Archive for the ‘Hacks’ Category

Canvastastic

Monday, September 4th, 2006

At this weekend’s BarCamp London, I announced a new Javascript library which takes the 3D engine from my Gallions Reach demo and promises to place it in the hands of industrious web developers, hackers and masher-uppers everywhere. The presentation seemed to go down well, so it’s only right that I should get this first release out, as promised. Strictly raw materials right now (and still no real documentation), so be prepared to fill in the gaps…

You shouldn’t have to wait too long for proper documentation, especially in view of the valiant effort Simon has already made. That Willison is a crafty one, as anyone who witnessed him pretending not to be a werewolf will testify. I borrowed his laptop for my talk, and within half an hour of getting it back he’d trawled through the code I’d left on it and more or less written up the complete API documentation – and promptly set about drawing diagrams to explain 3D coordinate transformations. Zero-day w4r3z, anyone?

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Extreme Sudoku Solving with Ruby

Wednesday, July 26th, 2006


This is a talk I gave at last night’s Ask Later event (formerly known as Techa Kucha) in London. As per the house rules of the night, the format was 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide; in those six-and-two-thirds minutes, I told the tale of my attempt to wangle free booze from the Rupert Murdoch empire with a bit of help from a worldwide puzzle phenomenon, some home-spun OCR algorithms and a most excellent programming language from Japan.

Extreme Sudoku Solving – slides (328K, PDF)

Unfortunately the slides don’t have an awful lot of text on them, so you’ll have to do a lot of the storytelling yourself until I get chance to do a proper write-up…