Musings on technology, literature, and interesting topics
If creativity is borne out of constraints, creating mods for games must be one of the most creative things you can do as a programmer. It’s just so fun to hack a game engine to do something it was never supposed to do. This blog post goes into depth describing a mod I made for the game Oblivion Remastered , a full graphics overhaul of the classic 2006 open-world RPG Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion .…
Modmapper is a website that I made that puts every mod for the game Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim uploaded to Nexus Mods on an interactive map. You can view the map at https://modmapper.com . Released in 2011, Skyrim is over a decade old now. But, its vast modding community has kept it alive and relevant to this day. Skyrim is still in the top 50 games being played on Steam in 2022 and I think it’s no…
I’ve been trying to learn Rust lately, the hot new systems programming language. One of the projects I wanted to tackle with the speed of Rust was generating 3D polyhedron shapes. Specifically, I wanted to implement something like the Three.js IcosahedronGeometry in Rust. If you try to generate icosahedron s in Three.js over any detail level over 5 the whole browser will slow to a crawl. I think…
This is a blog post that I originally wrote for the edX engineering blog . At the core of edX is the edx-platform , a monolithic Django code-base 2.7 times the size of Django itself. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Language Files Lines Code Comments Blanks ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ActionScript 1…
I’ve been meaning to add a commenting system to this blog for a while, but I couldn’t think of a good way to do it. I implemented my own commenting system on my old Django personal site . While I enjoyed working on it at the time, it was a lot of work, especially to fight the spam. Now that my blog is hosted statically on Github’s servers, I have no way to host something dynamic like comments.…
When my beloved Google Reader was discontinued in 2013, I stopped regularly checking RSS feeds. Apparently, I am not alone . It seems like there’s a new article every month arguing either that RSS is dead or RSS is not dead yet . Maybe RSS will stick around to serve as a cross-site communication backbone, but I don’t think anyone will refute that RSS feeds are declining in consumer use. Facebook,…
I’ve been messing around with a library called PixiJS which allows you to create WebGL animations which will fall back to HTML5 canvas if WebGL is not available in the browser. I mostly like it because the API is similar to HTML5 canvas which I was already familiar with . I can’t say that I like the PixiJS API and documentation that much, though. For this project, I mostly just used a small…
In this post, I will demonstrate how to generate random text using a few lines of standard python and then progressively refine the output until it looks poem-like. If you would like to follow along with this post and run the code snippets yourself, you can clone my NLP repository and run the Jupyter notebook . You might not realize it, but you probably use an app everyday that can generate random…
I found the tensorflow documentation rather lacking for installation instructions, especially in regards to getting GPU support. I’m going to write down my notes from wrangling with the installation here for future reference and hopefully this helps someone else too. This will invariably go out-of-date at some point, so be mindful of the publish date of this post. Make sure to cross-reference…
I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting with neural-style the last month. I think I’ve discovered a few exciting applications of the technique that I haven’t seen anyone else do yet. The true power of this algorithm really shines when you can see concrete examples. Skip to the Applications part of this post to see the outputs from my experimentation if you are already familiar with DeepDream, Deep…