Old Tools for a New Age

I like Command Line Interfaces alot.

I like them for their power, lack of mouse usage, and mostly their seemingly infinite learning curve. When I say this I mean that given an inifinite level of genius/craziness anything is possible within the CLI. This is good because it lets the hardcore folks really scale in efficiency as they see fit.

Whats about browsers?

They get no loving-embrace from the CLI. I've been thinking alot of what could be brought to the table. Here are some of those thoughts:

Silent+ Easy social media updating
social -tf "Loving this command line interface!"
Updates twitter and facebook with this new status

Ease of click heavy actions
bookmark -a \media\funny\cats
bookmark -m \media\funny\cats \media\awww
Adds the current page to your cats bookmarks folder
Moves all your cute cat videos to the new "aww folder"

Integration with email and other services
maps -d -t="200 university ave waterloo ontario" -f="169 charolette st port colborne ontario" > email -r=scott.tolksdorf@gmail.com -s="Directions to Home" -m="here are those directions"
Gets directions from the university to my house and sends them into an email to me. All from the command line.

I thinking something like a shortcut enabled drop down on the top right to the console. If I find some time I might start working on a chrome extension.

xo-skeleton: The hippiest way to save time while webDeving

I write alot of webpages. Alot. Most are just for fun side projects, a few clients here or there, or just some quick mock-ups. However, I seem to be writing the some code over, and over and over again. Figuring out the same annoying quirks of css. Still trying to get columns to work. Well I decided to fix all of that.

Introducing xo-skeletion! (xo for short)

So Clean. So Beautiful. Look at those columns!

xo-skeleton is a hyper-lightweight web framework. I tried a few other frameworks and they were super massive and took weeks to learn. So I built my own.
xo is simple!
Some of the features:

• Easy html-class based access to common css sttributes (font size, color, etc.)
• A simplifed way to make columns in html
• Pre-built footers
• Comes with 4 of my favourite fonts
• Built-in Javascript debugging tool BlackBird.

Do you feel how easy that was?
Do you feel yourself getting more attractive to the opposite sex?
Yes. Yes you do.

Anyways, download it, give it a swing. Tell me what you think!

Challenge Complete!

The Challenge is complete!

I had a few hiccups; being distracted by a movie and sleeping (bleh). All in all it was very fun. In total I took me about 150ish minutes of actual coding time.

Things I learned:

• In challenges like this you really need to know your language. I unfortunately did not know python that well, which lead to some headaches and constant syntax look ups. I would have been better using lisp.
• I really like recursion. I used it in every solution. Made my code super tiny! My longest solution was 30 lines long.
• One of my friends who recently completed the challenge said there was "secret tech" to solving the first challenge super fast. I think that distracted me too much. Still don't know what it was, my solution runs in n^2 time, but usually better due to some tricks I added.

Give the challenge a shot!

The Greplin Challenge

A friend of mine introduced me to a little coding game called The Greplin Challenge.

Let's see how quickly I can tackle this.

Deployed!

Whew! Time definitely flew. The newest version is deployed and running, so check it out!

Do you has what it takes?

Let's review
- Better distribution of question types  It now always does at least 5 of each question type
- Better instructions I think it looks pretty good
- Adding a count down timer before the test begins Just enough time to read the fancy instructions
- Clean up the interface a touch more Still has some more love to be given, but so far good
- Add a repeat button Aww yeah!
- Add an easily copy-able final score to share Wrote this in the last 5 minutes!
- Facebook and twitter sharing
- Graph of results


Lessons learned?
- CSS, as always and continues to be, a complete bitch. Ate up most of my time getting things to fit and not fly away the screen.
- Customizing the twitter and facebook share buttons is trickier then I thought. It'll need a tad more research.
- The transition between the countdown timer and experimenting needs a bit of work. I has some ideas.
- Rocking out in the same turntable.fm room as the Zuckerberg increases productivity. True Story.
- I have alot of progress for the graph, but not quite finished. 
- CSS is a bitch.


You may have noticed I changed the logo to "ReCognition:Math". This has been so fun, I think I'm going to build a whole suite of cognitive tests under the name ReCognition. 


Next ReCognition test?


Reaction!

Instructions are also cool

Is this instructiony enough?

Time to Buff

While sitting in class, the last post still fresh in my head, along with a ton of suggestions and improvements flowing in from friends, I really got ramped up to begin the polishing process ASAP.

Alright, so here's the run down:
- Better distribution of question types
- Better instructions
- Adding a count down timer before the test begins
- Clean up the interface a touch more
- Add a repeat button
- Add an easily copy-able final score to share
- Facebook and twitter sharing
- Graph of results

Alright, let's give myself... hm.... 90 minutes? I'll report back then and see how much I can cross off. GO GO GO!

Math is cool

Hello Internets,

A few days ago I embarked on a coding sprint. A coding sprint is where I pick a small project that I can complete in about 2 hours and time myself coding it. I like to do these about once every 2 weeks. The project for this fortnight is lovingly called Mathy.

Minimalism is the new cluttered

The inspiration for Mathy came from a need. Very soon I am going to be starting a nootropic regiment and wanted to get so base-line cognitive scores to test differetn stacks against, as any proper scientist would. So I thought, "I'll just look up a series of basic cognitive tests online, bookmark them and attack them each day. Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy".

FALSE.

All of the tests I found were poorly designed, childish in nature, varied wildly in difficulty, length and configurability and finally riddled with ads. Being part of the Self Tracking Community I saw this as a definite vacuum. So Mathy is my contribution to make the world a more trackier place.

Mathy is simple. Answer 25 random math questions as fast as possible. The goal was clean and attractive interface, excellent analytics, and relative short length (takes about 30-60 seconds). It's built in about 200 lines of Javascript and hosted on App Engine.

Not too shabby.

It's a start, I'm going to add much more polish later, but for now I'm proud for what I can do in 2 hours. Enjoy!