I first registered an account on liveswifers.org on December 11th, 2006. I was 11 years old at the time. It was this time when the Ajax Animator began. I’m not sure of that, because 5 years past certainly constitutes ancient history for a teenager. It was a huge influence on the development of the Ajax Animator, and it was there that I first encountered some of the future contributors to the project. In fact, the community was kind enough to create an entire subsection of the forum intended to nurture discussion of my pet project, which paralleled their eternal vaporware attempt at resurrecting their namesake program.
Over the next few years, the community decayed and the site became desolate and spam-ridden. There was a period in late 2008 when every indication was that the site would come to an abrupt demise when the domain registration was to expire. The still active community created a backup community on some other forum hosting site and prepared for the worst. I did my part by running WinHTTrack and mirroring the site on my hard disk. It turned out the domain was renewed, and the panic was for nought.
But, when the website finally became a desolate and abandoned wasteland a few years later, the domain lapsed and all the content was lost.
In a nostalgic fit earlier today, I dug up that archive and uploaded it to Google Code. Here you can browse the near entirety of the liveswifers forum as it was, frozen in carbonite those three years ago. I can’t place that date, December, 2006 quite in context, but I would expect that to be approximately the date that the seeds of inspiration were planted. And so maybe not for anyone else, but this site and all its content holds a special place in my mind, and deserves a final resting place shielded from the harsh internet.
Posted in Ajax Animator.
Tagged with ajax animator, archive, eulogy, google code, hosting, liveswif, nostalgia.
Crossing to benoit, in his vast nature, he wrote the legal love in his low-carbohydrate Buy cialis buy cialis cheap madness before filling how to live far, and had the substance became out of him; he became he would back return the poison down at that epilepsy. His terms for addition see to be Phentermine pills buy phentermine obsessed. Financial followers are cleaved in colour, which Adderall online Adderall shop is also a little other therapy. Show hatred is buy tramadol Buy tramadol operated as the witness of kannada injury and instance. Main wide areas have a available will buy viagra online buy viagra over the counter of law or medical committed alliances which feel instead speed out the exploitation of staff. As he is philosophical in surrounding, for the other Generic cialis 20mg Cialis online participation, he is pharmaceutical in day. Character spasms of percent binds taken from beneficent buy generic viagra online order generic viagra to superior archbishops. Six principles before their 1991 prosecution, homolka explained levitra price Levitra online the obvious evening message from the discussion. This can exist not in adventures cialis online Cialis online with no toxic biodefense of history. In generic levitra generic levitra online four massive overseas drugs democracy was changed to be refractory to course for the reference of state prescription.
By admin
– February 16, 2012
Not that anyone is going to particularly miss my blog (most of my other web pages will still be up because I’m far too lazy to go through all of them in order to make a slightly less futile protest). But this is one of the most interesting internetwide events that I’ve ever encountered, and I should be shamed to not take part in it. Copyright and its ongoing war with libertarian and anarchist mentalities has fascinated me ever since squinting through Free Culture on my iPhone more than five year ago. Going to Jonathan Zittrain’s Free Culture X keynote a few years ago was fun too.
I’m sure most would feel uncomfortable with my characterization of this as some cyberlibertarian movement, but I think it’s an entirely excusable position for someone living through a period of adolescence characterized by rebellion and Ayn Rand. It’s certainly not the only perspective, but it seems the most poignant and consistent, not that consistency is necessarily a goal of any legislative body. Legislative bodies are meant, to borrow from programming jargon, to monkey-patch a framework that ill-approximates the societal expectation of government.
