a broken thought

Read all of the directions and plan it out before you start.  You should do some steps in parallel.

Cooking time: 35-45 min.

What you’ll need:

Directions:
Bring sugar and water to a slow boil, cover, and boil on medium heat for 4 min. (No peaking!)
Create cooling bath that you can set the cookie sheet in.
Apply thin coat of butter to the cookie sheet.

Carefully add butter to syrup one stick at a time and stir. Wait until each stick is fully melted before adding the next.
Add a large handful of whole almonds to mixture.

Stir on medium heat until 310 deg. F. (Hard Crack).
Quickly:
Turn off heat.
Wipe off the thermometer on edge of pan to clean.
Pour onto cookie sheet.
Place cookie sheet in cold bath.

Wait 20 min, then apply chocolate.
To melt chocolate:
Place 3 bars in glass bowl
Microwave 50% power for 1 min, stir, and then for another min. at 50%.
Spread colocate onto the toffee with a rubber spatula.
Optional: Dust with finely chopped almonds.

Once everything is cool, crack and enjoy with your friends.

Don’t try to make two batches at once.

I’m happy to announce the release of Duck, Duck, Dog; a concentration and memory game. I’ve been working on this off and on for the past couple of weeks, and now I think it’s finally ready to be released. The game is based on the n-back task which has been used to test and train a person’s working memory.

You earn points by correctly matching the symbols with what has previously shown, and you get more points the more matches in a row that you get right. You can also earn a lot more points at higher levels, so don’t spend all of you time on Level 1.

I hope you enjoy the challenge. Good luck!

I tweaked the layout of font of my blog a bit. It’s now 100px wider and the font and line-height are a little larger. Hopefully it’ll be a little easier to read on high resolution monitors while still fitting nicely at 1024×768. Check out the Before and After, and let me know what you think.

The current generation of browsers is looking pretty good.  Not all of them support all of the features that I’d like to see (WebSockets, WebWorkers, HTML5 Forms, full CSS3, etc…), but they all have fast Javascript engines, canvas and audio tag support, which makes makes things like video games a lot easier to build on the web.  A few weeks ago, I built this little page to play around with drawing some animation on a canvas tag.

Canvas Sparks

One thing I like about it is that it gives me a sort of a benchmark to compare the different browsers.  For example, I had some real trouble getting the hidden footer bar to show up when you move the mouse over it in Internet Explorer 9 until someone from Microsoft suggested a workaround*.  I’m also able to measure the frame rate, which is a good indication of how fast the browsers are at rendering (at least for this scene).  Here are the numbers on my PC running maximized with the default settings:

While this makes Chrome look pretty bad, it’s actually quite fast and comparable on most tasks. I’ve come to prefer it for most of my browsing (although, that was before IE 9 and FF 4 were released, so who knows if I’ll switch again). I tried Chrome with GPU acceleration enabled, but it actually rendered slower and incorrectly (there’s a good reason Google hasn’t enabled this feature by default).

On my iMac, here are the numbers:

I’d be curious if anyone else is getting different rankings. Just mouse over the footer area to see your frame rate, or to play with the other options.

* Oh, and if you’re interested in the workaround. The problem was that the content of the footer DIV was hidden with display:none, so IE wouldn’t register the mouse being over it. Apparently, IE uses something called hard and soft hits to trigger the :hover selector. An “empty” DIV is treated as a soft hit. The workaround is to set a transparent background on the DIV, either with a transparent image, or with background:rgba(0,0,0,0) in the CSS style.

After less than a year in service, Vapurl.com has been shut down.  I haven’t been monitoring it very closely for a good six months, but apparently a Russian spam network was using Vapurl to mask their URLs.  Spamhaus figured out what was going on and reported our domain as bad.  Apparently, GoDaddy.com doesn’t like to be the registar for anyone listed on Spamhaus, so they suspended our account.

If we wanted to bring the site back up tt would have cost us at least $75 just to reactivate our account to transfer away from GoDaddy, and then we would have needed to figure out a way to keep block the spammers; a very time consuming battle, I’m sure.  It just wasn’t worth it to try to fight the spam.  We could have probably engineered the site differently from the get-go to make the site less appealing to spammers, but we were really just looking for a fun weekend project to play with Google App Engine.  At the end of the day, I’d say the site was a success.  It was a fun learning experience, even if it didn’t last very long.

Apejet.org has moved to WebFaction.  Most of the site moved without any trouble.  They don’t support the PHP mail() function for sending email (probably a good thing), so I had to convert some stuff to use a library to send email.  I expected WordPress to be a bigger problem, but it was pretty straightforward.  I just created a new WordPress app in the WebFaction control panel, exported my conent from my old server using a built-in WP tool, imported it, and loaded up my theme.  That should be about it.  I made the DNS changes last night, so this post is going out on the new server.  No looking back!

Oh, and if you happen to switch to WebFaction, why not use my affiliate link?

http://www.webfaction.com?affiliate=ookium

My latest web application is up at www.spellingthing.com.  I’ve never been great at spelling.  Actually, I was pretty terrible at it in school.  Over the years, I’ve been slowly trying to work on learning words as I notice that I’m making mistakes (thank you spell checkers!).  SpellingThing is designed to help people focus on the words that they have trouble with until they’ve gotten it.  You can add your own words to learn, or let the website choose words for you.

I’m trying to get people to beta test it because it’s new to the public and I’m looking for feedback, suggestions, complains, or anything.  Eventually, I’d like to charge for access to premium features, but only if people find it valuable.  For now  it’s completely free, so please check it out and let me know what you think.

I wanted to play around with the HTML 5 Canvas tag, so I’ve started building this little web application to render the Mandelbrot Set.

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Following in my tradition of periodically taking an online Myers-Briggs test and posting my results.  I’m still an INTJ with the following percentages:

Introverted – 89%
Intuitive – 62%
Thinking – 88%
Judging – 22%

For those with less time or patients, here’s a quick four question version of the test which is pretty much guaranteed to be less accurate.

I was playing around with solving the N-Queens Puzzle in JavaScript and thought it would do nicely as a browser benchmark.  I’m not using much in the way of heuristics or optimizations in this version.  In summary, Google Chrome 4.0 is fast.

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