C++: A language for next generation web apps

On Monday, I was pleased to be an uninvited speaker at Waterloo Devhouse, hosted in Postrank's magnificent office. After making some surreptitious alterations to their agile development wall, I gave a tongue-in-cheek talk on how C++ can fit in to a web application.

A simple command line calculator

A textbook example of recursive descent parsing.

Zwibbler: A simple drawing program using Javascript and Canvas

Now it's a commercial product, but Zwibbler was once a fun side-project, and here's some details on its implementation.

Let's read a Truetype font file from scratch

Walkthough of reading and interpretting a TrueType font file in a few lines of Javascript.

Usability Nightmare: Xfce Settings Manager

Rant: Why can't anyone make a good settings screen?

Pitching to VCs (comic)

20 lines of code that will beat A/B testing every time

A/B testing is used far too often, for something that performs so badly. It is defective by design: Segment users into two groups. Show the A group the old, tried and true stuff. Show the B group the new whiz-bang design with the bigger buttons and slightly different copy. After a while, take a look at the stats and figure out which group presses the button more often. Sounds good, right? The problem is staring you in the face. It is the same dilemma faced by researchers administering drug studies. During drug trials, you can only give half the patients the life saving treatment. The others get sugar water. If the treatment works, group B lost out. This sacrifice is made to get good data. But it doesn't have to be this way.

Email Etiquette

If you begin your emails with "Hi, <name>!" then they will seem less rude.

My favourite Google Cardboard Apps

I have never been a gamer. The most I've played was Super Mario Bros (the original). I then took a break for a decade or two and spent a few weeks with Simcity 4. All that changed when I got Google Cardboard.

Building a better rhyming dictionary

Back in 2007, I created a rhyming engine based on the public domain Moby pronouncing dictionary. It simply reads the dictionary and looks for rhyming words by comparing the suffix of the words' pronunciations. Since that time, I have made some improvements.