After watching “Kara is Self Aware”, I put my foot down and purchased “The Singularity is Near” by Ray Kurzweil. While the author would contend the book is anything but science fiction, I felt that, as a subject, the Singularity was woefully under-represented in my sci-fi reading. The Singularity describes an exponential growth in technological capability, but my own interest in Kurzweil’s opinions varied with an exponential decay. Visions of the Future Kurzweil has much to say on possible futures of the human race, and his predictions range from highly speculative to relatively concrete.

I’ve written a new article for the Bocoup.com weblog entitled “Third-Party JavaScript Development: Optimizing CSS Delivery”. You can find it here.

I’m not sure how I first heard about Bruce Schneier, but his ideas have appealed to me for a while now. He has an impressive background in computer cryptography, but his transition to a personality in the field of security that interests me most. Utilizing a technical background to build a more socially-relevant identity is a feat I personally hope to accomplish one day (just like Tony Stark, “Mannie” O’‘Kelly-Davis, or Mitchell Hundred).

I wrote a new article for the Bocoup weblog based on my experience with the Web Audio API and incorporating it into the upcoming web port of the game Fieldrunners. You can find it here. I was invited to join the project based on some work I recently did with Google, building a sort of “driver” for sound generation with Web Audio. This article is a somewhat high-level rundown of the strengths and weaknesses of the API as compared to HTML5 Audio.

A recent project at Bocoup had me searching for ways to programatically modify the user-agent string in Chrome. Searching the web yielded little evidence that this was possible, but luckily, I have a friend who works on Chrome. He clued me in to the WebRequest API, and I got to work creating my extension. If you want to try it out, you can download it here. If you’re interested in the technology, you can read about the code in an article I wrote for the Bocoup website.

I’ve been working with Rick and learning a bunch about what makes JavaScript so great. While refactoring some of my work in a code review, I recognized the Strategy pattern emerging. I wrote my first article for bocoup.com about employing this pattern in JavaScript. You can read it here. I have to say, though, that writing this article gave me a lot to think about in regards to classical design patterns and their implementations in JavaScript.

I am excited to announce that I have accepted a full-time position at the web development house Bocoup! I’ll be commuting to “the Loft” in South Boston beginning in June, and I can’t wait to get started! Watch this space for links to articles I write based on my work there.

A while back, after playing around with Firebug, I developed a method for saving streaming media delivered by Grooveshark.com. Since then, I have been thinking about ways to share this method with other people. I had some spare time this weekend, so I implemented the approach in a Google Chrome extension. You can download it here. Boris’s work with Chrome fueled my initial interest. As it turns out, programming extensions for Chrome is extremely easy!

Now that classes are over and my website is (mostly) done, I have the time to go back and review the code I wrote for the shared workspace. It was well-commented, but the code itself could use some legibility improvements. Plus, there are some interesting patterns I would like to try and apply, the simplest of which is the Constructor Pattern. While writing the code, I was wondering about the performance cost incurred when many instances of the same type define the same functions.

I’ve been thinking about running a RAID setup for a long time. Each time I upgrade my hard drive, disk failure becomes more scary. While building my new PC, I finally came to my senses. Ever since my media collection grew past a few gigs, the thought of losing it has worried me. It’s taken a lot of time to accumulate this stuff, after all! A RAID-1 (or even better, RAID-5) setup would eliminate all my worries, wouldn’t it?