I recently moved an old website to a new server. For performance reasons, the new server is running nginx instead of Apache, and didn’t have nginx set up to use PHP. (The optimal way, apparently, is to use PHP-FGM, which currently requires you to patch and build PHP yourself, at least until PHP 5.4). That […]

I was cleaning out some miscellaneous files from my computer today when I found a folder called “eyeos”. EyeOS. My friend and I thought we were uber-cool when we set up eyeOS on our shared hosting accounts and looking back, yeah, well, we were. EyeOS was an ambitious open-source project to give you a desktop […]

One of the biggest hurdles in going from JavaScript as a trivial gimmick for making divs change color to a powerful language for building real applications is its single-namespace weakness. It’s easy to accidentally cause variable names to collide when you start combining scripts, and there’s no native library or module system to alleviate this. […]

Templating is one of those must-haves for building websites; separating content from presentation is sliced bread compared to cavalierly interleave logic and HTML into one file. In Scheme, I think that quasiquotation could be used in wonderful ways to create templates; namely, every template can be a function that simply takes parameters and directly uses […]

Objective: Create a single-file PHP installer for WordPress that will automate the downloading, unpacking, and setup of a WordPress blog. Reason: As of right now, setting up a WordPress blog involves a lot of fiddling with files. The user must download the archive, unzip it on their computer, open a ftp connection to their server, […]

Update: There used to be an unhappy blog post about my experience with Musicnotes.com from 2009 here, but I don’t know if any of it is relevant or not anymore. If you are looking for open-source software for music notation, I encourage you to check out MuseScore.

Today, my friend told me about this amazing new Internet filter. He went to a meeting at the city hall, where it was being demonstrated to the government. Apparently, the police gave it the thumbs up and recommended it for the schools. On a news story, it said that it was made by a Purdue […]

It seems that a lot of people are enjoying my “To Be” Verbs Analysis” program, and, well, some aren’t. Since only the school has Writer’s Workbench, people have trouble finding time to use it. Well, now they can do it at home. Mitchell pointed out that “It doesn’t work!” because it wasn’t picking up “wasn’t”, […]