Code I've written
Over the years I've written some bad code, and some okay code. But one constant is that I've always enjoyed writing code, and always enjoyed the challenge of learning new languages and libraries.
I guess I started learning to code at primary school with Logo, before dabbling with BASIC in secondary school. At University I learned Pascal and C++.
Since then I've learned, to varying degrees of competence (and in roughly chronological order): VBA, Perl, PHP, KiXtart, Rexx, Python, C, C#, Javascript.
A lot of my code is on GitHub. Here are write-ups of some of the projects I've worked on:
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The importance of readable data structures
A friend asked for help on Facebook the other day with a programming problem. He needed to dynamically create a set of buttons, and was having problems looping through his variables that stored the data used to create his buttons, to create each button dynamically.
8 min read, 1459 words. Continue Reading...Categories: Software , Tags: Python, Object, Naming, Clarity
Into War
A friend recently let me know of a tiny program
5 min read, 955 words. Continue Reading...that runs a 3D scene with both audio and video. How tiny? The executable, a .com file, is 64 bytes in size (yeah, that's pretty damn small!), and the camera angle is a flyover of a grassy field with a blue sky above. The audio is a single note played once, overlaid with the sound of a helicopter's whirring blades and a periodic swooshing noise that sounds like the wind. It seems too amazing to be real, especially when you've seen the video: Tone Generator
Thanks to the generosity of a friend, my lounge now not only has a 7.2 embedded wall speaker setup, but the sofa also vibrates when there is a low bass rumble in the audio of whatever media I'm consuming. This effect has been achieved with the (mis)use of an Aura Interactor
3 min read, 593 words. Continue Reading...Shaker. The Aura Interactor was a device sold in the 1990s to gamers, and was a backpack with a low frequency speaker inside it. Rather than being designed to make noise, this speaker moves a large piece of metal back and forth without a diaphragm, and shakes whatever it's attached to. The rig comes with an amplifier, and takes a mono RCA input - which, thankfully, most subwoofers these days have an output for. My friend has collected a few of these devices over the years, removing the shaker from the backpack each time and bolting it to a piece of wood that is then bolted to the inside wooden frame of a sofa. Tab or Space(s) to Indent?
Tabs vs Spaces - which one should be used when indenting code? I'm going to spoil the suspense right away by saying that the answer is clearly Tabs. However, it would be remiss of me not to describe what we're talking about, and why Tabs are the correct(TM) choice.
7 min read, 1315 words. Continue Reading...Voltage Divider
A friend who is studying Engineering at university asked me for help tutoring him for one of his degree projects where he was tasked with writing a voltage divider calculator:
3 min read, 409 words. Continue Reading...QR Code Generator
With the magic of Vue
1 min read, 136 words. Continue Reading..., it's pretty easy to do a whole host of pretty cool things dynamically. As a quick example, here's a dynamic QR Code generator using a text box linked to the vue-qriously library. This Website
This website is built using Vuepress
3 min read, 528 words. Continue Reading...and a little bit of Vue magic. The entire source for this site is on GitHub, and the config.js file has been set to build the site to the /docs folder. In GitHub this repository has been set to publish the site at /docs and has been given a custom domain name - mark.honeychurch.org. ingoa.nz
asa.sbh.nz
Categories: Software , Tags: ASA, Gamification
A Better Path
FishBarrel
Back in the early days of my foray into skepticism, I found a Chrome plugin called FishBarrel
1 min read, 150 words. Continue Reading...which makes it easy to gather data from a nonsense website and submit a complaint to the relevant regulatory body. Kodi NZ OnDemand Plugin
NZ XMLTV Listings
Download Music Artist Images
I was cleaning up my music collection yesterday by using Discogs
4 min read, 703 words. Continue Reading..., a great online Discography catalogue website, to download missing album cover art. I normally use the long-windedly named Album Cover Art Downloader to download cover art, as it's pretty good and can grab images from various sources (amazon.com, yahoo, buy.com) - but there are some albums, especially bootlegs and the like, that aren't on Amazon. While using Discogs I saw that they have artist images (such as the one on the right), and started to download these to use like Album Art images, by naming the file folder.jpg and placing it in the artist's folder (My music collection is organised by First Letter\Artist\Album, e.g. A\Aphex Twin\Hangable Autobulb). Categories: Software , Tags: AlbumCoverArtDownloader, Discogs
Decrypting encoded text
I became interested in cryptography a few years ago, and have been slowly working my way through Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography
6 min read, 1062 words. Continue Reading.... From this, I became interested in simple forced decryption (cracking) of cyphers, and directed my attention to the ROT13 algorithm. Categories: Cryptography, Software , Tags: ROT13, ROTx, Caesar, Substitution, Cypher
My first web page
At University we were tasked with creating a web page on the topic of patterns of innovation. I still have a copy of the page, and it shows a less than auspicious start to my website creating days!
1 min read, 93 words. Continue Reading...