the importance of vowels

I'm working on an IWB app to show the various rules of phonics. The plan is for it to have multiple functions - a slideshow for rote drills of A is a a ant and so on, a speller, a matching game for sounds and letters, and a couple of other doohickeys including handwriting into the bargain.

It will be a long time in development because it'll be my first time working with audio in a web app, and it is, to put it mildly, something of a nightmare to try and get an efficient cross-browser solution going.

Here's the thing, though. This is for use in elementary schools, and I almost named it the Phonicator. I feel like there's some new brand of irony in that it's only one tiny vowel change away from a word that is totally unsuitable for its target user base.

fractional distillation

I got it!

nerdical seepage

When I was studying Calculus BC and Precalculus (both at the same time, after having passed my Calculus AB exam the previous year; don't ask, but if you went to a school run on Caribbean rules it'll totally make sense to you), I became rather obsessed with math. I won't claim I was awesome at the subject, but it certainly captivated me. I became so enraptured with the rules and logic of it all, that it started to leak into other areas of my life.

$\frac{πp}{r}$: a slice of π

In a previous post I made a doohickey to convert decimals into fractions. It occurred to me that with a tiny bit of tweaking, we could make it work for fractions of pi, too.

necrodev: xwd

On my main computer (I have three, for various reasons, the most salient being that I am an incredible nerd) I have a folder called "webdesign". This folder contains everything I have ever created using HTML, Javascript, and other web technologies.

Since I have been doing this for over ten years, there is a lot of stuff in this folder. Much of it is unfinished, because generally speaking (as I mention in the altastic faq), my creative process goes like this:

1. Have an idea for a page.
2. Make a rudimentary plan and produce a working version using the knowledge I have at the time.
3. Learn the very next day that there is a much better technology I could have used.
4. Decide to redo the old page using said technology.
5. Suddenly have an idea for a new page that wouldn't have been possible without the new technology.
6. Work on the new page, putting the old page on hold for the moment.
7. Forget entirely about the old page.

Once in a while, though, I go back through all the myriad folders within folders and see if I can find something to salvage.

$\frac{p}{r}$: just the fracts, ma'am

This is the first in a series of posts in which I plan to document myself attempting to wring some mathematics out of Javascript. With Mathjax we can now display complex formulae and equations easily; with Raphaël, we have at least a glimmer of a hope of displaying graphs. I have a number of ideas in mind involving both these technologies, but I thought it would be better to start out small.

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The Fractionizer

Decimal:

Improper fraction

Integer + Proper Fraction

Yeah, I gave one of my doohickeys a name ending in -izer. So unlike me. Unfortunately the usual suffix* would have resulted in The Fractioninator, which even I concede would perhaps have been a step too far.

早口言葉#7

A persimmonious tongue twister this time: 「隣の客はよく柿食う客だ」

foolish microsoft

I thought this was just a silly meme, but if the guys at Microsoft are putting it into finished products, it's gone too far.