I’ve been playing around with Node.js recently and taking some of the neat online lessons available through Nodeschool. One of the lessons involved streaming realtime data between the client and server using Socket.io.

This sounded insanely powerful and fun, so I took a break from the rest of the lessons and started playing around with Socket.io. They have a tutorial that explains how to build a simple, realtime chat application using its library in about 20 minutes.

I’ve uploaded the results of this little project to Github and you can view it right here. This little web app is more or less a result of tutorial and I’ve added some additional stuff as I played around with it:

• Usernames!
• Number of active users!
• Display a list of all connected users!
• Check for identical usernames and prompt for different name
• Timestamps on messages!
• Sanitizing user input!
• Properly autolink URLs!
• Detect if a link to an image is pasted in and expand!
• Display welcome message on connect

All in all, it’s been a really fun learning process and has given me some ideas on how to use Node.js for future realtime applications.

Note: You can see this in action on Heroku. You’ll probably be the only one only, but hey! https://davechat.herokuapp.com/

This past weekend, I played around with jQuery, JavaScript, and Twitter’s API to create a web app that displays realtime search results for various baseball teams. I figure this is particularly important since pitchers and catchers report in about 10 days! 🙂

Anyway, the goal of this project was to rapidly build out a web app that could search and parse publicly available data (e.g., tweets!) for mentions of particular baseball teams while using various jQuery and JavaScript libraries. I could see this app having potentially wider uses beyond baseball such as returning the latest tweets from an event or hashtag. It also gave me a chance to use various libraries and frameworks as well. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

You can see it in action right here and the source code is available on Github.

Earlier this year, I joined a group on Meetup dedicated to creating, analyzing, and talking about digital maps. It’s organized by the fine folks at #Maptime, who have an amazing enthusiasm for all things map related. It sounded like something that’s right up my alley, considering all the time I spend thinking about maps.

Last night was project night. All sorts of folks were there, working on complicated issues such as transit, land use, green space, climate effects. It’s kind of inspiring!

I went to focus on some less lofty goals — I just wanted to get some experience playing with a JavaScript mapping library created by a company called Mapbox. My goal was to get the library up and running and then use it to display some geo-encoded data from a service I happen to use a lot: Foursquare.

It’s no secret that I really like Foursquare — mainly for keeping track of our adventures far and wide. I found a helpful PHP library for converting Foursquare (and other social networking) data into GeoJSON, which is needed by the JavaScript mapping libraries. After a couple of hours of hacking around, I got something up and running!

Pretty neat stuff! I have some ideas on how to improve this and some additional data that I want to show in the future.

This past weekend, I completed my first official half marathon after participating in the 32nd annual Kaiser Permanente San Francisco Half Marathon! The course was fairly flat and wound its way through Golden Gate Park and along Ocean Beach. You couldn’t have asked for better better weather or scenery! Overall, it was the perfect event for a new runner like myself.

My official result? 2:17:32. That’s kind of the nice thing about your first half marathon — any time is a new personal record. I’ve been training off and on for the last few months (and indeed, I could have trained more) and was hoping to hit 2 hours.

As it turns out, I was on pace to do it until one of my calves started to cramp up exactly half way through the race, forcing me to take a stretching break and limp through the remainder of the course.

That’s me at mile 8! via @kerryme.

That said, it was still a really positive and fun experience and it’s something I’d like to do more of! Which is good, because I signed up for the Oakland Running Festival in March. Oh, boy!

A couple things I learned:

• I brought my own water bottle (mainly so I could eat some of the gross energy gels that I brought with me). Overall, I wasn’t too distracted by it — I had brought a disposable bottle just in case it was annoying and I needed to chuck it. However, I skipped a bunch of water stations at the beginning of the race since I figured I had water. Big mistake! I should have taken advantage of the free water and gatorade (and used it to time when I should have consumed the gels). As it is, I ran out of water at around mile 10.
• The gels really helped! I had the Cliff Bar variety. While they were really thick and gross to consume, I really felt that they gave me energy and I didn’t really hit a wall until the last mile and a half or so of the race. More than anything, I was distracted about my tight calf!
• Someone else had mentioned this to me in the past, but I basically found someone who was running at a pace I was mostly comfortable with and I ended up sticking close to them for the first 6 miles. Trying to keep up with him was kind of a fun game.
• I also discovered the “awful truth about jogging that no one ever talks about.” Oh, man is it true!

