…as nature does. Create something from random numbers. Here are a couple of examples, from a Sunday morning programming session (plus 1 extra hour from the daylight savings change): – Random bubbles – Random trees Each time you reload the page, a new drawing appears. To see them correctly, you need Firefox or Opera, because… Read More »
What do you understand from this picture? It’s the switch of my bathroom heater. It has 4 positions: 0, fan, 1 and 2. It’s easy, isn’t it? Even though, last week I had to open it to try to repair it, and I discovered that one of the two small radiators, it has inside, was… Read More »
If you can read this, your browser cannot render “Scalable Vector Graphics”… get FIREFOX or OPERA I’m learning to use Inkscape, an open source application to draw graphics. It saves your drawings in SVG format. For some reason, I’ve discovered that this format is a really interesting standard for the future of the WWW. The… Read More »
This week I have had a lot of dead time in the office (while waiting for the client’s answers), and I’ve been reading some web usability articles from Jakob Nielsen’s website. I have read almost every column he wrote, and I think I already knew most of the key issues (like colors for links, big… Read More »
A morning office conversation: Tony (a workmate): Is there a PHP function to stop for a moment the execution of a page? Me: Yes, it is “sleep()”. Tony: Just what I need, to sleep a little bit. Does it work with microseconds? Me: No, it works with seconds. For example, if you write sleep(1), it… Read More »
Two years ago, I arrived to Barcelona to continue my Ph.D studies. Two years, how long!, who could imagine all the things that were going to happen? In those days I was looking for a programming language to “fast-prototype” my ideas. The final match was between Python and Ruby, and I finally started to learn… Read More »
I live in Barcelona, a city marked with Gaudí’s spirit. Gaudí was a wise architect who studied shapes from nature, as a form of inspiration, and he used them to create new buildings. These shapes, like spiral, helix or hyperboloid, are not only beautiful but also interesting ways to sustain a building’s weight. Both beauty… Read More »
At the office I’m working on a big website, with a blog, a forum, other things, and a “shared” user system: so you only have to sign in once and you can surf from one module to another (blog, forum) without the need of signing in again. The client wanted standard and well known modules… Read More »
Yesterday was one of those days where it’s better to not wake up. Maybe the whole week was bad! At the office the bosses were complaining about everything (from timetable to holidays to our time to have lunch) . They are making a lot of changes, and it seems this company is not going to… Read More »
One of those things which sometimes made me crazy while programming are quotes (single ‘ and double ” quotes). Let me explain… Most of the modern programming languages include a way to manage strings, normally it’s surrounding them with quotes (for example, in PHP: $response=”Hi there!”). The question arrives when you want to add a… Read More »