Khan Academy Visualisations Are Pretty Khool

Back in early 2011, when I first started full-time work as a developer, I was working at an investment bank. Funnily enough, I knew absolutely nothing about Finance at the time, having never been interested in business or commerce at school or, frankly, anywhere else. However, my manager suggested it'd be good to get up to speed with all the lingo and whatnot to "speak our clients' language". He gave me a 900 page tome called "Securities & Financial Instruments" that made about as much sense to me as the first time I tried to read Assembly code.

Then, I was fortunate enough to stumble across this video on TED about an education platform called Khan Academy and this quirky but engaging guy named Sal Khan. Not only did I learn about Finance from Sal's videos, I realised I actually liked it!

Fast forward three and a half years, I'm not working at the bank anymore but I love investing and I love tracking my finances; so much so I even developed a web app called Savvy for it. And Khan Academy has gone from being a hundred Youtube videos of Sal drawing on blackboards to a really impressive education platform covering everything from Prehistoric Art to Cryptography. I've learnt a ton, not only about Finance & Economics, but also about early 19th century history, WWI, probability & statistics, even some things about programming I didn't already know.

One of the really cool things they've implemented is the Computer Science platform, which allows anyone from beginner to expert programmer to create games, simulations and any other funky visual project they can think of. It was created by the jQuery man John Resig & his team, using his ProcessingJS library, and involves a really responsive online editing environment inspired by Bret Victor's talk on instant feedback & inventing on principle.

I managed to create this interactive visualisation of plasma fractals... although it's still a work in progress! I highly encourage you to check out John's blog post about the platform, or simply to get stuck in creating something cool.

Hang With Me: An App Built With Meteor JS Framework

This is the first app that I built using the incredibly excellent Meteor Javascript framework.

Basically it is a browser-based, multiplayer version of Hang Man, where players race against one another to guess a randomly-generated word. You can play with friends, randoms or even solo.

I have it hosted on Meteor's own free hosting here.

You can fork it on Github here.

Or check out other cool projects written using Meteor at Made With Meteor.

Enjoy!

Two Dropbox Accounts on One Computer

In a previous post, I showed how you can get two maxed-out Dropbox accounts for $5. As one of my readers pointed out though, this raises the question: how do I run them both on my machine at the same time?

Now that you have two Dropbox accounts, you might ask "Sure, but how do I use them both on the same machine??"

Read on to find out...

How To Paste Without Formatting, on OSX and Windows

One thing that used to really grind my gears was having to paste into Notepad or Text Wrangler every time I wanted to remove formatting from copied text. It's such a tedious and seemingly unnecessary process.

So... how do I avoid this now?

In Windows

There's a simple and excellent program that one of my work colleagues got me onto named PureText. 

1. Download PureText.
2. Set it to load on startup (or don't, this will simply save you the effort)
3. Copy text as per usual with CTRL + C (or right click etc.)
4. To paste without formatting you simply press Windows Key + V, instead of CTRL + V.

In Mac OS X

OS X has a built-in shortcut, albeit not that short: 

Command + Shift + Option + V

This performs a command called Paste and Match Style which doesn't so much remove formatting as matches the formatting of your destination. 

You can re-map this to a simpler shortcut following the instructions on this Lifehacker post. For your purposes you'll want to select All Applications in the shortcut menu, Menu Title = "Paste and Match Style" (no quotes) and choose whatever shortcut you want.

I hope that helps you save a few seconds, a few hundred times!

Recursively chmod only files or directories

Hi Floppers,

I wrote a little script a while back that allows you to recursively change permissions on a directory tree in unix, specifying permissions for either directories or files or both.

From the documentation:

 
# Takes a path to recurse through and options for specifying directory and/or 
# file permissions.
# Outputs a list of affected directories and files.
# 
# If no options are specified, it recursively resets all directory and file
# permissions to the default for most OSs (dirs: 755, files: 644).

Check out chmodr.sh from Gist and feel free to tinker, comment or just use as you wish.

Plasma Fractal Generator Using Meteor Javascript Framework

Hey Floppers,

A while back I created a couple of neat apps using the Meteor Javascript framework and I thought it might be nice to share them with you all.

The first is a plasma fractal generator... you know, that thing you did for a project at university and then never looked at again for the rest of your life?

Check it out:
http://plasma.meteor.com/

If you haven't checked out meteor.com, do so immediately! I suppose saying that it is a framework is a bit of an understatement; it is more of a platform consisting of a number of proven frameworks like node.js and handlebars.

There are a few totally awesome features on top of these though, such as live page updates when you edit source code, which is really nice for development, and latency compensation, which is great for online games. You can watch the screencast on their site for more details; it's pretty mind-blowing!