In part I, I explained how I’m attempting to write a webapp that can solve simple Sudoku puzzles. Since then, I’ve made some progress. This series will track what I’ve been working on, learning, and any difficulties I’m encountering.

With a goal in mind, it was time to just dive in and go.

Step 1: Oh God, what is this even…

At first, it was kind of overwhelming. Where do I even start? How the heck am I going to even tackle any of this?

After learning the basics of Javascript loops, functions, arrays, and objects, thanks to Codecademy, I was mostly ready to go. What was my real first step? How the heck do I even manipulate data on a webpage, let alone collect and analyze it?

After a few tries, I had a simple project featuring a table (with cells individually labeled) up and running!

After some more tinkering, I was able to get the “Generate Numbers!” button to actually randomly generate the numbers 1 through 9 and fill in the cells without repeating any numbers. Sweet!

Hey, that’s kind of cool. Now we’re getting somewhere! I think I was ready to take it to the next level.

Step 2: Okay… I guess we need to make a fake Sudoku grid.

There’s probably simpler ways to go about doing this, but I ended up spending a lot of time figuring out how to build a Sudoku grid in the first place. Hey, I wanted this project to look somewhat presentable when I showed it off and (hopefully) finished it.

HTML tables were driving me crazy, so I just straight up stole this helpful thing after Googling for an answer. It looks pretty good. Pretty, pretty, pretty good.

“Wow, sir. That looks so good that I’d like to take two!”

Alright, one mission accomplished. Now onto another mission. How do I completely fill out the entire grid? I started with this, because I wanted to understand how to try to isolate certain sections of the Sudoku grid and see if I could create a series of non-duplicated random numbers.

Why did I start with randomly generating numbers? I initially thought I would just try to brute force solve some simple beginner’s level puzzles, but I later realized how ridiculous this would be. There’s a ridiculous number of possible permutations to try.

For now though, I decided to start filling out random numbers by row. This is what my initial code looked like.

[javascript]
function fillTable(row) {
for (var i = 1; i <= maxColumns; i++) {
var selectCell = row + i;
//console.log(selectCell);
document.getElementById(selectCell).innerHTML = fillCell(selectCell);
if (i == maxColumns && row != maxRow) {
i = 0;
row = nextChar(row);
} else if (i == maxColumns && row == maxRow) {
break;
}
}
}
[/javascript]

Did it work? Yes! I ended up with grid of random numbers filled out! Sure, there’s really no rhyme or reason for where numbers ended up, but it certainly looks like a completed Sudoku puzzle, right?

Step 3: Let’s put some real numbers in there

Alright, entering a bunch of random numbers into a grid is pretty fun for all of 5 minutes. (To be honest, it was pretty fun) But to take this to the next level, I really needed to have the beginning of a Sudoku puzzle in there.

A few quick Google searches later, and I found a suitable candidate! One thing I decided early on was to store all this data in an object — mostly so I could easily update it with different puzzles later on. It ended up looking like this.

[javascript]
var allCells = {
a1: "", a2: 1, a3: "", a4: 6, a5: "", a6: 4, a7: 3, a8: "", a9: 7,
b1: 3, b2: 5, b3: 6, b4: "", b5: "", b6: "", b7: "", b8: "", b9: "",
c1: "", c2: "", c3: "", c4: "", c5: 5, c6: 3, c7: 6, c8: 9, c9: "",
d1: "", d2: 8, d3: 3, d4: 2, d5: 6, d6: "", d7: 4, d8: "", d9: 9,
e1: "", e2: "", e3: "", e4: "", e5: "", e6: "", e7: "", e8: "", e9: "",
f1: 4, f2: "", f3: 5, f4: "", f5: 7, f6: 8, f7: 2, f8: 6, f9: "",
g1: "", g2: "", g3: "", g4: "", g5: "", g6: "", g7: "", g8: "", g9: "",
h1: "", h2: "", h3: "", h4: "", h5: "", h6: "", h7: 7, h8: 2, h9: 4,
i1: 7, i2: "", i3: 9, i4: 4, i5: "", i6: 2, i7: "", i8: 8, i9: ""
};
[/javascript]

On top of this, I wanted to easily differentiate the initial numbers that were created on a brand new board (so I could easily see what my script was generating, versus what was already in place on the board). I wrote a function to modify the DOM and change the font weight and background color of the starting cells.

