The Coding Dragon

Account Closing

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 18:57:28 GMT

Whoops! I think I was too excited when I created this. I have no time to update it, so enjoy the entries I've left. Bye bye!

Dramatic Fox

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 20:28:20 GMT

This is fun.

Direct Link

My Plans To Become Cybernetic Are Slowly Coming To Fruition

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 08:31:49 GMT

I've been wondering about the feasibility of this exact technology for upwards of two years now. I'm extremely curious about how they managed to deal with the closeness problem (the closer an image is to your eye, the harder it is to focus on that image). Perhaps they plan to do a reverse blur on the screen images that will cancel out the blur caused by the inherent closeness. Anyway, I'm going to be getting one of these as soon as they are approved for ~~human~~ dragon use. Then, I'll be well on my way to full cyberization sans actual surgery.

Source

Darkest Ever Material Created

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 18:56:34 GMT

This new material, made of "forests" of nanotubes, reflects less light than air. If you were to paint your walls with it, you'd feel like you were living inside an endless black void. If you painted your car with it, you would look like several windows inside a void driving down the street. It would be cool to try this stuff out.

Article

Thinnest Mac Ever

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 19:32:33 GMT

I've got to have one of these! A computer so thin you could cut yourself on it.

The Macbook Air

Source

Macworld "Stevenote" Tomorrow

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 08:49:52 GMT

For those of you who own Macs, and those of you who don't, you really should check out Steve Job's keynote that he'll be presenting tomorrow morning. Rumors are afly about what products and technologies he will be revealing. No matter what it is, it will be good, and as always, Steve Jobs will also make it fun to watch.

Apple will be posting the video of the event Tuesday afternoon on their page.

But if you can't wait even that long, try a liveblog that will post news as it happens. That's where I'll be tomorrow. :)

Brawl Delayed

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 08:37:02 GMT

Well shoot! Super Smash Bros. Brawl has been delayed for a second time, though this time, only for a month. I was looking forward to playing this early February. Oh well, quality is quality.

Official Announcement (top of page)

Center Images The Correct Way

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 08:19:39 GMT

There are many, many ways to do even the simplest of things in HTML, but there are very few correct ways. Here's the correct (modern) way to center an image within whatever area you are in, be it a div, table cell, or the page itself.

All you have to do is apply a "centered" class to the image you want centered, and then create the centered class in your CSS file (or stick it wherever you're declaring CSS styles).

So, when you want an image centered, just be sure to add this part to the tag:
<img src="../someImage.jpg" class="centered" />

Then, in your CSS file, create this class:

.centered
{
    display: block;
    margin-left: auto;
    margin-right: auto;
}

You can, of course, rename "centered" to whatever you want, so long as both names match.

This works because you are saying that you have an object of a specific size (since the image has height and width properties), so you want to display it as a block, at its normal size. Then, you tell both the left and right side's margins to be as large as "needed." That results in the margins taking up exactly the same amount of space on both the left and right sides, centering the image.

Bridget Fursuit

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 08:04:39 GMT

I can't really determine if the person under the mask here is named Bridget, or if that's the name of the character portrayed, but this is another interesting fursuit, if you can call it that. The face is completely hard and most of the body is covered in relatively normal clothes. The only truly fursuit-y thing about this is the tail. Regardless of all that however, the suit works well in my opinion. It screams realism in a way that few other fursuits can.

Direct Link

Upcoming Furry Documentary

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 09:32:14 GMT

So there's a documentary about the furry fandom and the members thereof. It's called "American Furry: Life, Liberty and the Fursuit of Happiness." It's still in progress, but they've released two preview videos, one of which I've posted below. Looks interesting. Should be another good explanation of furries to the world.

Direct Links:
Part 1
Part 2

Project Website

Making Better Webpages

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 05:40:22 GMT

I love making websites. They combine my love for programming with my love for good visual design. Both are skills I have worked for years to achieve. Perhaps one day I'll get time and use those skills for this very Livejournal. For now, however, I'll make due by telling all of you some of my tips for making your pages better.

I'm going to start off by assuming that you're making your sites from scratch in a text editor. If you are not, shame on you! You really need to know XHTML and CSS at the code level to get the kinds of professional looking sites you really desire. That's a subject I'll save for later.

So, this time I'm going to cover the very end of website development, after you've made the website, make sure your website is standards compliant.

To do this, the W3C has made it extremely easy for you. Just post the URL, the file, or the text of the file on their validator webpage, and click "Check".

Depending on how you made your site, it will test it against one of several standards. It will warn you of most errors and warnings. It's to your and your visitor's benefit to make sure you have no errors or warnings. If you can do that, your site will be standards compliant! And you can use one of these nice little buttons:

W3C Validator
Validated Buttons

Rise of the Video Game: Second Life

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 03:44:46 GMT

I've been busy lately, which is why it took me so long to look up the final episode of Discovery Channel's special on video games, "Rise of the Video Game." While I like the series, and it has a great history toward the beginning, I think they spend far too much time studying the social and cultural aspects of games. These are game's we are talking about here, I don't want to hear about why Missile Command is such a story of that time in American history. Games are about having fun. That's my opinion anyway.

