Seven Languages in Seven Weeks
Think about the way you think. Think about that thought, and this one. Did you think using words? Did you see the words? Sound them out mentally? If someone asked you describe yourself, you would probably think of a series of adjectives (at least if you’re an English speaker). We think via language, spoken or [...]
Be Careful With your Redis BitSets and Java
Fast, easy, realtime metrics using Redis Bitmaps A while back a popular article hit Hacker News. Written by the guys over at Spool, it contained a slick methodology for storing metrics such as user logins per day, song plays by user, etc using using Redis BitSets. How about a basic example. When a user logs [...]
Ruby, Let’s Take a Break. I Wanna Date Node.js For a While.
Ruby you’re great. No really, I love your terse syntax, iterating is easy, and the community that supports you is quite large. But, I think we need to take a break. Wait, don’t cry. Let me explain. It’s just that I’m tired of having to remember so many syntaxes, especially one so different than the [...]
Algorithms Can Really Beat You Up
“Here’s a simple one” remarked the young man as he drew a diagram on the board. “You should have this figured out in about five minutes.” I stared at the pyramid of numbers scribbled hastily in blue dry erase. The only thing clear to me in that moment was that I wouldn’t have this figured [...]
Programming, Languages, and Hacking the Way We Think
Last night I read a wonderful article about programming languages. It opened with a quote: A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing. Alan Perlis After a few minutes of thinking about it, I changed the quote to read: A language that doesn’t change the way you think [...]
Todo-CL 2.0.0
A while back I created a simple command line tool that allowed me to create tasks from Launchy and send them directly to Toodledo. My process was simple. I’d create a bunch of tasks throughout the day while doing other stuff, then sometime that night (or the next morning) I’d go through all those tasks [...]
A Launchy Todo Client and the GitHub Paradigm
I use Launchy hundreds of times in a day. The Alt and Spacebar keys are usually the first to show significant wear and tear on any new computer I work with. It’s the first thing I install, and it’s how I keep my hands on the keyboard and off the mouse. I also use a [...]
GOLSequencer, HarmonicTable, and MidiReference on GitHub
With just a little trepidation I have checked in the code for all of my free software goodies into GitHub. I was getting several requests to provide access to the source for several of my old projects, so rather than emailing code around on a case by case basis, I have simply checked everything in [...]
RWMidi and Pitch Bend: Another Adventure in Social Coding
In my previous post, I discovered that the RWMidi library was available via GitHub, leaving it open to the possibility of forking and making my sync and pulse resolution changes public. Proving that Jung and Sting were on to something, while making these changes I received an e-mail from a user struggling with RWMidi: I’m [...]
RWMidi, GMS, and GOL Sequencer: Adventures in Social Coding
Many moons ago, I created a little tool called the GOL Sequencer Bank. You can read more about it here, and here. In order to create the tool, I used RWMidi, a Java/Processing library created by Manuel Odendahl of Ruin&Wesen. While creating the sequencer bank, I discovered that the RWMidi library had no support for [...]
