codeman38 @ Dreamwidth

I have returned!

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 00:14:34 GMT

...Wow, I haven't posted here for over six years? It really has been a long time.

I'd been spending the past several years posting casual blog stuff over on Tumblr, and had mostly forgotten about this place—but since it looks like that site is going to implode à la LiveJournal in the near future, I suppose I might as well come back and set up here again.

*waves* Hello again, anyone who's still following me over here!

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LiveJournal's new friends page: or, how not to implement infinite scrolling

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 17:30:16 GMT

I've never been a huge fan of the whole 'infinite scrolling' pattern, largely because there are so many ways to implement it wrongly, and so many implementations seem to screw it up.

Consider the following use cases, both of which I've experienced, and the expected behavior that would occur on a normal paginated implementation:

You're on a site with infinite scrolling, and decide to click on a link within a post that's several pages down. The website's maintainers didn't add a 'target' attribute to links so that they'll open in a separate window, so the link you clicked on takes over the window. You have to click your browser's 'back' button to return to the page you were just viewing.

Expected behavior: When you click 'back', you'll be returned to the post you had just been viewing.
You're using a public Wi-Fi connection that's a bit overloaded by all the other users on the same network. The connection often ends up timing out before web pages finish loading, and it's frequently necessary to reload the page several times until all of the content manages to load.

Expected behavior: When you reload the page, you'll be returned to the same general set of posts where you had been before reloading.

The question, then, is: if your site uses infinite scrolling, does it produce the expected behavior in these scenarios?

With LiveJournal's new friends page beta, the answer is a resounding NO.

( How can we screw up infinite scrolling? Let me count the ways... )

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Apropos of absolutely nothing, but...

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 03:50:51 GMT

After 28 (ah, off-by-one errors, the bane of programmers) 29 years of living in Georgia, I have moved to the Boston metro area for work. (Arlington, specifically.)

And even though I've only been here a few weeks, I still feel pretty confident in saying... it's like a home that I never even knew I had. The 'Camberville' area, especially. So much geekily awesome stuff out there to do!

(One of the few things I do miss from Georgia? Sweet iced tea. Sorry, but it's just not the same if you mix the sugar in after it gets cold...)

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Sat, 06 Aug 2011 23:52:41 GMT

I am now officially a Ph.D.

Now, to try to find stable employment...

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Yet another Gratuitous Icon Post

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 05:14:45 GMT

Not cross-posting this one to LJ because I don't have enough icon slots over there, but... yay, new icon. As usual, made by myself from DVD screencaps.

I may very well be replacing the "own little world" icon with this one over on LJ, too, depending on whether I feel like it.

And the reason I love this scene? I have literally done this in real life. Seriously, I don't know how many times I've been standing at an intersection and gotten so lost in my own thoughts that I didn't notice the light had changed.

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The annual gift exchange post

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 00:33:58 GMT

Yeah, I know, y'all are wondering what I got and gave for Christmas this year...

My big present wasn't actually delivered at Christmas-- in fact, it wasn't even a physical possession. Neither me nor my girlfriend can drive, and we're no longer even living in the same state (though at least we're in neighboring states, so it could be much worse). So my big present, three weeks ago, was for my dad to drive me up to visit my girlfriend and her family. It was enjoyable, and very much overdue; I hadn't seen her for fifteen months! And we did some gift exchanging there; I gave her several DVDs and a Bluetooth adapter to sync her phone and her computer, and in return, she gave me a huge pile of DVDs, CDs and books. And, of course, there was much cuddling, too. :) Plus, I got to meet her grandma, whom I'd never met before. So yeah, overall, it was a fun trip; I just wish it had lasted more than just a weekend!

The rest of the gifts came, in the usual fashion, on Christmas itself. From my sister, I got iTunes and GameStop gift cards; from my grandmother-in-law, a pair of University of Georgia sandals. My parents got me a new battery for my two-and-a-half-year-old MacBook (also much overdue, as it wasn't even holding two hours' worth of charge), Sonic Colors for Wii, the latest Professor Layton game for DS, and various clothes. (I'd probably have also gotten Donkey Kong Country Returns, but I'd already gotten that on my birthday several weeks ago.)