[javascript]
function setupBoard(row) {
var row = row;
var cellValue = 0;
for (i = 0; i < maxColumns; i++) {
//console.log("ROW: " + row + (i+1));
cellValue = allCells[row+(i+1)];
document.getElementById(row + (i+1)).innerHTML = allCells[row+(i+1)];

// Just highlighting what cells we initially started with.
if (Number(cellValue) > 0) {
document.getElementById(row + (i+1)).style.fontWeight = "bold";
document.getElementById(row + (i+1)).style.backgroundColor = "#F2F2F2";
} else {
// Use this to count up total number of empty cells that we need to solve for
// The idea is that we can use this to detect if we’re stuck
emptyCells++;
}
}
}
[/javascript]

You’ll notice I have a lot of console.log() calls commented out. I liberally used these all over the place so I could make sure things were working correctly. Anyway, once all that was said and done, it ended up generating a board that looked like this.

Wow, we’re starting to chug along pretty nicely! Next time, I’ll talk about the million different functions I created in trying to solve this.

This series of posts will track what I’ve been working on, new things I’ve been learning, and any difficulties I’m encountering along the way. Buckle up!

One of the things I resolved to do this year was spend a bit more time learning to code. Sure, sure, I’ve dabbled in things like PHP and have used MySQL to build some pretty basic websites and tools.

Even with the little I’ve done, I’ve always enjoyed it and have found myself losing track of time while trying to solve some problem or just get this certain thing to work. It reminds me of a similar thing I’ve encountered with the addictive nature of Sid Meier’s Civilization games.

“Just one more turn…”

Late last year, I mentioned to a coworker my desire to spend a bit more time learning various techniques and theory. He suggested that if I’m serious, I should really just start trying to tackle some problems and we could go over it together.

The first thing he suggested? I should build a application to solve a Sudoku puzzle.

What??!

As tends to happen, the end of the year got a bit hectic and I put this project on the backburner. When I originally considered it, I was going to try and write it in PHP. However, I recently saw this goofy map of popular programming languages by state and thought, “I’ve never really done anything with Javascript. Maybe I should try that.”

So, that’s what I’ve been doing the last few weeks. Between taking some awesome online courses through Codecademy and Udemy, as well as reading up on various books, I’ve been trying to really get into it.

How am I doing? I’ll try to share my progress in future updates.

Nothing makes me feel ready to take on the day like my NASA mug full of fresh coffee. 

The last few months have been pretty awesome for my coffee game. Between gifts from our wedding, Christmas presents, and my birthday, I’ve started to build up quite a collection of devices to help feed my caffeine addiction.

• Chemex
• Aeropress
• Variable temp electric gooseneck kettle
• Digital scale with timer

It’s been awesome and fun experimenting with different ways to make coffee and see how it affects some of my favorite types of beans.

One of the things that I’ve recently started doing is creating a crazy Google form to track all the different coffee preparation methods I’ve been using. It looks like this.

What sorts of additional details am I missing that I should be recording here? It’s probably getting a little bit ridiculous, but hey!

This sort of thing appeals to my sense of experimentation and adventure. I should probably put one together for my Aeropress as well. File that one under #weekendprojects.

Santa Cruzin’

Historical fiction and World War II are two subjects that I love reading about. Even better when they’re combined, in my opinion. I just finished City of Thieves by David Benioff and it’s one of my favorite books that I’ve read in awhile.

It follows the antics of two teenage Russian boys during the siege of Leningrad in the early 1940’s. After the boys are caught breaking the law and thrown in prison, they are given reprieve by a local military commander. Find a dozen eggs in 5 days and their lives will be spared.

From then on, both hilarity and catastrophe ensue. It’s full of (mis)adventure, humor, and even has some deep reflections on what it means to be alive. There were parts where I laughed out loud and other parts that nearly brought a tear to my eye.

For anyone who’s a fan of historical fiction, especially when set in World War II, I highly recommend this book. It’s great. And at 260 pages, you can get through it really quick.