Brian Slesinsky

PixelToy Returns

Fri, 02 May 2008 08:00 GMT

With the launch of Google App Engine, I decided to give it a spin by rewriting PixelToy, a Java Applet (and backend server) that I wrote more than a decade ago to learn Java. This time, the technologies I'm trying out are jQuery, Ajax, and Python.

PixelToy is a simple paint program where everyone who visits paints on the same canvas. The new Pixeltoy also lets you take a snapshot of your painting and see a gallery of pictures others have made; the gallery also has a feed.

How it works: the PixelToy web page sends each brush stroke to the server when you release the mouse button and polls the server for updates. The polling gets slower for inactive users.

(Warning: since anyone can paint anything they like and painting is anonymous, you never know what you'll find when you visit. I ask that visitors keep things generally "safe for work," but can't monitor it all the time.)

(And yes, this is also an excuse to post a gratuitious squid picture.)

Why can't Wall Street plan for emergencies?

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 21:30 GMT

When not following the election, I've found the latest financial crisis to be pretty interesting; how can so many smart people be collectively so stupid as to put the entire system at risk? I don't pretend to fully understand this stuff, but here are a few thoughts, from a spectator.

Capsule reviews of a few web comics I like

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 01:00 GMT

Maybe it's just that I haven't found the right web site yet, but discovering good web comics online seems a little harder than it ought to be. I went looking for new comics the other day, and found that lots of people make lists of their favorite comics but provide too little information: who wants to follow a blind link from a long list created by someone they don't know? On the other hand, there are a few websites that publish fairly serious critical articles about comics, but that's too much information when you're just looking for a new comic to read. And then there are the websites that review online and offline comics together, so you have to wade through stuff you can't read right now to get to the good stuff.

How is it possible that in the year 2008, a really good web comic review site hasn't spontaneously appeared out of the sea of obsession that is the Internet? It's a clear-cut case of market failure (or maybe just laziness on my part) that I could remain unaware of Girl Genius for several years after it started.

Until someone does start that website, I'll post a few reviews here and leave it to Google to get them to people who might find them useful:

Guice callbacks should take parameters

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 22:45 GMT

Guice is easy to use when you want to build a web of objects based on a static configuration. However, it gets awkward when you want to create multiple, similar webs of objects, where only a few nodes vary.

This is because Guice has no direct support for callbacks that take parameters. The only callback that's built into Guice is Provider.get().

I would like to see full support for callbacks with parameters in the next version of Guice. In this article, I'll sketch out how we could do it.

Suspicion

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 05:30 GMT

"There is the dangerous cliché in the financial world [that] everything depends on confidence. One could better argue the importance of unremitting suspicion."

- John Kenneth Galbraith

Inject is the new import

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 09:13 GMT

import com.example.Thing;
 
...
 
Thing.go();

import com.example.Thing;
...
@Inject
private Thing thing;
...
thing.go()

I've written before about how Guice works, but didn't explain why you would want to use it. Here's one way to think about it.

Northern California

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 01:00 GMT

Vacation pictures! These are from Mount Lassen, Mount Shasta, Redwood National Park, and the Charles M. Schultz museum in Santa Rosa.

Switched to Pyblosxom

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 00:25 GMT

No, I didn't fall off the face of the earth. I haven't posted because I've been busy, and also had a case of the blog migration blues. If everything has gone smoothly, the website should look exactly the same. (Attention conservation notice: lots of boring tech detail below.)

Proposed Hanson Quarry Expansion

Sun, 22 Jul 2007 02:54 GMT

Someone sent me an email in response to my article on Permanente Creek. Hanson Permanente Cement is requesting approval for a plan to "include an additional 917 acres of mining and reclamation activity and extend the termination date by 25 years." There is a public meeting on Thursday, July 26th, and the public is invited to submit topics to be considered in the Environmental Impact Report by August 1. A volunteer group called AD-HOC is opposing the expansion.

Posts I Liked

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 06:48 GMT

I don't know whether anyone has noticed it, so I'll mention it here: for a while now, I've been sharing links to blog posts and other web pages I liked in a widget at the bottom-right of each page on this website. You can see the whole list on this page, and there is also a feed.