Mr Speaker

Author Archives: Mr Speaker

#rimshot: zingers from tweetland

I just finished typing all this code, and boy are my arms tired! Wait, that doesn’t really work. Anyway, I did a search on twitter for the hash tag #rimshot yesterday and the results were not very funny. The problem was that seeing the term #rimshot is not the same as hearing “budum ching”. Hence, […]

Caine’s Arcade Fun Pass Generator

Caine’s Arcade is the coolest arcade ever (even better than Flynn’s Arcade and Bailey’s Arcade. The “pros” of Caine’s Arcade are that all the games are hand-built by a 9 year old, out of cardboard. But the “cons” are the prices: $1 gets you 4 plays, and $2 gets you a “Fun Pass” ™ valid […]

Syntax highlighting for writers

Ok, This was a “here’s an old project I’ve abandoned” type post, but after some interest in the matter I’m re-opening this for questions… Syntax highlighting for writers: what do you think? Yay, or nay? When you have a brilliant idea for a start-up, you mock up a prototype and show your intended audience. They’ll […]

Typesafe Console: behind the scenes

Scala, Play 2.0, CoffeeScript, real-time streams, server-sent events, (lots of) HTML5 canvas, local storage, push state, easter egg, … If you’ve worked in IT for long enough, you make sure you get yourself in a position where you no longer have to work on dull projects. It’s hard (dull projects are often very lucrative – […]

Weird EventSource problems? Watch your content-length!

Super short version: If you’re using Server Sent Events, and it doesn’t work in Firefox because “Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at…” and it’s not a CORS problem… make sure you’re not setting a content-length header. The end.

Colourising sprites in Canvas – part 2

And we’re back! In part one we looked at setting up a tinted palette for drawing our 8-bit masterpieces to canvas. Here’s what we’re going for today: rendering colourised sprites and tiles. We’ll be loading in the 4-color sprite sheet and rendering tiles from it with our chosen colours.

Translating marketing garbage

French is a beautiful language, so of course it makes sense that some right-wing crazies would fight like heck to keep English from ruining it. That’s exactly the intent behind Toubon Law – which mandates that any commercial publications written (or containing text) in another language also come with a visible French translation. This usually […]

Navigate the web with your gamepad

How crap is the mouse, right? Yeah, I know! So I made a greasemonkey script to do my websurfin’ using my NES-style USB gamepad. For those of you too excited to read on, take your gamepad-enabled build of Firefox and install Gamepad Navigator now! Up and down to scroll the page up and down. The […]