Programming blog

I was checking out my email messages in my Gmail account today, and I noticed that the Favicon.ico switches to a loading Gif when you are waiting for Gmail to process some command of yours. So I thought to myself, this seems useful, and wrote a script to handle this task.

I had some issues with the script, and found this post where the author has written a script to handle this. His script is far superior to mine (in the sense that it handles a more general case) and I used his script to debug my own script.

Anyway, you can check out my progress here.

This is a script I've written which seems to work in most major browsers (I haven't tested IE MAC 5.0, but I'm going to bet it doesn't work properly).

It allows you to take a list, or multiple lists, or even multiple nested lists, and re-arrange the items in the list by dragging them to the location you want them. The plan is to use this in the Drupal CMS to allow users to easily rearrange the structure of pages in the CMS.

You can test it out for yourself here.

I wrote a very simple script for my 6th grade students today to help them with an experiment they were working on. Basically what this script does is simulates drawing poker hands a number of times and records the results into 4 categories.

You can view it here.

So I've been playing around with Ajax recently, using the jQuery library and it's looking pretty good. Today I created a little tab view, where the actual content of the tabs is updated via Ajax. I used an article from 'A List Apart' to provide the theme for the tabs. The code itself was actually pretty simple to write, it only took me a morning.

You can check it out here.

Hey folks,

The title of this post is a bit misleading. The GUI isn't actually for LOGO, it's for a LOGO like 'computer language' I'm writing in PHP that takes some very specific instructions written by a user, and converts them into an image. So far there are some minor bugs to work out, but it has 6 commands so far and seems to run relatively quickly.

You can view it here.

My friend was playing around with his TI-84, and he showed me a picture of a classic example of chaos theory at work. So I decided to port his algorithm to PHP and use it to output an image of the example. You can view it here.

So I've been working on a project recently for a client, and he wanted an easy way to use a Google map to enter a location of a picture someone was uploading. This was as part of his Drupal installation he is using.

So I took a look around, and Drupal has a great module that has been developed with this purpose in mind, so setting up the map and having the locations transfered to the form was very easy to set up. Here is a static example for this, with the code 'borrowed' from Drupal.

Obviously this is very useful.

Hey folks,

I created a very simple script that lets you generate an approximation of Sierpinsky's gasket. The algorithm for doing this is well known, I've just adapted it to Javascript.

Check it out here.

Dave

I've started using Camstudio to record my lessons with my students and I'm posting them online for the students to watch for themselves. If you are interested in the quality of these lessons, you can check out one of them here.

Dave

I wrote a script that uses the canvas html element, available in recent versions of Safari, Firefox and Opera, that shows off each iteration of the Koch snowflake.

You can view it here.

So I modified the code for the Koch snowflake, changed the algorithm for actually calculating the different triangles, and voila, the Sierpinski triangle instead!

You can view it here.

This is adapted from someone else's script, they draw divs on the page like crazy, I'm using the canvas element instead, and I've simplified the output quite a bit. Still looks pretty neat.

Check it out here.

This next cube is interactive which means you can use the mouse-wheel (assuming your browser supports mouse-wheel events) or the arrow keys to modify the spinning of the cube. It's pretty neat.

Check it out here.

You can view the article I've borrowed some of my script as well. It was written by Gary Beene.

So another application of the canvas element, this time to rendering Sierpinski's carpet. Looks really neat.

Check it out here.

So just for fun, I created a labyrinth "game" using the canvas element and some javascript. Currently all you can do is move around the board, but future possible features include things like color on the walls, things you can pick up. Maybe I can create a middle quest you can do?

Anyway, so far it's not visually spectacular, just kind of neat. You can view it here.

So I've been working again on the spreadsheet I was creating before, and I've worked out some technical difficulties. The new version is also slightly nicer in appearance than the old version, although I need to get it looking the same in everyone's browser.

You can check it out here.

It's not fully featured yet, but I have yet to decide what features of a regular spreadsheet I should implement, and what features are unnecessary.

Also, I've created a module to port this spreadsheet into Drupal, which could turn out to be very useful.

Dave

So this is my foray into Flash. Click below and then use the arrow keys to move around the labyrinth.

Click on the image above to start, you can use the arrow keys to move around.

This is a very simple Flash movie that lets you draw rectangles in it by clicking and dragging the mouse inside the movie frame. Give it a shot.

This is a slideshow program I wrote, it comes with some music that plays along as the slides progress, if you click on the play button the slideshow will move automatically, one slide every 10 seconds. All of the images are loaded on the fly, as is the audio, which makes the actual download of the flash relatively easy.

Check it out here:

http://www.unitorganizer.com/flash/slideshow/

So I created this script that lets my students try out different transformation matrices on a vector and see the result of the transformations. From this I am hoping we can come to some conclusions as to what the transformation matrices are (at least in terms of dilation of scale etc...).

You can view the script here.

This should work in most browsers including IE (assuming you have VML support enabled).