A year ago, I bought a brand new computer. In parts. While in Fry's, I discovered that they did not have the case I wanted, but they had the "gamer's equivalent" for about $20 more. I bought that one.

That was an experience I will be repeating from now on. This case is quiet, much more quiet than the older "office grade" case. This morning, I ( Read more... )

Many moons ago, I admired a lovely little program called ToneMatrix by Andre Michelle. I had Flash envy hard after seeing it, and I wanted to figure out if it was possible to make such a thing using only HTML.

Well, with the latest audio standard from the W3C (note that that's a "Raw Tip" specification, meaning that it's completely vaporware), it ( Read more... )

I've had this weird sensation all week. My brain has been dreadfully quiet. No new outputs have occurred to me-- no new stories, no new software development spikes have suggested themselves to me ( Read more... )

This afternoon, I had a problem. Django is a popular tool for building websites, and the Django administration tool is designed to show individual tables from a database and lists of their contents. I had a fairly complicated problem whereby a related, generic table was supposed to have-- but may not have had-- data associated with items in my ( Read more... )

I used to joke that, sometimes, when someone in my family comes down and sees a mess of code up in Emacs on my screen that "No, really, I'm playing a video game. It just looks like work." Because I find coding fun. But the fact is that I also play games, and Portal 2 was definitely a brain-bender.

But not as brain-bending as Haskell.

That said, I ( Read more... )

The other day, I blogged proudly about a piece of code called Switchboard, which allowed you to create a reverse proxy with routes decided by URL rather than host. Nginx does this, but it only has HTTP/1.1 <-> HTTP/1.0 proxying and no control over buffer sizes. Varnish does all 1.1, but no SSL. Pound buffers uploads completely to RAM before ( Read more... )

"Siri, where can I go to get an abortion ( Read more... )

This morning, I had misplaced my phone. I asked Omaha if I could use hers to call mine. Having had some luck with it in the past, I pushed the button on her phone and said, "Siri, please call Elf Sternberg ( Read more... )

I've spent all day working with Zombie and Vows and Coffeescript, only to be stuck by one tiny problem. Dear Javascript Developers: "undefined" and "false" are not the same thing. There are javascript environments (see: node.js) that will crap a brick if you try to dereference the undereferencable.

I had to "fix" both FileUploader.js and ( Read more... )

I always have a half-dozen web projects going on at any moment, most of them on my laptop. I often forget where they are, virtually. "Is Omaha's first project on port 8101 or 8103? Where is Oxymoron run from? What about Kafka?"

I mean, the actual projects themselves are in my /projects folder, but since I run a lot of them out of Apache, it' ( Read more... )