Cloning Zelda: Candles, or the Magic of dojo.connect

It's been a while since I've worked on Canvassa, my HTML5 love letter to the original 8-bit NES Legend of Zelda. If you remember last time, we worked out some kinks in the code that were causing it to crash in Google Chrome. Today, it's back to implementing missing functionality: namely, how to make the blue candle behave appropriately. Fortunately, Dojo provides us a way to do this, and it's actually a pretty cool feature of the framework. Read on to see how it works.

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One-page resume in CSS3

Recently, I came across a really nicely done one-page resume on Scribd, and wanted to try to recreate it using the latest web technologies (no Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Word, or OpenOffice allowed). Turns out with a few sprinklings of CSS3, it's pretty straightforward. Let's peel back the covers and take a look.

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Slaying the Beast

So tell me if this sounds familiar:

goal: build up my online portfolio.
how I'll do it: maintain a regular blogging schedule (this, too, I'll write more about soon)

Yeah, not so much. Instead, the past 6 months of my life have been swallowed up by a ravenous beast known as "graduate school," that has grown more and more aggressive in the past 3 or 4 weeks. I dealt it a mortal blow when I passed my defense on Monday the 19th, but it limped along for a while, whispering to me of Target Audiences, Proper Whitespacing, and Nested Bookmarks. Today, I think it finally gasped its last breath, but I have to wait until tomorrow for the official word from the graduate reviewercoroner.

So, this is me saying "I'm back." I have a half-dozen half-finished posts in draft, way more free time than I'm used to, and a lot to catch up on.

See you soon.

In Case You Missed It: TXJS

Last Saturday was the inaugural TXJS (Texas JavaScript) conference in Austin, Texas. Unfortunately, as with JSConf, I wasn't able to attend, but I still wanted to stay abreast of its happenings. Just as I did with JSConf, I've looked over the schedule, picked through the Twitter stream, followed the presenters, and where possible, found links to the slides they each presented. All for you, Dear Readers (well, for me too... but mostly for you ;) ).

So anyway, without further adieu, here we go!

In Case You Missed It: TXJS

Saturday, June 5, 2010

Speaker(s)	Topic
TRACK A
Douglas Crockford	ECMAScript 5: the New & Improved Parts
John Resig	JavaScript on the Mobile Web
Dan Webb	Building @anywhere: A Client-side Interface to Twitter
Paul Irish	10 Things I Learned from the jQuery Source
Nicole Sullivan	The Top 5 Mistakes of Massive CSS
Tom Hughes-Croucher	JavaScript Everywhere! Creating a 100% JavaScript web stack
Juriy Zaytsev	Dive into ECMAScript 5
Peter Higgins	It's Just JavaScript
Brian LeRoux	F#$% Yeah, Mobile JavaScript
TRACK B
Tom Occhino	Front End Abstractions at Facebook
Mike Taylor	Regressive Enhancement, or HTML5 for crappy browsers (PDF)
Joe McCann	Rapid Prototyping with JavaScript
Eugene Lazutkin	Dojo for Programmers
Alex Sexton	Breaking The Cross Domain Barrier
Andrew Dupont	How Custom Events Will Save The Universe
Brandon Aaron	Special Events: Beyond Custom Events
Tim Caswell	Writing a real-time game with NodeJS
Kyle Simpson	Web Performance & UI Architecture
TRACK C
Douglas Crockford	The JSON Saga
Jeffrey Van Gogh	Reactive Extensions for JavaScript
John Hann	Sneak Peek: Cujo - Dojo, CSS3, MVC
Jason Huggins	JavaScript Frameworks & Functional Testing (panel, no slides)

As of now, this is what I could find. If there are slide decks from other talks online that I don't have linked here, please note it in the comments below, and I'll update accordingly.

Tidbits

As of this morning, JSConf 2010 videos are starting to make their way online. I'm looking forward to virtually experiencing the Piratey goodness for myself.

Oh, and I'm starting to fix/update the Canvassa mapping tool, still needs some optimizations and bugfixes, but at least it's not completely broken anymore... yay?

Finally, I've recently found myself on an insanely-accelerated timetable to finish my Computational Linguistics MA thesis in the next 3 weeks or so, so you can probably expect my next post or two to reflect that preoccupation. Provided I find anything in the course of writing it that deserves the (slightly) larger platform.

Solved: Cannot find -lgcc_s on Cygwin 4.3.4

For the past week or so, I've been trying to build the Giza++ language modeling tools on my Windows machines, and have been having quite a bit of trouble. Permissions errors on Windows 7, weird "missing separator" error messages that were completely unhelpful (it means your text editor has replaced all tabs with spaces), and so on. Compile and build errors that have kept me up late into the night on several occasions lately, but which I was ultimately able to untangle with a little applied Google-Fu.

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