Watching my normal habits rarely leads me to new conclusions in life, but the path traveled can be rewarding. In previous articles (here, and here) I took a look at how I write code when, other than daydreaming, I do zero design up front. What did I do? How did I work? The results are not surprising.I had a spring break of sorts over the last week, and took the time to revisit my current understanding of JavaScript in the browser within the world of a 2d canvas. I explored another game library called gamejs in the hopes of making...
English spelling always baffles me. It never surprises me that those who evolve the language are the same idiots who came up with things like Daylight Savings Time. The following are collections of words that I find myself grouping together as spelling reference groups. The fact that my brain groups these together makes me misspell one or all of them. I'll strike out the word that I most often misspell and the way that I usually misspell it.
In my recent attempts to use open source software for video conversions and editing, I have settled on using ffmpeg. The learning curve for ffmpeg was a bit steep, compounded by the fact that the newer versions of ffmpeg use slightly different options than what a lot of past, pageranked blog posts have documented. Because of how useful and powerful ffmpeg has turned out to be, I'm starting a page of ffmpeg recipes. If you are interested in the ffmpeg recipes, please bookmark the page referenced in the ffmpeg recipes link. I'll be posting new recipes there, not here.
I don't always play video games, but when I do, I like to try indie games and open source games. I have gotten into the Let's Play phenomenon on youtube and, after some bad starts (video and audio encoding woes, and a lot of forced education about video and audio in general) with the good old game Warlords, I aimed to do a Let's Play of an open source video game. Open source projects can always use free publicity.The open source game that I first chose, and was going to record, will remain nameless in this article. It has a...
I love it when experiments take on a life of their own. I had previously indulged some video game silliness in a small amount of spare time. I also took the time to document what goes through my mind when I write code, in particular when I code organically, which is what I call "stream of consciousness" but for programmers. Finding a bit more time to continue the experiment, I've put together three more steps of the small game that I'm calling shootdown. Below is my documentation of my internal dialog as I move forward, along with a snapshot of...
A few years ago when I first found out about Node.js (hereafter referred to as node), I thought it was the absolute coolest thing ever. "Cool!" I thought, I can dump Django and PHP and my reliance on those server side engineers. I can do it all myself! Honeymoons, thankfully, don't last. My first impression of node quickly turned into despair at having to code everything myself that I was used to getting for free in other web frameworks. Whether those thoughts were accurate at the time, they were my thoughts, and lacking a node therapy/support group I moved...