William Huster

UX, code, sundry

[whusterj]

Machine Learning for Programming

“Machine Learning is the Ultimate Agile Programming”

Peter Norvig keynotes on using machine learning techniques to solve more general software problems, helping both the advanced programmer and the novice one.

[prostheticknowledge]

Audio Landscape

Webtoy put together by D͡a͜n is a musical visualizer that is presented as a flight over a natural landscape.

Put together with javascript and three.js, drag-and-drop an mp3 to experience different landscapes - good for mellower songs.

Try it out for yourself here

[whusterj]

Awesome WebGL Visualizer

[whusterj]

As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.

Kurt Vonnegut

[whusterj]

Interactive Typewriter

So cool!

See the Pen Interactive typewriter by Finn (@GeeWizWow) on CodePen.

[whusterj]

Deep Get in JavaScript

Search for a deep property in an object without raising a TypeError:

via A Drip of JavaScript

[whusterj]

"The Invasion of America"

Great time-lapse visualization. I've been getting into those lately.

via kottke

[whusterj]

Email Auto-Suggest

A really great idea and useful implementation of an email auto-suggest feature from Stuart Tayler (via This CXPartners article).

Just start typing an email address in the box, and the form will suggest common extensions. Try miss-spelling the email extension (ex: 'gnail' instead of 'gmail') and help text will suggest a correction. Very cool!

See the Pen Email Auto-Suggest by Stuart Tayler (@stuarttayler) on CodePen.

[whusterj]

JS Levenshtein Edit Distance

Just posting this gist to hold on to it:

[whusterj]

Why Do All Records Sound the Same?

Desperate to get their music on the radio, record labels employ powerful software to artificially sweeten it, polish it,…

[whusterj]

Is it really "complex"? Or did we just make it "complicated"?

"The Airbus 800 and the biggest 747 can be flown by two people.... you just can't have a crew of 130 if you're gonna be in the airplane business... The problem is, you can have have a crew of 130 in the submarine business, whether it's a good idea or not.... Maybe these large programming crews that we have actually go back to the days of machine code and machine code programming, but actually have no place today."

[whusterj]

Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

Alan Watts via Can Functional Programming Be Liberated from the Von Neumann Paradigm?

[whusterj]

WEBGL interactive sock puppet demo

WEBGL interactive sock puppet demo by myp

[whusterj]

"Iterate the Schedule with the Code."

Tip 19, The Pragmatic Programmer

[whusterj]

... a good programmer in these times does not just write programs. A good programmer builds a working vocabulary. In other words, a good programmer does language design, though not from scratch, but by building on the frame of a base language.

- Guy L. Steele Jr. via Objects Have Failed (slideshow) 

[whusterj]

Really impressive work. I look forward to the game that comes out of this!

[whusterj]

The Saddest Thing I Know about the Integers | Roots of Unity, Scientific American Blog Network

The integers are a unique factorization domain, so we can’t tune pianos. That is the saddest thing I know about the integers. I talked to a Girl ...

You can't tune a piano. A look at the problems that exist where math, music theory, and music reality come together:

[whusterj]

Writing Plain Text Templates for Email in Django

Short answer: don't. Managing whitespace in plain text templates is a headache-and-a-half....

God forbid you want to add some if statements or for loops! Suddenly you have a steamy, tangled mess on your hands.

Writing and maintaining templates in non-whitespace-sensitive HTML is faaar more sane. So my advice: write your template in HTML, render it to a string, and then use the html2text library to convert the rendered HTML to plaintext.

Check out html2text on github

html2text actually renders the result as markdown, which applies pretty sensible and readable formatting, even for non-technical recipients.

Ideally, of course, you should be sending HTML in almost every case anyway. But you still always need plain text as a fallback. Well, now you have an easy way to generate that fallback -- without any need to maintain both an HTML and plain text template.

Here's a gist to show how it's done:

https://gist.github.com/whusterj/1cb3a25bd5afed57a902