Category: Development

  • A raytracer for Google Chrome Native Client

    A couple of months ago, I applied for a job. I’d been working for the previous 6 years in Java, and the job was a C++ post so I needed to learn C++ quickly – as a good project to get me going, I wrote a raytracer. I got the job, and I’m about 5…

  • Free cross-platform dynamic DNS with wildcards

    This will roughly explain how to get wildcard DNS working for free (any-words-here.yoursubdomain.yourdomain.com) on a connection which gets assigned dynamic IPs. I’d like to make sure subdomain.example.com is always up to date with my home IP, and be able to request subdomains (like someword.subdomain.example.com) that resolve to the same IP. These are useful if you…

  • VIM quick fix (for arrow keys in insert mode)

    When using VIM in insert mode, when I try and move around with the arrow keys, it inserts A, B, C and D instead. Not completely sure why, but typing: :set nocompatible seems to fix the problem. You can make this permanent by sticking set nocompatible in .vimrc in your home directory. Anyone know why?!

  • How to create pages outside of the WordPress installation, that use WordPress themes

    This is a quick guide on how to get  a file anywhere in your webhost’s file tree to serve its content as if it was part of WordPress – this can be useful if you already have a site that you only want to use WordPress for part of, or if you have WordPress that…

  • Let Firefox read local files during development

    Use with caution!! By default, Firefox doesn’t allow resources on the web to access local files. However, when debugging a web application, this is sometimes useful (for example, if you have a remote web system that takes a long time to rebuild/update, and want to make a lot of small trial-and-error changes to javascript/css). This…

  • Random dev doodling – JavaScript 3D cube

    Being a developer, I spend quite a bit of time playing around with programming bits and bobs. A little while ago, I had a relatively old Nokia that supported J2ME (without floating point) so I decided to try and write a simple 3d renderer for it – having no FPU (floating point unit) I had…

  • Quick howto: init.d script for glassfish 3

    Glassfish is a reference implentation of the Java EE 6 application server – it’s fairly easy to download and get running, but I wanted to get it running automatically on system startup on my linux server (which at the moment is running on coLinux – probably post about separately that at some point). I’m assuming…