New Web Thing – Wander / / No Comments I’ve built a few web games in the past (IdleFleet and Cat Herder are two examples), but what I’m sharing today doesn’t really fit into the category of a game. This is going to sound terribly pretentious and I apologize in advance, but what I’m sharing today is more an "experience" for lack of a better term. It’s part technical exploration, and part cathartic dumping, and just kinda weird. But honestly, the web needs more weird and I’m happy to contribute to that. As with most of the things I’ve built, I think it’s more interesting if you experience it first before taking a look at what’s behind it, so with that in mind, click this... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: thing, Wander
See Europe by Train, Hour by Hour / / No Comments Chronotrains, pioneers of European train data visualization, are back with another superb tool. Their latest interactive map again reveals how far you can travel in Europe by train within set time periods – using an impressive animated isochrone layer.The original Old Chronotrains map features an amazing interactive isochrone layer that automatically moves around Europe to show you how Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Europe, hour, train
Recognizing Abundant, Deficient, and Perfect Numbers / / No Comments Ok, this post falls into the "I’ll never actually use this again" category, which frankly, my normal readers know happens all the time, but it was a fun little diversion and a reminder of why I used to love math so much. Yesterday I found out that one of my kids’ homework was to look at a set of numbers and determine if they were abundant, deficient, or perfect. Right now you are probably (at least I know I was) asking, "what in the actual heck is that???" A quick bit of Googling turned up this explainer that basically boils it down to a simple principal. Given a number, find all the divisors of that number, excluding the number itself, and add them up. If the... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Abundant, Deficient, numbers, Perfect, Recognizing
Using Chrome AI to Summarize Comic Books / / No Comments A few weeks back, I blogged about analyzing comic books with gen ai, and honestly, it worked really darn well. I extracted the pages with Python, and send them to Google Gemini to create the summary. I was naturally curious to see if this could be done entirely on device, using Chrome’s AI support. Here’s what I found. First, a reminder – a few days ago I updated my web-based comic book reader and described that process. The code I’m sharing today is built upon that first application, so if you missed that post, I’d strongly suggest reading it first. (And if you don’t want to miss any of my posts, don’t forget to subscribe!). How It Works Alright –... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Books, Chrome, Comic, Summarize, using
How Google Maps Works / / No Comments Google Maps Explained is an awesome walkthrough that breaks down how Google Maps figures out the best route when you ask for directions. The star of the show is Geo, a cute little green guide who walks you through the behind-the-scenes magic that makes Google Maps so smart. At the heart of Google Directions is some seriously clever tech – powerful pathfinding algorithms. These are Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Google, maps, works
Testing with BoxLang / / No Comments One of the fun things about immersing myself in BoxLang these past few months is my expose to other products from Ortus. Most recently, I’ve been doing some contracting with a client that makes use of ColdBox, which for my non-CFML readers out there is probably the most well known, and probably most popular, framework for building enterprise web applications with ColdFusion. As part of that work, I’ve been integrating TestBox, a testing and mocking framework that works well with ColdBox, but also (somewhat recently, I think a month or so now), supports BoxLang as well. For the most part, "it just works", but as I was new to it, I did run into a few small issues I thought... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: BoxLang, Testing
Losing BIG, Very SAD! / / No Comments The Economist has mapped President Trump’s approval rating in each state, and the results look bleak for the president and the Republican Party ahead of next year’s midterm elections. Drawing on data from YouGov polling, The Economist finds that Trump holds a positive net approval rating in only 11 states.In its cartogram of Donald Trump’s Approval Rating, the magazine shows that the Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Losing, very
Integrating Algolia with BoxLang / / No Comments I’ve been using Algolia for my search on this blog for years and absolutely love the service. At a high level, Algolia is a hosted search service that lets you easily create search indexes (think of it as a search optimized version of your content) while also providing easy libraries to add a search UI to your page itself. If you type in the search bar on top and perform a search, you’ll see this yourself. My site here is static, all simple flat files with no database, so a solution like Algolia is vital. I thought I’d take a look at integrating Algolia’s REST APIs with BoxLang and was able to build a quick demo in less than an hour. Here’s what I did. Initial Setup As... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Algolia, BoxLang, Integrating