The New Olio

HTML5 Canvas Particle Animation

Posted by Tim in Code

UPDATE: yes, I know some people out there will see some flickering when viewing the demo. This is because a) I didn’t implement a double buffer, and b) there is no built-in canvas support for double buffering. There is a very simple solution, but I’ll save that for another time. Having never really been a user of Apple products, I guess it’s not all that surprising that I’ve never been to the MobileMe website. However, after Googling something like the lines of “most popular e-mail providers,” I came across its…read more

CSS3 Trickery: A Lesson in Gradients and Masks

Posted by Tim in Code, Design

I’m currently working on a project where one of the designs I’m to implement involves making one of these suckers: However, that’s not all. Based on where the user is amidst these four steps, it will actually end up looking something like this: Normally, I’d achieve this with CSS sprites and be rather sad about it all since whatever I’d be doing would be either a) not semantically correct, or b) terribly convoluted. Luckily, this project is specified to only having to run on Chrome, which I finally get to…read more

Jan.18

Drupal Versus CakePHP

Posted by Tim in Code

Although Drupal is generally considered a CMS rather than a web application framework, there’s a fair bit of overlap in either regard, which I guess excuses the fact that I’ve been using it as such. At my current job with Eyemart Express where I work as one of two(!) software developers for a company that really requires somewhere near 20, I work a lot with CakePHP because, quite frankly, it was the first framework I could think of when the two of us met and started discussing rebuilding the company’s…read more

Oct.18

Using WebSockets With PHP

Posted by Tim in Code

For my senior design project class, my group decided to try our hand at making a multiplayer 3D tank shooter game (called Mega Hovertank Wars) that plays in an HTML5-compliant browser. Along with one other team member (the other two were pretty much dead weight), we worked heartily on the game engine, but it turns out he didn’t have much experience with programming in anything except JavaScript. Obviously, that won’t cut it for writing a game server.

May.03

Writing A Compiler

Posted by Tim in Code

In my final semester of undergraduate collegiate studies (meaning I’ll hopefully be doing graduate shenanigans following this year), I decided to broaden my scope of computer science knowledge and drop myself into a graduate-level course on compilers. The professor for the course is Daniel Cooke, a pretty big name in the world of computer languages, NASA intelligence systems, and AI and logic. His most prolific brainchild is probably SequenceL, a high performance declarative language that rips traditional languages a new one in terms of speed.

Apr.28