So part three of episode five talks about online communities. The first half of it is about professional gamers and gaming conventions. The second half of this video is about Second Life, arguably not a video game at all. It was funny how many furry characters they show. I know that Second Life has a very large furry population, so that's understandable. The narrator and commenters kind of shrugged off the existence of animal avatars as a manifestation of the Totem. The word furry wasn't used, but it was fun to see their reactions to something they likely weren't expecting when planning the documentary.

Full Video

Charizard Cosplay

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 07:23:21 GMT

I feel no shame in telling you guys that I like Pokémon. It's a great game series with fun characters. Whilst looking for fursuit-related stuff on YouTube, I happened across a well made anthro Charizard costume, made and worn by Tusami. The fact that she can wear clothes instead of a full-body fursuit makes it look much more natural to move around in. Nice job, Tusami!

Full Video

LOLCODE

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 07:13:37 GMT

Ever wished you could write a program in LOLCAT speak and have it work? The thought never crossed your mind, you say? Well, fear not! It's already implemented, though a lot of work still has to be done. That's right, BTW, ORLY, and KTHXBYE are all valid statements in this language. Okay, so it isn't a language per se, but it's been implemented on top of other languages like Javascript and Perl.

Here are a few fun examples:

Prints out values from 0 to 10 (I think)


HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
IM IN YR LOOP
    UP VAR!!1
    VISIBLE VAR
    IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10? KTHXBYE
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE

Opens and prints filed named "LOLCATS.TXT", or if an error occurs, handles said error.


HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
PLZ OPEN FILE "LOLCATS.TXT"?
    AWSUM THX
        VISIBLE FILE
    O NOES
        INVISIBLE "ERROR!"
KTHXBYE

And, of course, the inevitable "Hai World" program.


HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE

Had enough? Want more? You got it!

Simple Steps to Faster Code (Part 1)

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 08:14:31 GMT

The very last thing you should do to your code is make it fast. Your first concern should be making code that works, then make your code easy to read. And by read, I mean people other than you should be able to understand your code after a short time. Readable code is almost as important as working code, so no slacking.

But assuming you've done all that, there are some simple steps that you can take to make your program run a little bit (or a lot) faster, and these don't effect the readability much, if at all.

Step 1. Reverse the loop
Looping is often the slowest part of a program because you are doing a fast operation so many times that it becomes a slow operation, not to mention the overhead required to run the loop. You should reduce how much each loop does. One way is to make your loop run backwards. Obviously, this kind of technique will only work on loops that don't care what order they execute in, perhaps you need to add a 5 to every element in an array. You can make that loop faster by counting down to 0 than counting up to the array length.

The reason is because you reduce the number of times you access the length property to once, and you count down to a well-known number: 0. Some programming languages can process logical operations on 0 better than some arbitrary number. So let's look at the code.

The original loop:


for (var i = 0; i < a.length; i++)
{
   a[i] += 5;
}

This code segment, with an array of 1 million numbers, takes about 1423 milliseconds to operate (almost 1.5 seconds). The code and tests are being done in Javascript for simplicity, but the technique can be applied to many languages.

Now, the reversed loop:


for (var i = a.length - 1; i > 0; i--)
{
   a[i] += 5;
}

This code segment, with the same million numbers, takes about 1357 milliseconds to operate, a savings of 66 milliseconds. Admittedly, this isn't all that impressive, but we're talking about Javascript here. The difference will likely be more drastic in other languages. Additionally, not every speed enhancement you add will make your program faster. It might actually make it slower, so be sure to check for that. But if you're making your program for speed, every little bit helps.

Bonus version:


var i = a.length;
while (i > 0)
{
   a[--i] += 5;
}

So here, I removed the line that decrements the loop by sticking it inside the brackets and using its return value as the array index. This relatively major change saves us an additional 41 milliseconds, for a total savings of a little more than a tenth of a second. Not bad.

Keep in mind though, that this kind of change is a bit more complicated, so you'll want to make sure you test it to ensure it does the same job as the other code. Notice that we don't subtract the one from the length before entering the loop because the decrement happens before we access the array element (--i vs. i--).

Alright folks, try that on for size. If you can't use this code in your projects, I hope you've at least had fun learning something new.

NetNewsWire is Free

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 02:36:14 GMT

Newsgator has made their popular Mac RSS feed reader, NetNewsWire, free to download (no more lite version for me). For the uninitiated, Wikipedia - Feed Reader.

Download it here

And for the Windows users out there, Feed Demon is now also free.

Hello

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 02:27:38 GMT

I'm Coding Dragon. I hope you like technology, because I sure do. It's likely that technology is all that I will post about, that and furry-related stuff.

Have a pleasant day.