, but not exclusively, Jose Collas ( my resume ).

I have recently been working with the HTML5 canvas tag, Processing.js and toxiclibs.js to create a general strategy for HTML5 canvas development. You can see the notes at vis.goatstone.com and the example game herdBall here: http://vis.goatstone.com/herdBall

Other current projects:

I have been to a few hackathons lately:

My strategy was to go into the Hackathon with a set of tools (JavaScript, server w. Java servlets being a few of them and of course my Samsung Q430) and see how well I could turn all that into someone's idea. It is a great learning experience and I hope to go to more Hakathons. I also attended something called an "Open Space" sponsored by Amazon.

I have given up on Think Pads and started using Samsungs. So far the Q430 and the N210 have served me well, running 10 Ubuntu and Ubuntu Remix. I gave up on my virtual server and started using Google apps.

Recent Projects

This web site: A JQuery UI and Theme Demonstration

The current Goatstone home page is a demonstration of some of the functionality of the JQuery and JQuery UI libraries.

At the top of the page, menus are displayed that give the user options for viewing the content of the site. The user can change the format of the content, apply effects and change the "theme" of the site.

There are four options for viewing the content presented: "accordion", "dialogs", "tabs" and "flat text". The effects come from the JQuery UI library and are applied to the content. Another menu enables the user to select a number of JQuery UI themes that can be applied to the site. Viewing the various permutations of a site can help you decide which combinations work best together.

ImgSee

http://imgsee.goatstone.com
git : https://github.com/goatstone/ImgSee

Search for images available publicly on Google's Picassa Photo Albums and compose them into collages.

ImgSee is an on-line application that enables the searching of images and the creation of a collage from the results of those searches.

The user inputs search terms into a text box and selects a button to initiate the search. The search results are displayed and the user can either remove a resulting image from the results display area or add it to the collage area. Once an image is in the collage area the user can modify the images' size and position or remove it from the collage.

Weather Visualization

http://weather.goatstone.com
git : https://github.com/goatstone/goatVis

A weather animation / image that shows the current weather in Seattle Washington, USA as observed from Boeing Field. The information about the live weather comes from an XML file hosted at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Weather Service. The XML file has a description of the weather which is translated into the appropriate weather animation .

This web page will query a service that gets current information from the NOAA site at a regular interval. In this way the visual shown should always be representative of the current weather. There is also the option of viewing the various weather animations through a menu. The animations is done with processing http://processingjs.org/.

The Technologies

Most recently I have been doing a lot of JavaScript and JQery work. I am finding that with JQuery, JavaScript development is a lot faster. I have switched from a virtual server to Google Apps. My traffic is low enough that I am not charged very much. With a virtual server I was paying $50.00 a month. This is a big price difference. I am restricted to what I can do on Google but so far I have been able to adapt. The biggest change is not using MySQL as data storage.

I have stopped using GWT. I will be using primarily JavaScript to create front ends now and I am hoping to start using HTML5 more often.

Contact

jose collas at goatstone.com