i have been known to have the occasional lapse of judgement and make a foray into the real world or do things that real people see. Fortunately, this is rare and the instances can be enumerated.
hot yam!
i volunteer at the
Hot Yam! They are a non-profit, volunteer-based organization that serves all vegan, mostly local, and mostly organic lunches once a week.
toronto democamp 5: kids help phone
toronto democamp 10: pbj - web 0.1
Being inspired by a demo of some web frameworks at
Toronto DemoCamp 5, i set about designing a framework that allows developers in different programming languages to write web applications as though they are writing desktop applications. Being somewhat miffed by all the "web 2.0" applications and wanting to bring back the "scruffy" feel of older DemoCamps, i presented my framework, PBJ, at the first Toronto DemoCamp with an available
presentation slot.
ddj review of
ending spam
headshots: click
Sometimes i grab
candids of friends or at events where i'm a photographer.
conferences
Do these even count as forays into the real world?
Photos from some conferences i've attended. i may also have a
flickr account.
None. But don't believe everything you read (doo doo doo ♪ ♫).
Here are code snippets that i've written... more will hopefully appear here over time. It would be appreciated if you
dropped me a line if you find any of these useful. i should probably include a disclaimer of some sort lest i be be held responsible for a something unpleasant. So here it is: Use at your own risk and
with great power comes great responsibility, so please don't use this code for evil.
objective-c
Linked List
OCLinkedList is a linked list implementation i put together since one doesn't appear to be part of Cocoa. This should be handy for implementing a queue (e.g. using
addObject: and
removeFirstObject:). Cocoa already includes NSArray, which is implemented as a circular buffer, but that requires tinkering to get queues of (more or less) unbounded length. Writing a queue providing O(1) operations on the head and tail thus requires a bit more work using only that which is provided with Cocoa. While this implementation is missing many amenities of normal Cocoa collections, it should be sufficient for many purposes. Unlike normal Cocoa collections, this class also supports the addition of nil objects to the list. The testing framework included isn't well documented, though i think it's still reasonably thorough.
Test framework
Source code
NSThread Joining
NSThreadWaiter is a category that extends the functionality of NSThread to include join-like abilities. This may be useful for waiting for worker threads to complete.
Source code
Example usage code
cool tools
version control systems
A
version control system like
git,
Mercurial, and
subversion is a must-have tool. Hooks, allowing things like error checking before allowing versions to be saved, seal the deal. Not only that, but the price is right! This site is automatically updated when new versions of it are committed to a subversion repository through the use of hooks. I use
monotone which suits me nicely.
Audience: Pretty much everyone!
LaTeX
LaTeX, a typesetting system, is handy tool for writing up assignments. Not only does it produce consistent output to many formats; can write equations with more symbols than you can shake three fists at; is free; makes using citations easy (if you use a Mac, try out
BibDesk); and supports macros to save typing/increase consistency, its output is pretty! Now if only it were able to support more fancy HTML output. Oh well. That's what
Perl,
Perligata,
PHP, and
Python™ are for.
Audience: Anyone who writes papers or formulae in electronic form.
JavaScript
JavaScript. Face it. Even if you don't consider yourself a geek, there are a few times where a bit of
chicken blood would be like a spinach infusion to
Popeye. Like when you want to count the number of times the word "spam" appears in the Monty Python Spam sketch or need to figure out how many penguins could fit in a telephone booth (assuming a spherical penguin, of course). While JavaScript may not be the best choice, the basics would at least be somewhat useful. How often do you find yourself with access to a computer without a web browser but with some other programming language?
Audience: Anyone who doesn't already know another programming language and doesn't mind getting his/her hands a little dirty.
cool places
Ille Interrete est omnis divisus in partes tres, quarum unam incolunt canes, aliam tales, tertiam ei qui ipsorum lingua feminae, nostra viri appellantur. In ille pars, fuit paginae hypertextuales optimi,
perseus digital library nomine. ego te hortor ut eas illos.
Audience: Omnes.
the antarctic
This place is definitely cool, with an annual mean temperature of about -50°C. That's a brisk 223K for you scientists.
Audience: Anyone who
really likes penguins or is afraid of bears, the
number one threat to America.
cool people (incomplete list)
Some people i know... that F***dbook doesn't know i know. Or do they?
Sigh. They probably do.
“I'm Jorge Aranda, a Mexican, vegetarian, cat-dad, serpent fish, happily-married, smartypants Ph.D. student of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.” — Jorge Aranda
