Beer and Tell July 2014

Once a month, web developers across the Mozilla community get together to share what side projects or cool stuff we’ve been working on in our spare time. This monthly tribute is known as “Beer and Tell”.

There’s a wiki page listing the presenters and links to what they’re showing off and useful side information. There’s also a recording on Air Mozilla of the meeting.

Pomax: RGBAnalyse and nrAPI

This month Pomax had two projects to show. The first, RGBAnalyse, is a JavaScript library that generates histographical data about the colors in an image. Originally created so he could sort ink colors by hue, the library not only generates the data, but also generates images (available as data-uris) of histograms using that data.

The second project Pomax shared was nrAPI, a Node.js-based REST API for a website for learning Japanese: nihongoresources.com. The API lets you search for basic dictionary info, data on specific Kanji, sound effects, and Japanese names. Search input is accepted in English, Romaji, Hiragana, Katakana, or Kanji.

HTML result from nrAPI search for "tiger".

HTML result from nrAPI search for “tiger”.

Bill Walker: Photo Mosaic via CSS Multi-Column

Next, bwalker shared his personal birding photo site, and talked about a new photo layout he’s been playing with that uses a multi-column layout via CSS. The result is an attractive grid of photos of various sizes without awkward gaps, that can also be made responsive without the use of JavaScript. bwalker also shared the blog post that he learned the technique from.

Dean Johnson: MusicDownloader

deanj shared MusicDownloader, a Python-based program for downloading music from SoundCloud, Youtube, Rdio, Pandora, and HypeScript. The secret sauce is in the submodules, which implement the service-specific download code.

Chris Lonnen: Alonzo

Lastly, lonnen shared alonzo, a Scheme interpreter written in Haskell as part of a mad attempt to learn both languages at the same time. It usesĀ Parsec to implement parsing, and so far implements binary numeric operations, basic conditionals, and even rudimentary error checking. The development roughly follows along “Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours” by Johnathan Tang.

Sample Runs of alonzo


Thanks to all of our presenters for sharing! If you’re interested in attending or presenting at the next Beer and Tell, subscribe to the dev-webdev mailing list! The wiki page and connection info is shared a few days before each meeting.

See you next month!