I brought some SNES games to Heatsync Labs’ Vintage Game Night in Mesa tonight…

Attendee: “Cool, Tetris Attack? You guys should be playing this one.” Me: “You show excellent taste, sir. I bet you’ll appreciate this…” [I reach into a box to retrieve my prized Japanese import…] Attendee: “Oh, did you bring Panel de Pon?”

…There’s no impressing anyone any more. :P

Try R!

The Try R course is out on Code School! All lesson content by: me! Badass remote executor (that shows your graphs in the page!) by Thomas Meeks. Challenge implementation by me, Adam Fortuna, and Casey Jenks. Sponsorship by O’Reilly, which means the course is free to you!

It takes about an hour to complete, it’s pretty fun, and you’ll learn a language that can help you present data in compelling ways. Hope you’ll go try it!

Try R

SVG Tweets and HTML5 Canvas Tweets are both a bust...

…A data: URL can hold everything fine, sure, but I can’t get ‘em under 140 characters (at least, not while doing anything exciting with them). There’s just too much boilerplate. I’m under 256, at least!

Canvas - Rotate and Scale

Paste this into your address bar:

data:text/html,<canvas id='c' width='999' height='999'/><script>c=document.getElementById('c').getContext("2d");for(s=1;s<99;s++){c.scale(1.1,1.1);c.rotate(4);c.fillText("☃",1,2)}</script>

Or, just click this link.

SVG - Animation

SVG animations are EXCITING! (Or, in the wrong hands, seizure-inducing.)

Paste this into your address bar:

data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg'><g transform="translate(500,400)"><text x='-15' y='5'>SVG!<animateTransform attributeName="transform" type="scale" values="0;99;0" dur="0.3s" repeatCount="99"/></text></g></svg>

Or, just click this link.

Well, it was a fun experiment, anyway. And there may be techniques for shaving off a few bytes out there; I might cram something worthwhile into a tweet yet.

Time for the FAA to join the 21st century.

Sent at the encouragement of this LifeHacker article.

Date: Sat, 1 Sep 2012 15:00:08 -0700

Subject: Please allow electronic devices during takeoff!

From: Jay McGavren

To: PEDcomment@faa.gov

Dear sir or madam,

I will not claim to have data regarding whether non-radio-transmitting electronic devices (or even those that do transmit) interfere with aircraft equipment. I’m sure the research resources of the FAA and other institutions far exceed my own in that regard.

I can, however, tell you that what I hear as an ordinary consumer and citizen from reputable news outlets is that they do not, and so it’s really frustrating when I’m asked to stop editing code (I’m a web developer who bills by the hour) and sit idle in observance of a rule that I believe has no benefit for anyone. I can only imagine how foreign visitors to the U.S. must feel.

Please, revisit the issue of whether electronic devices during takeoff are safe - I believe the FAA will find that they are.

Sincerely,

Jay McGavren

Scottsdale, AZ

I encourage you to send your comments as well! Copy-paste my letter if you need to (though we’ll both have more effect if you personalize yours a bit).

SVG in a URL!

Some folks were messing around with a “data:text/html” URL in Campfire (paste it into your address bar to render the accompanying HTML), which I hadn’t known was possible… Well, of course I immediately had to see if other MIME types would work, and the first thing I tried was SVG…

Raw form (copy-paste in your address bar):

data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg'><g transform="rotate(50),scale(9)"><text>SVG in a URL!</text></g></svg>

Link form (uses entities for the angle brackets):

SVG in a URL!

Tested in Chrome, Safari and Firefox on OSX. If it doesn’t work for you (or is expected to be deprecated in the future), I’d be curious to know.