Simon C Page's Colourful Universe posters inspired me to make a javascript canvas particle-system in a similar style.

Click to launch demo
(Try left clicking or pressing space, press "p" to pause)

Last summer I graduated with my undergraduate degree amidst much celebration from my family. I wanted to do something special to thank them so I carted out AR Toolkit, Papervision 3D and Flex Builder to put together an augmented reality "thank you" card.

Visit the original page and play with it

Launch JavaScript Tyrian Demo

These days if you head over to ChromeExperiments.com you can see Google Chrome's V8 engine doing all sorts of things you thought it was not JavaScript's job to do. Flash back to 2007, blogger and now chief creative officer at Spry Fox, Danc, released remastered sprite art from the 1995 Epic MegaGames shoot'em'up called Tyrian. Put the two together and you get this humble little number.

Obviously this is a work in progress. My scrap-built game engine runs spectacularly well in Chrome and can get far into the hundreds of sprites on screen before slowing down, but a level designer I am not. So, if anyone is interested in doing the design dirty work, drop me a line. I've created some level design tools with about a third of the sprites I have available loaded in and I put more in periodically when I have time.

JavaScript's pseudo-random number generator Math.random() outputs what you want a pseudo-random number generator to output: a random number uniformly distributed between 0 and 1. Great, but say you are in a situation where you don't want every number to be equally likely, you want them evenly distributed about a mean. You want a normally distributed random number. To get this you can use the Box-Muller transformation on two uniformly distributed random numbers. Problem solved!

Click to launch demo

In this demonstration I use the Box-Muller transformation on numbers generated by JavaScript's Math.random() and use the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test to compare the result against a normal cdf table generated by Mathematica to see if they actually come out normally distributed.

This article is for businesses who want to stream video on their websites and cannot use free services like YouTube, Vimeo or Revver because their content is to be strictly commercial or promotional. It will give you, business owner (or web master working for business owner), a sense of the bandwidth and space costs associated with streaming video on your website as well as the technologies involved.

NetworkManager is Red Hat's "networking made easy" utility that allows UNIX-like OSes to "do the right thing" most of the time when dealing with networks. But what if you want to do something else?

This site is my first attempt at making a site from scratch using Drupal and I am here to say that the process was as quick and painless as they would have you believe it is - at least if you are accustomed to setting up and using PHP/MySQL CMS's. The module methodology is exquisite. Once you learn the relatively small lexicon -that is well documented in the many online handbooks- you have easy access to the basic building blocks of a site all laid out in front of you and ready to go.