My latest project:

So Taylor Otwell just merged my pull request. I promise this is my last post freaking out about contributing to open source projects. BUT TAYLOR OTWELL.

node.js (sic) is a really cool runtime environment that allows for asynchronous, event driven coding. It uses JavaScript and runs on Google’s open source V8 JS engine.

I love the chat service ChatStep, but they advertise privacy and encryption without being willing to put their money where there mouth is and open source the system for full transparency.

I was frustrated with ChatStep’s purported security but unwillingness to open up their backend, so I decided to be the change I wanted to see in the world. I wrote an open source, mobile friendly, elegant chat that can handle image messaging. I tried also to comment my code (perhaps a bit too) liberally, as I wanted to be helpful to others who were starting in the same place I was.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
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My first pull request to the Reddit codebase just got OK’d for merge by the admin. I officially contributed to Reddit production code!

Okay, fanboying done.

I was hoping to contribute to some documentation for a project that’s especially near to my heart. One of the biggest issues was inconsistent comma usage, so I wanted to remedy that. To aid me, I dipped my toes into Perl and RegEx to create OxfordPerl, and simple script that uses regular expressions to find sentences that should have an Oxford (AKA serial) comma, but don’t.

The script performs adequately; it rarely misses a spot that should have one, but often is fooled by other comma-delimited parentheticals. For the most part, though, it works well: in 448KB of text, I received two correctly identified issues, and five false positives. Not great, but it does what I need.

Wow. Git is so much better than SVN. It just makes more sense. I feel like being raised on SVN has been like training wheels, and now that I’m starting to use Git with GitHub in more complex way, I can actually go places on my metaphorical bicycle.

I like it.

slowly because his PHP packages were bad. He got as far as yanking out all PHP packages, and halfway through removing all his Webtatic repos before he passed out. I can only imagine what waking up to that would have been like.

I finally have a GitHub profile. I have a few projects I’ll be adding to it over the next little while so I can have real version control going on for personal stuff, as well as a profile to put on my resume. Woo!

“Book ’em, Danno.”

–Detective Lieutenant Steve McGarrett, Hawaii Five-O

My most recent project has been working with page scraping and HTML parsing in order to work with our publicly accessible arrest records to parse them into a more view-able format. From conception to completion, this app took about 12 man hours – a new record for me for this type of project.

For privacy reasons, I’ve redacted the info from the screenshots (and for the same privacy reasons, opted to not make this app public beyond a closed alpha). I’m working on tidying the code and getting it up on GitHub (though school is first on my mind right now).

Oh goodness – it’s the beginning of the end of this blog… I almost made a post solely to apologize for not posting more often – that’s like the death rattle of a blog. *cringe*

ANYWAY.

What’s been going on in my life (abridged):

• Got back from an awesome trip in Texas
• Have been hard at work building server provisioning procedures at work (I’ll post some on here when I’m done; they’re great resources for anyone trying to take a box from bare metal to server)
• My magnet is still in my finger, with no change from the last post (shocker!). I think it’s hit an equilibrium point in extrusion, and may be in my finger for a while longer.
• I’ve got a big 100mL bottle of lidocaine I got from Thailand for $20 (much better deal)
• I’ve got 2 more magnets in the mail, this time new and improved from the research done by Amal and Glims over at Biohack.me. They’re titanium nitride coated; much more durable and resistant to fouling than my last ones. Gonna wait for a bit and do another implantation! :D

Things are pretty busy with work at the moment, but it’s just a few weeks until I’m off and relaxing until school!

I had an awesome weekend of kneeboarding and tubing at Lake Livingston in Texas, and somehow the magnet stayed in! It was tender at a few points, but it has survived the hardest weekend of the trip, so I’m back to expecting a gradual extrusion rather than being painfully popped out.