Josh On Design

thoughts on build systems

I'm rebuilding my HTML Canvas Deep Dive book so I need a way to compile various source files into a final thing. I'm not producing an executable but rather a directory full of generated HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and possibly some other stuff; but it's the same basic idea. I need to turn a collection of things into another collection of things. I need a build system. So which should I use?

I'm optimistic about humanity's abillity to deal with climate change. I know that sounds ridiculous in the current political environment of the US, where one party can't agree on what to do and the other party denies that the problem even exists. But still I'm optimistic. Why? Because of the bomb.

When you think of a book you probably think of prose. A bunch of paragraphs with section headers and chapter names, and perhaps a few illustrations. In short, you are thinking of a paper book. When I first wrote the HTML Canvas Deep Dive I was thinking along those lines as well, but I also wanted interactivity. What’s the point of having an educational book on the web if we can’t push the envelope a bit.

Some years ago I wrote a book called the HTML Canvas Deep Dive. To be truthful the writing was an accident. I taught a workshop four years in a row at OSCON, back when it was in Portland. Whenever I teach a workshop I want the students to have something to take away with them in case they don't finished, so I structure it as a series of lessons with hands on activities. Eventually I realized that if I simply called these chapters instead of lessons then I'd have a book on my hands. So that became the first release of HTML Canvas Deep Dive.

I'm happy to announce that as of today there is no Google on my website. In fact, there is nothing loaded from any other domains than my own. No fonts, no images, and absolutely no trackers. Here's how I did it.

I had the great pleasure to meet lots of dedicated engineers, researchers, and scientists at the W3C Immersive Web Working Group face to face meeting this week. This is the team dedicated to creating standards for mixed reality so that we can all enjoy future interactive content from the web-browser of our choice.

This is why DRM is a Bad Idea

Or, an attempt to exercise my digital rights, badly managed.

2018 was a pretty good year. Jesse loves 2nd grade, Jen earned a new car (her 10th?), and it marks my first full year at Mozilla. Professionally I feel like I’ve been all over the place. I’ve tried lots of new ways to reach people, some successful and others less so. The teams I serve are happy so I guess I’m doing things okay, but I want to prune in 2019. I want to stop doing things that have not been effective and double down on the things that seem interesting. 2019 should be a very interesting year for WebXR, but before we get to those plans, let’s review 2018.

The Manga Guide to Cryptography by Masaaki Mitani, Shinichi Sato, Idero Hinoki is a rather improbable book. Can you really teach crypto, a notably math heavy subject, through a graphic novel? The answer is: sorta.

If you have a kid who loves Legos, or are a Lego nut who just loves Legos (or both, like me), then you know about the Technic line, a set of kits with motors and gears for building crazy contraptions. My son and I both love them.

If you haven't used it before, Scratch is a programming environment for teaching kids. It's a real programming system with loops and conditionals, but it uses visual blocks rather than textual syntax, making it *far* easier for kids to learn. Recently the Scratch team created Scratch Jr, a simpler version for younger kids that runs on tablets like the iPad. One of the problems with Scratch and Scratch Jr is that once you have completed the in-app tutorials you are left to your imagination to come up with new things to build. Some kids need a bit more guidance. That's where No Starch Press' ScratchJr Coding Cards come in.

One year ago today I joined the Mixed Reality Team at Mozilla.

I just finished reading Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings by Christopher Moore. I’m a fan of Christopher Moore. I really love his mixture of humor and the fantastic. I consider him a modern day Douglas Adams. Lamb is an amazing book that I encourage everyone to read. But Fluke? Well, Fluke fell short. While it was mostly enjoyable it had some major flaws that sort of ruined it for me. Needless to say. Spoilers are coming.

Today we are going to take a break from creative procedural generation and talk about a very useful graphics primitive, the Bézier curve, and learn how to render it from scratch.

Recently Nadia Eghbal posted about the history of independent researchers. One crucial point (hinted at in her article but I don't think is explicit enough) is that to be a researcher you don't need to have a big organization behind you or credentials, but you do have to publish. Sharing research, both the successes and failures, is what makes science work. If you hoard away your research and keep the results a secret then you aren't a scientist, you're an alchemist.

Welcome back to my series on procedural content generation. Today we are going to learn how to play with color. Generating textures is great, but it's so much better when we can generate new color schemes to go with our textures. First, however, we need to do a little clean up.

"I'm afraid your daughter is a vampire". The words still rang in Bob's ears. The content of the words were less shocking than the calm and straightforward manner the old man said them. Vampires are the fictitious villains of medieval fairy tales, yet the man used that word so casually, as if her were describing a case of the flu.

The captain stared into the abyss through his cabin window pensively. So many stars. So many possible worlds, yet so empty. He took another swig of a drink. It's hard to get the good stuff in space, he mused, but captains rations were decent.

We've built a lot of stuff so far. In part one we built some tools and noise. In part two we created patterns with sine waves, then mixed them with noise. However, so far our images are essentially black and white, or occasionally hard coded to a particular color like red. Today we're going to lerp through some colors. Don't worry, I'll explain that this means in a minute.

Now that we've got a little toolkit from part 1, let's draw a simple sin wave. As you may recall from your trigonometry, the sin function goes from -1 to 1. It also loops forever. That's going to be very handy.