A tech blog/javascript demo site
This is an explanation of the 3D drawing techniques that have been used on this site. During the life of this site I have implemented and re-implemented linear algebra libraries and 3D demos which used them. Here are some demos that make use of 3D: BSP demo Tesseract 3D Tesla Fractal Cubes Rooms Doing everything from scratch When I started writing demos for this site I had an aversion to using any…
This is an explanation of a graphical demo I call “Heroes and Villains”. I wrote the first version in my first year of university and it was one of the first demos on this site. I revisited the code several years later when I entered the demo in JS1K competition, and re-implemented it in less than 1 kilobyte. Demo runs for 5 seconds then pauses (so as to not drain your laptop's battery). Click the…
My name in the book at the summit of Tromsdalstinden I’m not a planner. To be precise, I have a high threshold for plan-worthy-ness of activities. Well below this threshold is traveling. Traveling through Europe with no plan or itinerary is more expensive and stressful than the alternative, as transportation and accommodation is generally booked at the last minute. That said, my style of traveling…
One hour. That’s how long you’re told it will take to start to feel the effects of the innocuous looking cake. You’ll shortly be boarding a train from Amsterdam to Eindhoven where you and some friends have a reservation for the night. There’s track work so the trip will comprise of a train ride, a bus ride, a second train ride, and finally a bus trip from the station to the hotel. You came into…
Great Scott! It’s likely that everyone has encountered a work of fiction involving an extra dimension at some point. Be it time travel or trans dimensional beings, “extra dimensions” is a very popular topic. But what does it actually mean? The Basics If I was asked the question “What is a dimension?” I would say “A place for a number to go in a coordinate”. That is, if I was to give a coordinate…
Edit: A few things to note: my agda-helper program is obsolete, given that “agda -I” works (though it might say that it’s not supported). :typeOf is equivalent to the :t in agda-helper. the problems getting emacs’s agda-mode to work properly was due to a version mis-match between the Haskell Agda library and the Agda I installed with apt-get. to fix everything, build Agda from source or find an up…
This was drawn using a framebuffer. (Image from images.wikia.com) Two discoveries I recently made that will help with my game engine project as well as make my life easier in general, are CoffeeScript and using HTML Canvas elements as framebuffers. The former is a programming language that adds some “niceness” to javascript. The latter is a technique in computer graphics that allows the rendering…
This post is to introduce a new content management system and page template for stevebob.net. The frontend and backend have been completely re-written to be consistent with modern websites. There’s also an RSS feed, and rounded corners! The style of the old site was designed to look 8-bit, using bright colours, square corners and the pixelated fractal tree (which lives on here ). The new style is…
Here’s a quick post about how visible surface detection works, in particular when there are things that move around. Firstly, say you have a bunch of polygons you want to draw, and some obscure the view of others. It’s easy to demonstrate that you can’t simply sort all the polygons into some magical order, then draw them, one after the other, in that order, drawing over anything on the canvas that…
This is the beginning of the actualization of an idea I’ve had floating around for several months now. I’ve spent the better part of the last two years making cool graphical demos and applications of questionable usefulness, and now I’m going to try to put the knowledge I’ve gained as a result to some practical use - namely, making a game. Due to the interesting technical challenges involved, I’m…
While I was lying in bed at 4am, unable to sleep, I started to get philosophical, as one does while lying in bed at 4am, unable to sleep. In fact I’m currently lying in bed at 4am, unable to sleep, and the philosophy is most likely the reason. Let me try to articulate exactly what is keeping me awake. Hopefully by now everyone has thought about what would happen if they made an exact copy of…
On my todo list for this trip was going hiking somewhere far from civilization with trees and mountains that made the scenery different from what one generally sees in Australia. The problems with this plan (besides the vagueness) were getting to such a location for one, and also, since I’m travelling alone there is some danger going somewhere so isolated. Unbeknown to me, my trip to Alaska would…
I finished exams almost two weeks ago and have been spending the time as a tourist in Toronto and Montreal. Here are some photos of what I’ve been up to in the past two weeks in reverse chronological order: Ottawa Ottawa seems like the Canberra of Canada - they couldn’t decide which city to make the capital so they built another one just for that purpose. The main attractions are museums, but…
So I know that this is well overdue, but here are some photos I have taken around Toronto. The camera I’m using is the one on my phone, so the quality is not great (though I was impressed with its ability to take night photos, since it’s a phone and all). U of T Photos from both the downtown and Scarborough campuses of U of T. CN Tower behind some buildings at U of T's downtown campus. Also there…
I’ve been in Canada for 5 days now. I didn’t post this right away because I didn’t (and still don’t) have internet where I am staying (I’m currently tethering it from my phone). I’ve been settling in, buying various necessities and getting uni things set up (internet, email, passwords, etc). Canada is great. The people are nice and the weather is cold (but bearable). To summarize my experience so…
Let me take a minute to explain myself. Perl was not my first choice of language when I decided to write a blog website. I initially started writing the site in Ruby using Sinatra and I really liked it. Coding websites in Ruby with Sinatra is intuitive and the code is readable. As with most web apps written in Ruby, Sinatra apps run as their own process and include a web server (such as Thin ).…