So you’re sitting around your living room, using your laptop. It’s chugging along happily, glowing brightly, and you’re enjoying a rousing game of ‘team solitaire’ (Valve’s newest online sensation). But wait! Your teammates are taking a reaaaaly long time to queue up for the next game, and you’re wanting to kill some time with ‘very pissed off avians…. under water!’ (the newest iteration of the mobile time sink that’s been sweeping the interwebs). You pull out your tablet, fire up the game, and start flinging feathered friends forward. You look up, and woah! The game has already started! You scramble for a safe place to put your tablet, spilling your drink all over your cable modem and rendering it slower than a 56k dial-up modem. Sadly, being in the US that’s only a 10% speed decrease. If only you had a tablet stand built into your laptop table, this minor annoyance could have been avoided!
After all the hullabaloo over my open sourcing of my Android work Wednesday night, I neglected to post up about how my impress.JS resume project has been coming along. I’ve finished the initial layout, and all the initial information pages and frames. There’s a lot of good embedded multimedia in there now (videos, the tuner, QG graphs, images, charts, etc) and I’m finally starting to refine the style a bit and add some CSS. I also added a slide discussing the open source Android update from Weds.
Just throwing up some statistics for posterity and new readers. Sometimes it’s helpful to give a little context to the state of my work and the site etc. These come from the advanced GitHub search box and manually going over the top user profiles by number of repositories, and I implore anyone with contrary data to let me know so I can update these. The text of the infographic image is below the jump for those of you who don’t like to load large images in posts.
After combing through the site archives, I’ve found another 11 applications from 2001 to 2007 that I wrote. I thought they could use a good home on GitHub. You can check them out on my GitHub page. They are
I’ve been studying my site and app traffic for a while now, and I’ve come to a very sure conclusion. Open-sourcing an app does nothing to decrease app sales or ad traffic, but increases web traffic significantly. Therefore I’ve decided to open source everything I’ve ever done, BSD licensed so you can use it at work.
A helpful reader (thanks Remo!) suggested I update the sign language fingering Javascript project to display the fingerings on screen without a timeout. It sounded like a good idea, and I thought it would be a synergistic addition as I’ve been wanting to do some dynamically created impress.JS presentations. So, I’ve gone ahead and implemented dynamic impress.JS presentations in asl.JS. As you’ve probably seen from my interactive resume (or its source code), impress.JS is an open source Javascript library that allows you to create 3d presentations and slide shows in HTML5.
The culmination of a great deal of hard work has just been pushed live to the web, and the marketing push will begin. I am very proud of what I accomplished, and the lengths Miso Media (my former employers) allowed me to push the boundaries of their web strategy. This is a fantastic piece of technology, and will hopefully be the basis for a great deal of future products and web items. It should easily integrate into any audio processing system, is portable to essentially any device, and should be standards compliant for many years. It’s been tested to work on Chrome and Firefox for Mac, Linux, and Windows and requires the Flash plugin for audio input. (Sadly there is just no getting around this requirement until browsers get with the HTML5 audio program).
As some of you may know, I spent the past 8 months or so working at a great little music startup in Los Angeles called Miso Media. Though I’m moving forward with my own projects up in Seattle, I look back on the work I created there with a terrific sense of accomplishment. A great deal of my time was spent porting their proprietary FFT, affine transformation, and pitch detection algorithms to various embedded platforms. I did some fun stuff with openGL texture transforms and shaders, but the real meat of the work I did was in optimizing for embedded platform efficiency. As such, the porting of their polyphonic pitch detection algorithms to client-side Javascript became a feasible option and the last bit of my tenure at Miso I spent porting the fruits of my optimization efforts to HTML5, Javascript, and webGL.
So I was updating my 3d impress.JS resume, and I thought I’d put some QuickGrapher graphs in there. Turns out it’s easy as pie to embed QuickGrapher graphs in an impress.JS presentation, and the results are pretty neat.
As someone who has hired and been hired many times, I’ve seen and written my fair share of resumes. Clean white sheets tree pulp embossed and inked with the accomplishments of the writer. What an outdated system! Worse still are the PDF and Word resumes, emulating the old pulp and ink model. Ignoring the fact that you can’t convey motion, video, or interactivity in a paper resume, the main downside from my perspective is a lack of open source spirit. All these resumes floating around and they’ve never taught anyone anything besides a written history of a job candidate. Bleh.
