I’ve been working on a series of videos about an unpublished app of mine called FlipStream, and I wanted to easily insert some information about the current PowerPoint presentation on the first slide. Sadly, PowerPoint doesn’t have a generic field replacement function like Word does. So, either I type some stuff and have to remember […]
When you’re a full-stack developer, you often find yourself mixing and matching destination hosts on your development system. Sometimes you need to run your development codebase against a test back-end server, sometimes you need to spoof the test back-end with your local code base. All of this switching back-and-forth can be tedious, so I wrote […]
One of the very first “big” programs I wrote all by myself was a banner-printing program for my TRS-80. It was all in TRS-80 Basic and I wasted almost an entire carton of tractor-feed paper while I was writing it. It was terrible code, and I’m sure if I saw it today I would cringe, […]
So, as part of my other post about writing a banner printer I ended up going down the rabbit hole of Unicode characters and combining marks. In the process, I found this wonderful blog post by Dmitri Pavlutin that explains the ins-and-outs of dealing with “complicated” text in JavaScript very well. But unfortunately it still […]
Coming up with contrasting, attractive colors for an unknown number of items can be tricky. This post gives a short (10 line) function that returns unique colors for an arbitrary number of items using bit manipulation.
So once again I found myself looking at the documentation for the Python re module, trying to remember the difference between matches and matching groups and I saw a code snippet that was so beautiful that I wanted to break it down and share it. It’s a fully-functional mini-language tokenizer in only 41 lines of […]
Note: this was originally published on my personal blog (smeans.com) in 2018. So, I’ve been building projects using NoSQL databases (like MongoDB and Apache CouchDB) for several years now, and there are a lot of things I really like about them. But one need I’m always bumping up against is the ability to summarize tons of […]