The how behind the homepage

October 29th, 2011

I recently built a new homepage to celebrate Fall and kill a few weekends playing with canvas, javascript and CA. A little while back I had an idea to use Cellular Automata rules to generate random groupings of xy coordinates. This worked well as a way to generate a rock pattern for my canvas drawing. [...]

Password management with TrueCrypt and Dropbox

August 15th, 2011

Maintaining passwords for multiple servers across multiple development environments is a pain. A few weeks back there was a downed service on one of my servers and I was at a computer without my passwords and hosts files. The debugging session that followed required hopping through multiple servers and in general took a lot longer [...]

Quick encrypt for your coffee shop traffic.

May 16th, 2011

Just a little function to add to your .profile that automatically turns on a socks proxy and tunnels all your traffic through the server of your choice. It’s a simple setup and <CTRL>-C kills the connection and shuts off the proxy. This assumes that you have shell access to some server that you trust to [...]

Drawing with Cellular Automata and HTML5 Canvas

May 10th, 2011

This weekend I set out to do some canvas drawings. The first one ended up being the centerpiece of my home page. It was inspired by the leaves of a tree on my street. Oh it’s good to be back in the deciduous loving climate. The second drawing was inspired by a recent campout in [...]

How to refactor other’s code.

February 9th, 2011

I was in a position today to refactor some code that didn’t belong to me. Without going into much detail I was asked to implement a feature that required some significant changes to some fresh code. A friend was online at the time. I remembered he had a very gentle way of dealing with other [...]

Ecsmas and Tron

December 27th, 2010

Well I really had a blast working with @darkgoyle on the Merry Ecsmas project on Christmas Eve. It was my first attempt at a canvas creation and it came together great. I am still finding myself creating snowflakes there! All this canvas exposure and seeing how @darkgoyle does his maths got me in a mood [...]

DumbledORM version 0.1 released!

December 20th, 2010

I’m happy to announce the release of DumbledORM 0.1. It’s a major revamp from the initial release. It’s still the same ~200 loc, but now chocked full of comments and under the MIT license. A few noteworthy changes. PDO now throws exceptions by default. The standard default in PDO is to fail silently. This was [...]

MEMP: PHP 5.3 with FPM and nginx via MacPorts

December 1st, 2010

I’ve been considering diving into nginx for a bit now. Rumors of it’s speed and Cyrillic error messages have intrigued me. With recent forays into node.js apps and their requirement for a free port, I wanted to find a nice solution that complimented the evented speed of node.js without exposing a port publicly for each [...]

tunr – a puzzle game

November 4th, 2010

tunr is a game. It’s a simple puzzle of sorts. Imitation and pacing. I built it after a long walk through the neighborhood when I had the idea of synchronizing with simple rhythms in a computer. Most games are about speed and end up leaving you in a state of stress. tunr is about pace [...]

The long dark tea-time of the node

November 4th, 2010

Looking back I would’ve never guessed this project would have had so many twists and turns. I set out to build a game that was about synchronizing with computer generated rhythms. Ie. Make the box move at the same rhythm as a sine wave. I really liked the idea of something so simple requiring intense [...]