So I was updating my 3d impress.JS resume, and I thought I’d put some QuickGrapher graphs in there. Turns out it’s easy as pie to embed QuickGrapher graphs in an impress.JS presentation, and the results are pretty neat.
A still photo, for those of you just skimming.
As someone who has hired and been hired many times, I’ve seen and written my fair share of resumes. Clean white sheets tree pulp embossed and inked with the accomplishments of the writer. What an outdated system! Worse still are the PDF and Word resumes, emulating the old pulp and ink model. Ignoring the fact that you can’t convey motion, video, or interactivity in a paper resume, the main downside from my perspective is a lack of open source spirit. All these resumes floating around and they’ve never taught anyone anything besides a written history of a job candidate. Bleh.
So I set out to change that. I’m re-writing my resume as an HTML page with CSS transforms and interactive Javascript and HTML5 elements. I’ve also released the project as open source on GitHub, so anyone can follow along as I learn more about impress.js, snag the source for their own resume, or just poke around at the guts. I’ve started preliminary work on the resume, and it’ll get updated steadily as I get more free time. I realized after the first couple of commits that I’d like to have a live version of the latest code always available online. Preferably without any interaction or external script wizardry from me. As it turns out, It’s no easy task to accomplish through the use of GitHub Pages and git submodules. My resume pulls impress.JS as a Git submodule, but GitHub doesn’t forward links to submodules in Pages. The end result is that the use of another open source project as a submodule is not a viable option for GitHub Pages sites. This is unfortunate, but I worked around it using the tools available to me on Bluehost.
First, I ssh’d into my account and cloned my resume repository into a /resume/ directory with
git clone https://github.com/huntergdavis/Hunter-Davis-impressjs-Resume.git resume
Next, in that same SSH shell I created a bash script that could be run with cron that would update this repo every hour:
#!/bin/bash
cd ~/public_html/
cd resume
git pull
git submodule update
Finally, I used the BlueHost control panel to tell my cron script to run every hour. That’s that!
You can always view my latest impress.js resume at www.hunterdavis.com/resume/
As a programmer (or sysadmin, IT professional, cluster maintenance worker, scrum leader, etc) there will absolutely be times that a debugger isn’t powerful enough or optimal enough or simple enough. For some classes of problems, whether they be visual (graphs, animations), size (too much stuff changing too quickly), security (only munged objects come with this module) etc, a debugger will only hinder your ability to work. We inevitably go to data logging for these classes of problems, as it’s quite simple to learn and generally the first method that we’re taught. Unfortunately, it’s also the most lackluster and limited method of debugging information that we have. However, it doesn’t have to be. I’m going to be highlighting a super simple but powerful idea that may just change the way you debug. Debug logs that are fully executable Python programs. Read on for more info and some examples.
Do your debug logs do this?
So I was unwinding after work today, and I thought it’d be fun to create a little Javascript function and mobile-optimized site for changing textual words to American Sign Language. *FYI I throw stuff up on my GitHub all the time, and it doesn’t always make the blog. Everything runs on the client browser, nothing is ever sent to my server and it’s safe to embed in applications. It only took about an hour to throw together, mainly because the only public domain images are that of the manual ASL alphabet. That in itself seems like a problem somebody should do a Kickstarter to solve (seriously). Anyway you can check out the page here, and check the source out here.
For those copy-pasting on a mobile site or tablet (I didn’t use any libraries, it should run on pretty much anything), it’s www.hunterdavis.com/asljs/
This is the sort of thing I think we should all take more time to actively do. Just write some code for the heck of it, and get it out there to share. Even if it’s a little thing. Especially if it’s a little thing! You never know what will come of it, and it’s a great way to get ideas out there.
I just unearthed all of my homework from my CS courses from my undergraduate degree (1999-2003). While assembling the retrospective gif for the previous post, I recalled I had a web page on my school’s csserver back as an undergraduate. Google confirmed this, but more amazingly it was still serving my hand-written redirect page. My amazement turned to horror as I realized I had served many a redhat ISO internally, and they were probably still lingering on there. A quick ssh later, and I’m back in the csserver of my youth. The account was never shut down, and the redhat ISOs were still there. I made a quick copy of all the rest of the data, deleted the data from the account, and logged out. I then realized what I had actually unearthed, a perfectly preserved history of each assignment I had ever completed for every CS class I had as an undergrad (dozens). Not only that, i had written some simple openGL games for the csserver. Sitting in the top level of a forgotten web directory was a compiled windows executable for a shitty little Tron openGL game you can download here.
I was relaxing after a hard day at work today, and thought it may be fun to throw up a little reminder of where hunterdavis.com came from and how far it’s come. In glorious GIF format 
*Update! It gets better. My ancient pre-hunterdavis.com website from 2001 is still available on the wayback machine! I’ve posted all my rants from 2001 below the break.
Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Sony, and many others have recently released large color Android tablets/e-book readers out into the wild. Effectively the third generation of e-book readers, these tablets priced at 150-250$ USD represent the current pinnacle of our e-book world. But I’m not telling you to go buy them. Oh no. The value may be there but the price isn’t right and the technology isn’t optimum for reading books.
I’m telling you to buy a first generation Kindle, Nook, Kobo, or Sony Pocket e-Reader. Why? Besides all being based on superior e-ink screens that won’t kill your eyes for reading, they have each and every one reached that oh so sweet 40-50$ price point on eBay.
Yep! 40-50$. For the same cost of a video game, a night out at the movies, a dinner (a cheap dinner here in Los Angeles), a pair of slacks, or two weeks of Starbucks blended drinks you can have an e-reader. Many first generation e-readers come with Wifi and some come with free 2g internet. Heck buy an extra or two to keep in a drawer at home. Take them on the bus. Take them to the beach or rock climbing. Whip them out at the bus stop or in sketchy neighborhoods. Treat them like a book. And when they are lost or stolen or drop and crack or die as all electronics invariably do, simply pull another from the drawer and move on.
I hadn’t logged into my account in some time (I’m registered with so many publishers and sites etc I end up checking them twice a year or something) Turns out people have been buying my books on the Apple book store. That’s cool, and an extra little bump in income I wasn’t expecting. Not as many sales on Google books though, I wonder if that speaks to the breath of market penetration or perhaps the percentage of book readers per platform. At any rate, I’ll try and post up a preview of my fourth book sometime soon.
Besides numerous other interesting forks which have come out of the open sourcing of Quick Grapher, I just got wind of a very interesting fork which ports it to Android. Two of my favorite projects coming together for a peanut butter and jelly style open source sandwich. Sharing for the win! Check it out!
QuickGrapher.com was one of the research projects spun out of Discursive Labs. One of the most promising projects we worked on, it always felt like a project without an intended audience, and it never really lifted off. I’m quite proud of the work that Mark and I did, and still think it’s a tremendously fun and important project.
You can see an outdated version of it in action here.
Check out the drake equation in QuickGrapher here.
Check out the set of video tutorials we did for it here.
(my favorite video)
Download, exploit, and contribute to the source at the github project here.
And check out the permalink page for it here.
Recent Comments