Tiny Little Life

The East Coast suffered Hurricane Sandy today. With the lights flickering off for brief moments every half hour or so, I decided it was time to stop hastily typing “ping” commands to diagnose my connectivity problems and so I wrote something to do it better. The result is a script that intelligently tests […]

Sometimes you want to apt-get installer packages in Debian or Ubuntu Linux, but downloading a lot of them in series can take a really long time. Here’s a script that does it for you; all you do is tell it what packages, and it fetches all the dependencies.
A full listing is below.

My thanks to […]

There are many times in code development when you need to run a bunch of commands after saving a file. You may even do it repeatedly. This shell script (listed below) automates that by watching a set of files, and executing a command if any of their modification times change.

import sys
import os
import time
import […]

I’m pleased to announce that the latest version of FontClustr, which is freely available on GitHub, now supports an interactive HTML tree for browsing its output.
This is a step toward an interactive font chooser that sorts by appearance.
When I go looking for a good typeface, I usually have a few styles in mind […]

My FontClustr project has received honorable mention in the 2011 Catalyst Award competition! As an outsider to the world of graphic design, I’m touched that they found my work so inspiring.
From the press release:
The judges were impressed by the approach taken by this self-confessed non-typographer to a practical problem: how to automate grouping […]

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve just developed a sorting algorithm in C++ whose worst case performance is O(n). I have named this algorithm ijk_sort (”ijk” is pronounced “ike” as in “Dijkstra“).
You can download the source of ijk_sort.cpp, reprinted below:

#include <limits .h>
using namespace std;
 
// via http://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html
static const unsigned char ijk_cache[256] =
{
# […]

FontClustr can now be found on GitHub:
https://github.com/ifreecarve/FontClustr

Here is a basic example (C++ file, Lua file, CMake file) of how to create a Lua environment inside C++, call a Lua function from C++, and have that Lua function make a function call to the C++ environment that contains it.
This demo covers functions with a variable number of arguments, multiple return values, and […]

This is the Lua code to properly curry (according to the definition I learned, which is supported by Wikipedia) a function in Lua. Mine is a fairly efficient implementation that allows functions to be curried, regardless of how many arguments they would individually take.
My rant on incorrect implementations — several of them […]

My GNU software called FontClustr has been updated to run on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx.
Download and Installation instructions for FontClustr are now in this permanent location.
I’ve also corrected an omission of the 3 files that make the output webpages work properly. Sorry!
As before, if you use FontClustr to improve font selection in your own program, […]