Splits

When writing programs, just a little bit of extra thought can produce exponential UX gains. Say we want to take input of two values, separated by a space. We make an input field, and tell the user to .... input two values separated by space. But users don't read. They try…

Something Fun

I casually play minecraft from time to time and run a small server for group play. Things are kept mostly vanilla, but code and hacking excites me as much as (or more than) mining and crafting. I wanted a way to do something simple – say boom in chat, and wherever…

Anti-hacking

I was made aware of trouble with a wordpress site – not that there's anything inherently wrong with wordpress, this one just happened to be. It was a non-profit site managed by a team of volunteers, and it was redirecting to a spam-ish canadian pharmacy domain. Investigation found the site to…

Sails ORM/ODM

Sails has grand goals. It's a smartly built and underappreciated framework that pulls together some of the best utilities available to the node.js community and combines them into one super framework of awesome. ....except that it doesn't.... My main gripe comes from the explanation of ORM/ODM where it…

smarter gulp restart

I wanted to make a gulpfile to restart a server when files changed. It seemed easy enough at first: var gulp = require('gulp') var child = require('child-process') gulp.task('default', function(){ var ps function spawn(){ if(ps) ps.kill() //spawn becomes respawn automatically ps = child.spawn('node', ['.'], {stdio:…