About

My Test Bench is a showcase for web experimentation. We mostly develop in private labs, but every once in a while, something worthy emerges and will be promoted to this site. The purpose is to maintain a portfolio of our work, provide samples for others to learn from, and also generate new ideas for future experiments.

Our Work

RSS

  • MyHeadlines - MyHeadlines is an RSS aggregator with Full Text search capabilities. The emergent behaviour is an efficient Current Events Search Engine. There's screen scraping technology for building custom feeds, and for harvesting Stock Ticker data. Blogging, Link Dump, and Comments are features included in the standard download. If you have a PHP and MySQL based web architecture then MyHeadlines is the Content Syndication Engine for You!

    • JavaScript

  • JavaScript Sudoku - Sudoku presents a great problem; its very basic rules result in intricate logic required to solve a board. But where the logic fails, often a guess is required. It is at this moment that Sudoku becomes a very effective vehicle for learning a new programming language. Here you will find our first JavaScript Sudoku, an experiment with JavaScript and CSS.
  • JavaScript Add-A-Gram - Following our Sudoku success we found one aspect of JavaScript particularly disturbing: Browser Timeouts. Most browsers monitor the running JavaScript to ensure that poor scripting doesn't lock-up the browser session. In most cases this is a very good thing to do. But, for us, we found it quite annoying. Our JavaScript computing activities were somewhat academic and arguably inappropriate: doing heavy computations client side was an unexpected repurposing of the platform. Did we give up? No. Instead we set out to find a problem that was orders of magnitude more complicated, and then build the technology to solve it without triggering a Browser Timeout. JavaScript Add-A-Gram will successfully solve itself, taking about an hour to do so, and not once trigger a browser warning.

    • Tag Clouds

  • Dominant Meme - Tag Clouds are one of the Internets most effect methods for representing meta data in a meaningful way. The size of a tag represents some data that would otherwise go unnoticed. Mix in a clustering algorithm, and you have Dominant Meme. An experiment in tracking current trends on the internet.

    • Contact

    We can be reached through our Contact Page.