Blog

Gogh, my vessel to the Hacker News front page, creates a tightly-coded random painting using HTML5's Canvas. The cool part is that it draws before your eyes, starting from a blank canvas to a simple landscape with a pretty tree. Currently, it draws trees and mountains along with the ground and sky. I am happy with where it is at for now, though it could use some happy little clouds.

I named it Gogh since I had a Doctor Who poster in my room drawn in the style of Gogh's Starry Night Sky, though I dedicated it to the late Bob Ross, whom I grew up watching since he was on after the cooking show and before Sesame Street. My motivation was to scratch my itch for some Canvas and trigonometry. Gogh try it out at the link above..

At Beaver Bar Camp X, I gave a talk on the theory of poker and hold'em strategy (HTML slides). The slides were intended to skim the iceberg of a professional poker player's mindset. Though I'll skim over what I talked about here.

My Poker Career in a Nutshell

I first started playing online poker seriously on Pokerstars sometime during my freshman year of college. Attracted by those endless promotions poker rooms have, my first deposit into Pokerstars was $20. I read books, dove into forums, did the math, paid for coaching videos, studied the game as if it were for my computer science degree.

I began to beat the microstakes (2NL 6max) at a hot rate of 20 big blinds per 100 hands over several tens of thousands of hands. I played 4 tables at a time, and played at least 4 hours a day. I moved onto 5NL on Full Tilt where I kept beating the game, then went through a long downswing, though still up. I tried my hand at a bit of heads-up; it wasn't my thing. The US Department of Justice eventually seized Poker Stars and Full Tilt on what was deemed "Black ... more

The Idea

Last month, I stayed up for over 24 hours straight for a Yahoo! hackathon where I spawned Grandbox, an HTML5 Box2DWeb-powered physics sandbox game. The goal was to create a side-scrolling platform game where players could create their levels, and the idea was inspired by the video games, LittleBigPlanet (a side-scrolling platformer where players create and share levels) and Garry's Mod (a physics sandbox game). I wanted to learn what it was somewhat like to create a game, even though I relied upon a Javascript library to do a lot of the thinking for me. Since it's a web application and therefore cross-platform, people could create levels on the desktop and play them on mobile. Though I haven't gotten quite that far.

The Features

After hacking for 24 hours solo, I got Grandbox to a presentable state that I was quite proud of. It currently has a sandbox mode where you control little pink ball that can roll around and jump. On the sidebar, there are objects that you can add to the world that interact with the player and other objects. I implemented a handful of objects such as balls, boxes, platforms, ... more

The story of three NETizens, uberj-limed-ngoke, now Mozillians, and their journey onto the Internet, via Google Street View. It's been along year, and we've been checking Google Maps at least once a month in eager anticipation. The day has arrived, and how the tender results came out so sweet.

And the hacking goes on. The main event for today, Mozilla HTML 5 Webapps hackathon. The prize, glory and fame...and smartphones. I teamed up with Sawyer Hollenshead, another Mozilla intern, to create Minimalist, a list-building app for noting down categorized thoughts such as 'places I want to visit' or 'things I want to accomplish this year'. Spoilers, we took home smartphones. In this edition of the ngokevin Bi-weekly, I'll describe how the hack day was, what it means for an app to be open, and some cool HTML 5 features we used.

Hack Day

Got up at early 8am. That was the second earliest time I've woken up thus far this summer. We got to the office for some bagels/cream cheese and orange juice. No time to lose, we started hacking. We basically split up with him taking mostly the frontend and me the backend. I got off to a quick start, but as expected I ran into a pitfall (trying to return from a jQuery .each loop). After spending half an hour on that, I began to rush myself. I wasn't really thinking about my code, I was kinda just banging on my ... more