USB monitors - yawn, hey wait a second!

I just came across this video on the BBC website that talks about USB monitors. "So what", I thought, "that's not newsworthy", and then I realised it was.

You see, normally to run multiple monitors on your PC you need either a dual-head graphics card or a graphics card per screen. With the USB monitor, all you do is plug it into your computer, and the monitor hooks up as a second display.

The required graphics processing is done by your CPU, so if you're running a video or something else requiring a lot of graphics processing (like Vista, lol!) then you may notice performance degradation on lower end PC's (or high end ones if you use up to 6 of these monitors at once - apparently supported!). Samsung are shipping these as of late last week but in saying that there's no mention on the Samsung website of these yet. More more details are available here (toysgadget) and here (engadget). Yum yum!

Using a XHTTP proxy to access XML content from other sites

I came across this howto that details how you can Use a Web Proxy for Cross-Domain XMLHttpRequest Calls (read this link for good background info). This sounded intriguing so I had a play around and threw together this demonstration that uses this technique to fetch the latest technology news items from the BBC and display them on your web page.

There is one requirement and that is that the web page that makes the call (xhttp.html in my case) must live on the same web server as the xhttp proxy. Other than that you're away laughing.

Check it out here - XHTTP Proxy Demonstration - Cross Domain XMLHttpRequest calls.

View the source of the page for comments - the server part is simply:

<?php
// XmlHTTPRequest Web Proxy
// Inspired by http://developer.yahoo.com/javascript/howto-proxy.html
// Bob Brown, 2007-10-03 23:46
 
// Restrict this proxy to bbc.co.uk feeds only
if (!preg_match('/\.bbc\.co\.uk\/.*rss\.xml$/',$_GET['url'])) 
{
  $error = '403 Proxy Request Denied - URL not allowed';
  header('HTTP/1.1 '.$error);
  echo $error;
}
else
{
  header('Content-type: text/xml');
  echo file_get_contents($_GET['url']);
}
?>

I think it might give unusual results in Internet Explorer - I don't mind if you find and fix the bug, IE7 has never worked on my Vista install! Might have a look if I get bored.