On the other end of the equation, I got my mom a 500 GB portable hard drive with automatic backup software, my dad a USB turntable to convert all of his old LPs that are sitting in the closet, and my sister and her family a gift certificate to the bowling alley.

My family also got my sister, brother-in-law, niece and nephew a Kinect for their Xbox 360. Having played it over at their house, I now wish I had an Xbox 360. I think that could help impressively with my poor coordination. (Hand-eye coordination? Great, from years of video games with handheld controllers. Rest of the body? Not so much...)

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A glorious example of NLP gone wrong

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 04:06:31 GMT

I was just checking Zap2it's page on Doctor Who to see if that show was going to be running on anything other than BBC America, which isn't on the cable tier I have... and found out it wasn't going to be, alas. However, I did find this hilarious example of natural language processing gone horribly wrong:

(Description: A screenshot of a listing of Doctor Who-related news, in which the first story is "Elvis Presley's doctor, who was accused after the legendary singer's death of over-prescribing barbiturates, sleeping pills, hormones, narcotics to his famous patient, now says that Elvis died from chronic constipation.")

It took me a while to figure out even how this was relevant, and then I realized it was a naïve keyword-matching algorithm that even ignores punctuation. ::facepalm::

Though I do admit, an episode in which the Doctor and his companion go to visit Elvis could definitely be entertaining!

(Cross-posted from my other blog.)

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Custom subtitles on Netflix's web player

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 03:23:01 GMT

Netflix users, check out this post on my personal domain regarding how to load custom subtitles into Netflix's web player. Turns out that someone's discovered a hidden feature that allows one to load any W3C Timed Text subtitle file, and with a bit of Python scripting (which, in turn, I've ported from a Windows PowerShell script), it's possible to convert SubRip files from around the 'net into the necessary format.

I may be watching a lot more streaming movies now... ^_^

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Because everyone else is doing it: the You Know You're From list

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 01:02:18 GMT

1.) Go to google and type in "You know you're from [your area] when..."
2.) Cut and paste the list
3.) Bold or italicize items that apply to you.

(from this Facebook page)

( What, no mention of Peachtrees? )

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The dangers of designing for one color scheme

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 15:58:08 GMT

Wow, there are arrows next to the cut tags to expand them? I didn't even notice this till I read the news post (which thankfully mentioned that they'd blend in far too well with certain color schemes), because the arrows are #3D3D3D and my background is #333333. 3% difference in contrast, yay!

If you're reading this on my journal page, here's a demo just to show what I mean:

( This is a test. )

Edited to add: And they're already working on it - they're going to be adding a white border to the graphic to make it easier to see in situations like this.

Edited further to add: Well, that was quick. There's already a border around the arrows now.

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There's a present for that

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 05:30:32 GMT

So Christmas has come and gone, I'm back home for the holidays. Which, of course, means the standard gift exchange with my family.

I got my dad an iPod car charger, my mom a gift certificate to Belk's, and my sister's family a gift certificate to the bowling alley. My dad and I also teamed up to get Mom a Nintendo Wii and Wii Fit board of her own-- yes, of course I have one, but I keep it on campus most of the year. I also got my girlfriend some things that she hasn't gotten yet because she hasn't gotten back from visiting her extended family yet, so I won't mention them. :)

And in exchange, I got...

( The List )

Hardly equivalent exchange (yes, you can tell I'm a Fullmetal Alchemist fan, can't you?). But then again, I'm a graduate student, with a graduate student's budget, so I suppose it's equivalent in a way...

Oh, yeah, and for my birthday (which was a couple weeks ago), I got New Super Mario Bros. for Wii. Better work on my time management for my dissertation, between all these video games!

But of course, tomorrow (well, technically, today, since it's past midnight) come the gift returns. The charger I bought for dad wasn't fully compatible with his iPhone; neither my nor dad's T-shirts were big enough; and I need to get an HDMI cable so I can actually play Blu-Ray movies in HD.

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Greetings...

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 23:36:25 GMT

So, I've gotten an invite to Dreamwidth because I wanted to post to a few DW-only communities (and help moderate some others here as well, eventually). I've set it up so that I can crosspost from here to LiveJournal; I'll probably be sticking around LJ for the most part, because that's where most of the people I know are, but I'll be crossposting any future entries both here and LJ.

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