Even better news, they recently secured an $11.2 million development budget, so the developers can work on Meteor full-time. This means we're sure to see consistent, quality improvements on this burgeoning platform in the weeks and months to come.

Seriously, have a play around with it and if you make something cool post it on their Made With Meteor site (I got first post on their with my hangwithme app, no biggie, whatevs; I'll post that up soon too).

xoxo Gossip Girl

Simple In-Site Search Using Google Chrome

Okay, I don't know about you, but as soon as I placed my grubby little mitts on that beautiful little thing called Google Chrome, there wasn't a ActiveX site or Firefox plug-in alive that would tempt me back to those other dinosaurs.

Now that I've pissed off any non-Chrome users around, I'll share with you a neat little tip I stumbled upon this morning by accident...

In the Chrome url/search bar, if you type in a popular website, then press Space, then enter a search term, it will perform an in-site search for you.

In fact, if you start typing the name of a popular website, then press Tab, it will complete the site AND allow you to perform an in-site search.

Detailed instructions below...

How to Max Out your Dropbox, Twice! for a Fiverr

I love Dropbox.

I think it's one of those neat, simple apps that works so well you barely even notice it.
It's great for sharing files between the office and home, sharing stuff with friends, synchronising between dual-booted operation systems and even as a totally painless backup for all your important documents.

I use it so much, in fact, that I completely maxed out my existing account last week. However, a friend of mine from work showed me a totally simple (and legal!) way to get a tonne of extra free space for dirt cheap using fiverr.com, a site where people will do a whole stack of things for you for the miserly sum of five bucks!

I've read a number of other guides on how to max out your Dropbox account but they all involve more time and effort than I care to invest. This one involves basically no effort on your behalf and you'll only need to wait a couple of hours before you get the extra space.

Read on to find out how...

Triple Boot Windows 7, Mac OS X Snow Leopard & Ubuntu 10.04

Hey Floppers and welcome back to Big Floppy Donkey Disk!

Today I'm going to share with you all my most recent adventure into the realms of multi-booting operation systems.

Why would I want to triple boot Windows, Mac OS X and Ubuntu?

Well...

Windows
Windows has been my OS of choice for most of my life; it's flexibility, compatibility and gaming capabilities are excellent. Whether you like Microsoft or not, it is the dominant OS so you're probably going to need to use it.

Ubuntu
Ubuntu is the up-and-coming giant-killer of the Linux world. Being Linux, it is free, incredibly fast (loads instantly), secure and open to customization. Ubuntu itself has an incredibly helpful online community (see http://ubuntuforums.org/), dream-like package management (every application on your computer can be upgraded with the click of a button) and a user interface that I personally find easier to navigate than Mac OS X (although I am still at early stages with both OSes). And seriously, compared to other Linux distros I've tried, everything just seems to work in Ubuntu.

OS X
I've never been a Mac fanboy, in fact I've spent a lot of my uni life paying out on them. However, with the arrival of the iPhone/iPad, and the draconian restrictions on the Apple Developer Program, I've realised I'm going to have to suck it up and learn how to code Steve Jobs-style if I want to make some money on the smartphone market. Hence, I'm finally installing Mac OS X and am ready to be blown away by its style, user friendliness, security, Steve Jobs' sexy turtle-neck, etc. etc.

Why not just use wubi?

Two reasons: because wubi loads Ubuntu directly from the Windows partition, instead of its own filesystem, Ubuntu will run slower through wubi than via a side-by-side installation. Furthermore, I was unable to get wubi to install Ubuntu successfully on my dual-booted Windows 7/Snow Leopard machine. I believe it may have been to do with 64-bit Windows 7.

Okay, down to business...

Welcome to Big Floppy Donkey Disk

Howdy Floppers!

Welcome to the first post of what will hopefully be an occasionally useful blog on technology and other stuff!

Who am I?

I'm Francis. I recently finished a Software Engineering and Arts combined degree at The University of Melbourne and have six months of glorious nothingness before I have to start full-time employment.

In this time, I hope to develop an iPhone app, so there'll probably be a bit of that on here. I also run a web application development business called Square One I.T. with my business partner Kyle (check out his spiffy new blog: http://kylesinterestingstuff.blogspot.com/), so expect to see a fair bit of web dev and project management-related stuff too. I also plan to travel at the end of the year, so there may even be some hilarious traveling anecdotes!

But first, I'm going to talk about my most recent endeavour: triple booting Windows 7, Mac OSX Snow Leopard and Ubuntu 10.04.

Please feel more than welcome to post any comments, techie dilemmas or general queries on my posts and I'll do my darnedest to respond to them all.

Get Flopping!

Floppy Fran out.