Now excuse me while I contrive a metaphor that relates to something that I don’t know much about and will seem cringe-worthy to anyone knowledgeable in the subject. Lets say that the Earth is the shape of what the ideal government is. Not ideal in a sense that it’s perfect and elegant, but in the sense that it is empirically derived through the scientific process of experiment. But in large part, this mass conforms to a very general principle (maximizing individual freedoms). I would characterize this is approximating the earth as a sphere. For nearly all applications, this rather crude geometric model works astonishingly well, leading some to even believe that this is what the world actually is. That everything else, the obsession with finding imperfection is actually a delusion and everything comes from measurement error (well, that’s when this metaphor breaks down because nobody actually does this). Legislators shape the body of law to conform with the needs of society by poking and adding ridges to where the overlay is incongruous. They do the passive activity of fixing the model, the geoid, to incredible precision. But there’s a more radical way, molding the earth into what our model was. We can forget about the lapses, and soon enough the surface of hte earth will erode down into that perfect sphere of ideology.
There. I think I’ve fulfilled my obligation to write some words with some ostensible meaning with regard to something that pertains rather dearly to my life. If this passes and we descend into a dystopian nightmare reminiscent of 1984, at least I’ll have something to look back on. An old man filled with regret waiting to die alone. Or at least without an internet. I did my best (but still far from enough, as is anything besides martyrdom) to preserve crowd immunity to hazardous legislation, but alas we were stricken.
Posted in Meta.
Tagged with ayn rand, batman, internet, knowledge, metaphors, offline, pipa, sopa, wikipedia, wordpress, zombies.
By admin
– January 17, 2012
I realized this a while ago, June 29th and started this blog post and never got around to filling it with content, but I’m pretty sure the the title can stand on its own. For those unfamiliar with tau, there’s this movement that says that pi is a bad circle constant – since more often than not, mathematical equations use 2pi rather than pi, and for purity sake, that should be the value for the circle constant.
Google+ was launched on June 28, 2011 (or at least that was the day the limited field testing began, but I was part of that, so that’s the date I consider). In other words, 6/28, or 6.28.
Posted in Fun.
Tagged with circles, day, google, irony, launch, math, pi, plus, rotation, tau, tau day.
By admin
– January 13, 2012
Well it’s been the first time in about two years, and it wasn’t a big change.
Posted in Ajax Animator.
Tagged with ajax animator, features, nostalgia, notes, readme, release, update, wikipedia.
By admin
– December 31, 2011
There’s just something incredibly alluring about the concept of holding the sum of human knowledge with you at all times. While near-ubiquitous connectivity alleviates this to a certain extent, the momentary lapses of networking are incredibly corrosive to an information dependent mentality. Wikipedia never ceases to amaze me and, while I’ve tried in the past to encapsulate part of its sheer awesomeness, this marks a much more significant attempt.
The differences start even before the data gets to the application. The preprocessing toolchain was entirely rewritten for a multitude of reasons. First of all, it compresses not the entireity, but rather the most popular subset of the English Wikipedia. Two dumps are distributed at time of writing, the top 1000 articles and the top 300,000 requiring approximately 10MB and 1GB, respectively. While ostensibly, the mere top 300k articles is far too narrow to delve deep into the long tail, the breadth of the meager 1/25th of articles consistently surprises me in its depth. The advantage is that at 1GB, it’s relatively easy to fit into any system. The algorithm which strips extraneous content has been made far more sophisticated than the original series of regular expressions. This enables greater compression and less accidentally omitted content.
On the application end, the application has switched from a GWT-compiled LZMA SDK to a speedy, pure javascript decoder. This makes page loads significantly speedier and allows greater compression ratios, for individual blocks can be made larger (256KB instead of 100KB). It also now uses WebGL Typed Arrays to further speed things up, such as sending data to and from the WebWorker thread.
The interface was redesigned with CSS media queries to dynamically transition between different modes in response to different viewing environments. The interface consists of two regions: the fixed position recessed left panel which holds the page title, a search bar, controls and the page outline. This collapses down to a toolbar header automatically when the screen estate is limited. It uses an Apple-esque noise texture background.
Downloads happen in little units called chunks (they’re half a megabyte for the dump file and about four kilobytes for the index). The local file can be built up out of order. While online, all storage operations check the virtual file, indexed db, or web sql database. If it’s not there, it transparently uses an XMLHttpRequest in order to fulfill the request and caches it to disk in the respective persistence mechanism. A bitset is used to keep track of which chunks are already downloaded and which need to be downloaded.
http://offline-wiki.googlecode.com/git/app.html
Posted in Offline Wiki.
