John Smith's Blog

Test post to verify migration to App Engine High-Replication Datastore worked OK

John Smith — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 23:05:14 +0100

The App Engine console is a paragon of crapness at the best of times, but the functionality to do a migration from the old master/slave datastore is in a class of its own.

Hopefully I'll only have to do this the once - at least for this blog, I've still …

Fixing slow emacs startup on Linux under VMWare

John Smith — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 21:54:25 +0100

TL; DR: try adding the host name to /etc/hosts

For various reasons I can't be bothered to go into now, on an intermittent basis I end up doing a lot of development on Linux VMs on Windows - mostly Fedora on VMWare. For a while I've noticed that emacs (my …

gl.enableVertexAttribArray() gotcha

John Smith — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 10:59:13 +0100

Another post mainly in the hope that I might save someone else the wasted time and head-scratching I spent in fixing this...

I've been continuing playing with WebGL, and as well as experimenting with new (to me) functionality, in parallel I've started building up a library to tidy up the …

nVidia Linux v302 drivers and dual-head/rotated monitor setups

John Smith — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 23:28:13 +0100

I recently upgraded to the 302.17 nVidia Linux drivers, which broke my dual head setup somewhat, and required a bit of manual reconfiguration to get things working properly again. Although all the information is available online, I thought it worthwhile writing a quick post in the event someone else …

Hassles with array access in WebGL, and a couple of workarounds

John Smith — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 21:24:00 +0100

I've been pottering around a bit more with WebGL for a personal project/experiment, and came across a hurdle that I wasn't expecting, involving arrays. Maybe my Google-fu was lacking, but this doesn't seem to be widely documented online - and I get the distinct impression that WebGL implementations might have …

Reinvented the wheel and built my own IP address checker

John Smith — Tue, 29 May 2012 23:30:21 +0100

I've recently started started using a VPN for the first time in years, and was using WhatIsMyIP to sanity check that I was indeed seeing the net via a different IP than that provided by my ISP. However, there were a few things I wasn't too happy about:

I was …

Parallax starfield and texture mask effect in WebGL

John Smith — Sun, 27 May 2012 01:50:00 +0100

I've been pottering around a bit with WebGL lately, really just playing with 2D stuff, and this is probably the most notable thing I've hacked up so far.

It's vaguely inspired by stuff like the Sid Sutton Doctor Who titles from the early '80s and Numb Res (especially the bit …

In praise of help() in Python's REPL

John Smith — Thu, 17 May 2012 11:31:00 +0100

For various reasons, I'm doing a bit of JavaScript/CoffeeScript work at the moment, which involves use of some functions in the core libraries which I'd not really used in the past. A minor aspect of this involves logarithmic values, and I was a bit surprised and then disappointed that …

Enhanced version of Python's SimpleHTTPServer that supports HTTP Range

John Smith — Tue, 08 May 2012 14:12:00 +0100

I've just uploaded a small personal project to GitHub here. It's basically a very crude webserver that allows me to share audio files on my Linux boxes to my iOS devices, using Mobile Safari.

The main reason for noting this is that the code may be of more general interest …

What's the best way of including SVGs in a responsive web page?

John Smith — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 19:46:00 +0100

TL; DR: <object> seems the best bet - although Safari 5.1 has issues compared to the other browsers. Second choice is having the SVG inline in the HTML, but that has issues for WebKit and IE.

As a diversion from my more usual diet of Python, I've spent a fair …