Ever since the first version of Command & Conquer came out, real-time strategy (RTS) games have been my (not-so) secret vice. I was never able to get interested in chess or go, they were just too structured. But RTS games are like a cross between boxing and chess. You have to make a plan, execute … Read More
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, … Read More
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 … Read More
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.
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 … Read More