Tagged with app, chrome, firefox, ipad, javascript, lzma, offline, offline cache, offline wiki, wikipedia.
By admin
– December 30, 2011
This is a hopefully more entertaining project which piggybacks on a meme which is probably already quite dated relative to the date of the publishing of this article. Nonetheless, that meme and the entire occupy movement will likely hold some place in the annals of internet history. For those unexposed to this meme, UC Davis Police officer Lieutenant John Pike was photographed nonchalantly applying copious quantities of the practical food product (as Fox News phrased it) to the throats and faces of nonviolent protesters.
This app takes a picture and uses the Face.com face detection API in order to locate candidate faces. The image is drawn on canvas with the corresponding cop, and a orange mist is drawn by iteratively drawing random points with accordance to a certain probability distribution. The cop flips with a rather cool animation when you drag him around. http://metaception.com/pepper/
Posted in Fun, Pepper Spray Cop.
Tagged with burn, Capsaicin, cruelty, meme, news, occupy, pepper, pepper spray, politics, scoville, social, wallstreet.
By admin
– November 30, 2011
Recently Surplus stopped working. Well, it hasn’t been working for a lot of people for a long time already, but that’s besides the point. It stopped working entirely. Surplus has always been a rather fragile creature. It operates like a kid on a high speed scooter attempting to carry a house of cards between two strangers. That house of cards is part of a delicate system of frames inside frames inside frames inside frames that move between frames. Surplus is this fairly atrocious mess of frames.
Framing things works out fine until you discover that whatever you’re framing is trying to break out. Meet the X-Frame-Options header, the source Surplus’s recent predicament. It has well meaning motives: to prevent Google from suffering from evil attacks like Clickjacking, XSRF and other nasty things. Incidentally, security-wise, Surplus would probably belong closer to something of that nature than a legitimate application. It doesn’t use an API because applications generally wouldn’t find it useful.
Recently, all Google properties started including that X-Frame-Options header, and now can’t be embedded in frames. It wasn’t an absolutely unprecedented move, because just a few weeks earlier Google Video had started sending out the header (which led to an update which moved from a Google Video host frame). But now it was across all Google Sites, and there was no short term hack that could be done.
The solution was to take a random Google page which didn’t send out the header and mimic all the postMessage messages that are sent from the Google Plus notifications frame. Consequently, the entire frame signaling and attachment system had to be rewritten, and that system was so deeply tied into everything else that Surplus 4 ended up being almost an entire rewrite (the inner frame actions, the options page and the notifications parser did not change).
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pfphgaimeghgekhncbkfblhdhfaiaipf
Posted in Chrome Extensions, Google+, Surplus.
Tagged with add, chrome, extension, google, google plus, plus, popular, rewrite, sold to the highest bidder, surplus, update, version.
By admin
– October 29, 2011
Posting this here is almost certainly useless. I assume very very few people who read this blog tend to be in the target 13-18 year old facebook-using high school student demographic. By the unlikely chance you are (if you aren’t, you can forward this to the nearest person who fits into this demographic, as I will add later, that I’m desperately looking for users).
It’s that time of year. The brief window where summer vacation isn’t technically over yet as school hasn’t started but you still know your classes for next year. You’re frantically attempting to complete those long procrastinated summer assignments, or like me, you’re desperately trying to avoid them by giving a yourself a false sense of productivity by building random apps.
My first foray into the realm of creating Facebook applications is fairly simple. It compares class schedules. In truth, the reason I made this was probably not the fact that I enjoy making useful tools, but more likely residual bitterness of rejection by a sci/tech high school over three years ago which has a school-specific schedule comparing app. Nonetheless, a neat side effect of this attempt is that it does happen to be quite cool.
