First impressions on Ruby on Rails

April 11, 2013 – 9:39 pm Tags: ,

In my job at Ribbon, I’ve been using Ruby on Rails a lot – that is what the Ribbon service is built with afterall.

This has been my first time working with Rails, so read on for some thoughts.

Read the rest of this entry »

Knockout vs Backbone vs Angular

March 16, 2013 – 4:48 am Tags: , , ,

There’s a lot of talk of various client-side kind-of-mvc libraries. Three of the popular ones I’ve used are Knockout, Backbone and Angular.

While there are other comparisons of the three, I feel many of them don’t really touch on some of the aspects that I’ve come to learn from my experiences with the three.

Read the rest of this entry »

Review: Can a 15 USD gaming mouse be better than 60+ USD ones?

February 23, 2013 – 10:50 am Tags:

Now for something slightly different from the usual content of this blog, a product review! You get to actually hear and see me, or, well, my hands.

Parsing and evaluating PHP in Haskell: Part 2

January 23, 2013 – 10:39 am Tags: ,

Last week I wrote a post about a PHP parser / evaluator I wrote in Haskell. I explained some of the parts on how the parser itself was designed to process PHP code into an abstract syntax tree.

Continuing from where we left off in the previous part, in this post I’ll discuss the actual evaluation part.

Read the rest of this entry »

Parsing and evaluating PHP in Haskell: Part 1

January 16, 2013 – 2:35 am Tags: ,

The other day I uploaded a new experimental project on GitHub – A Haskell PHP parser / evaluator. It doesn’t understand 100% of all PHP syntax, but it was an interesting experiment nevertheless.

Here’s some insights and other thoughts from working on the code.

Read the rest of this entry »

Post-mortem: Battlefield 3 Web Commander

November 17, 2012 – 7:43 pm

I thought I’d write a sort of “lessons learned” thing about my Battlefield 3 related NodeJS application.

As of writing this, the service has been down for several months. The very first idea with it was simply to see if it could be done. Then, the next idea was to see if I could make a few bucks with it. Overall, I’m in the negatives with it, but I had one paying customer so that’s something right there ;)

Continue reading for some more insights…

Read the rest of this entry »

How I rickrolled 15 000 people with one email

September 3, 2012 – 5:24 pm

I thought I’d share a funny story from some years ago.

This was when I was subcontracting at a Certain Large Finnish Mobile Phone Maker.

It involved email and rickrolling.

Rickrolling a lot of people.

Read the rest of this entry »

Could you use Minecraft to teach programming?

July 22, 2012 – 4:11 pm Tags: , , ,

There are two mods (that I’m aware of) for Minecraft which let you build computers inside the game.

ComputerCraft allows you to have Lua-programmable computers and robots, with basic wired and wireless networking capabilities. RedPower 2 on the other hand has a 6502-like CPU based computers, which are programmable either using 6502 Assembly or FORTH.

What if you used Minecraft and one of these mods as an environment to teach programming?

Read the rest of this entry »

I made a thing: Planetside 2 minigame

July 8, 2012 – 10:51 am Tags: , , , ,

Random ideas and idle hands lead from one thing to another. While waiting for the Planetside 2 (a large scale MMOFPS) beta to land, I decided to make a hex-grid of the game’s map.

Once the map is complete, someone suggests it should be colored in one of the three in-game faction’s colors… then I realize, why not just let the user click the map to change the color of a hex to his favorite faction’s?

End result: In the span of 12 or so hours, thousands of people come to play a game where the sole purpose is to franctically click hexes in competition with everyone else playing it.

Read on to find out what on earth am I talking about, how it worked (hint: node.js) and some thoughts on why it became so popular for a while.

Read the rest of this entry »

Best practices for building embeddable widgets

May 26, 2012 – 2:55 pm Tags: , , ,

With all the embeddable buttons, such as Facebook like buttons, and widgets like Disqus comments and whatnot these days, you’d think there was some nice info on how they are actually built.

But it turns out no, not really. I found this first hand when we had to build some FB like button style things at work, and had to basically invent the whole process myself.

Here’s some ideas and best practices for implementing embeddable widgets in the style of FB like buttons or anything else. Some of this is based on an answer I gave on Stack Overflow on a similar topic.

Read the rest of this entry »