Facebook recently held their annual “F8″ conference, aimed at unveiling some new features they’ve been working on. Most of
the initial coverage has focused on their new “Timeline” feature. Truth be told, I think it’s beautifully designed; they outdid
themselves on creating a great user experience for their intended goals. However, even with this addition, I’ve still [...]
Using Javascript to control the Nintendo Wii
The Nintendo Wii was released around the end of 2006. That’s a solid four years now; an amazing amount of time in the lifespan of a technological device these days. Often overlooked is the fact that the Wii has a web browser, which is in fact a build of Opera, offering support for canvas, CSS3, and more advanced aspects of HTML5. This should be incredible; why does nobody develop more for it?
Using the myGengo Translation API with Python
Many engineers and services are hit particularly hard by the deprecation of the Translation API that Google has so generously offered up to this point, and desire a solid alternative. While there are other machine translation APIs out there, I wanted to take a moment to show more developers how integrating with the myGengo Translation API can get them the best of both worlds.
More Power to ExpressionEngine URLs
When playing “contract engineer”, you sometimes have to jump in and work with a less than ideal codebase. This was the case on a recent project I helped out on; the codebase is PHP-based (ExpressionEngine/CodeIgniter), and overall not my normal cup of tea. That said, we can make it work for us…
Emitting Custom Events in Node.js
Node isn’t the first approach to event based programming, and with its explosion of interest it probably won’t be the last. Typical JavaScript patterns for callback functions involve passing around references to functions and managing odd scope levels. In many cases this is less than ideal; that said, there’s another option when you’re in Node: emit your own events, and let functions attach and respond to those. EventEmitter makes this incredibly easy!
Hacking the Human Brain
Back in 2008 I was frequently riding a train twice a day for a ridiculous ~3 hour (each way) commute that nobody on this planet should ever have to do. Needless to say, I did a lot of reading, particularly issues of Wired Magazine. To this day, one article still stands fresh in my mind, which essentially dealt with the concept of surrendering your brain to an algorithmic approach to memorization.