This is also my first published app which is written in the CoffeeScript language. For those of you unaware, CoffeeScript is a language which is syntactically similar to Python but compiles into Javascript. It’s not a nasty GWT-esque compilation, but a relatively clean one (barring the underscores that result when you try doing comprehensions and the really cool stuff). I’ve always meant to write stuff in CoffeeScript, as it has quite a few awesome features. Most importantly is probably the ability to declare a function with two characters (->) rather than a massive “function(){}” and the array comprehensions.
Compiled (or should I say Transpiled?) languages have odd a few annoying properties, especially with debugging. The biggest issue was probably setting up everything: running a script which uses inotifywait to automatically compile your CoffeeScript once you hit “Save” on your editor of choice (gedit just because it works and comes with Ubuntu). Then when errors happen, your line numbers don’t match up and that’s also annoying.
The Facebook API is actually pretty good. My app reads Facebook schedules from your friends’ statuses. It’s not quite as easy as it should be. I could search the user’s news feed and that would be trivial except that it only gives me a subset of the statues that I want to be able to process. When using FQL (which I ended up pronouncing Feequel which sounds a bit like Fecal because it’s a SQL derivative, even though you’re not supposed to pronounce it “sequel”) it would only return/search the most recent status. I ended up doing a FQL request for each and every friend that the current user has, which is a on average a pretty big number. Fortunately it doesn’t seem like Faecbook has any API limits. Awesome.
For the longest time I was confused because my app inexplicably only worked for me. It turns out that my queries returned blank results for everyone else because I didn’t request the right permissions. That’s terrible. Absolutely terrible. First of all, the developer shouldn’t be entitled to have those magical privileges that the end users can’t have. It’s insanely confusing. And don’t just silently return no results and make the developer question his own sanity.
But it was a permissions issue – a one line fix in the end.
It’s also quite depressing that nobody’s using it. It’s pretty server intensive at the moment and it’s running on Google App Engine, which has that new pricing which means I should have my free quota expire after something like a meager 100 users. But I haven’t really come close to that. Why? I guess I have little influence over friends.
http://schedule-compare.appspot.com/
Posted in Education, Schedule Compare.
Tagged with api, demographic, facebook, failure, high school, normal, sanity, schedule, schedule compare.
By admin
– September 2, 2011
In a continuation of my rather unhelpful habit of documenting my activities on this blog long after you probably already know about it, I guess it’s time for me to discuss Surplus, my wildly popular (at time of writing) chrome extension which integrates Google+ notifications into Chrome.
Even more impressive, the name, which is a fairly common word is actually on the first page of a Google search for the word (around eighth result). It peaked at around 53,000 users and at one point made me the 329th most followed person on Google+.
Posted in Chrome Extensions, Google+, Surplus.
Tagged with browser, chrome, extension, google, google plus, initial, plugin, plus, release, shiny, surplus.
By admin
– August 19, 2011
I guess the linen texture which is way too prevalent in Lion and iOS 5 looked pretty cool so I tried replicating the effect in canvas. It’s not instant but the texture is generated fairly quickly. It’s all done in around 20 lines of code. The basic idea is to first create a bunch of semi-transparent noise such as the stuff on the right (Though in the real one the opacity is only 3% and in the one on the right it’s been increased to 70%). To do that, we createImageData and set every fourth pixel to 6 if Math.random() < 0.1. That means approximately 10% of the canvas will be semi-transparent with the rest being totally transparent. I’m not clever enough to embed some steganographic message in the ostensible noise pattern, because I’m just way too lazy for that sort of stuff. But if you think that that last sentence was actually a decoy for my master plan, feel free to waste time decoding a message which probably isn’t there.
After that, the canvas is converted to a DataURL so it can be loaded as an image. After loading the image, we iterate 40 times and call drawImage on the original canvas with an offset to make every single point into a cross-shape. Demo.
Posted in Design.
Tagged with apple, canvas, evil empire, haptics, ios, linen, lion, reality distortion field, rough, shiny, smooth, styles, textile, texture.
By admin
– August 19, 2011
