New Blog Location

My blog has moved to //blog.jamie.ly.

Tabbed list to HTML in CoffeeScript

A friend asked for a script to converted a tabbed list of data to a nested HTML list. Here it is: //codepen.io/jamiely/pen/AbEjd. Before working on this, I didn’t know CodePen had live CoffeeScript editing. That feature moves it into the favorite spot above jsfiddle for live code editing. Given a sample of text like this: Convert […]

Setting up a MonoGame Mac Application with Xamarin Studio

Intro I wanted to try out the MonoGame framework, which allows for creating cross-platform games based on the XNA API. It wasn’t straightforward for me to run a Mac example (on OS X Mountain Lion). There were a number of steps I had to go through to get things working, including combing through forum posts. […]

Tetris Attack ClojureScript Update – Performance Update

Intro See my previous posts about a Tetris Attack implementation in ClojureScript. The game (as of tag v1.0.3) runs decently on my MacBook Air running Chrome 26. In FireFox 18, the game kind of crawls. Let’s try to figure out the problem. I’ll be looking at project tag v1.0.3. Open Chrome DevTools. Navigate to the […]

Book Notes – The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (Chapters 6-9)

Chapter 6: In the Lie Factory Rome had powerful families Poggio wanted to be apostolic scriptor Pope ruled many spiritually but had unstable physical kingdom Lots of cases in the papal court (the Roman Curia) He didn’t want to join the Church for fear of moral bankruptcy Roman Curia was perilous Lapo’s On the Excellence […]

Book Notes – The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (Chapters 1 – 5)

Notes for the book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt. Preface Greenblatt picked up Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things in a college book sale. He was struck by the ideas it espoused, including ideas on how to handle death. He had been fearful of death through his mother, who used […]

Tetris Attack ClojureScript Update – Garbage Blocks

In this v1.0.3 update to Tetris Attack Clojurescript, I implemented Garbage Blocks. In Tetris Attack, Garbage Blocks are dropped onto your playing field when your opponent makes a match. The dimensions of the block depend on the nature of your opponent’s match, whether it was a combo or a chain match. For now, I’ve implemented […]

Jessie

When Jessie started worked for Mr. Humphrey, she had no idea how she’d come to feel about him. In the mornings, while she prepared breakfast for the family, he’d stomp down the stairs bracing the laughing Robin upon his shoulders. How grateful My. Humphrey had always seemed for the meal, as if it wasn’t Jessie’s […]

ClojureScript – Tetris Attack

Intro Having completed a simple implementation of the game Breakout in Clojure, I decided my next Clojure project should be doing something with ClojureScript. Not only would it provide an opportunity to continue Clojure practice, but I’d be able to leverage existing knowledge I have about JavaScript (probably the language I am most familiar with), […]

Updating an old Flash project

In 2004, I wrote an implementation of Tetris in ActionScript 2 using Flash MX. I had thought the source code lost until just a few months ago. Upon finding that source, I immediately uploaded it to Github. Not too long afterwards, I tried to upon the .fla in the most recent version of Flash, without […]

Simulator Ruby Gem

Intro I’ve been working on this off and on for awhile. Simulator is a Ruby gem which provides functionality for creating discrete time models, and running those models. You can find the Homepage for the Simulator gem on Github. Take the following two examples included with the gem. Ball Drop Let’s say we want to model a […]

iOS App: Bunny Matcher

Introduction I recently finished a game for iOS called Bunny Matcher. This will probably be my last iOS app for awhile, as I want to do more Android development. I’m also ramping up with my new job doing iOS development, so I get plenty of practice with Objective-C every day. Bunny Matcher has the same […]

Clojure Breakout

I have been wanting to write some more Clojure code for awhile. Since I got a (somewhat) playable version of the Haskell Draughts implementation working, that gave me the time to do something short in Clojure. Although I have written some Clojure before for Project Euler, a lot of it was non-idiomatic, and I have […]

Haskell Draughts

I began this several months after a class I took on functional programming in Haskell. Learning Haskell was a huge eye opener in terms of thinking about programming and seeing what is out there. I’ve been working on it off (mostly off) and on since then, and finished a playable implementation this week. Especially after […]

Jumbly: A Jumble Game for iOS

I’ve been working on building my mobile development portfolio. While reviewing my repositories on GitHub, I came across a word game I wrote in ColdFusion for a presentation about Regular Expressions. I figured it might make a decent game, so I chose to implement it as my next iOS application. Jumbly is a word jumble-type […]

Jamie Ly

Developer, student, person