Pomax's homepage

Load text with custom fonts when the font is ready.

Saturday 21st of January 2012, 06:40:06 pm

Over the past year and a bit I've run into many occasions where it is ridiculously tricky to load a bit of text, styled with a custom font, because browsers don't know when a custom font is ready. They can tell that they finished downloading it, but then can't tell when it is also ready for typesetting (A large font can easily have 200ms between 'download complete' and 'fully parsed and ready for use'). [...]

Trap keys for HTML elements - show the browser who's boss

Sunday 20th of November 2011, 02:38:26 pm

Say you're writing a browser game. Everything's going great until your user hits "backspace" and BAM! The browser goes to the previous page. How annoying is that? Forget about annoying, it means your game is unplayable because it doesn't trap important keys. [...]

Adding macros to your CSS without breaking things

Sunday 20th of November 2011, 02:36:26 pm

For the redesign of Nihongoresources.com I needed CSS macros at the client. I like SASS, but it doesn't let you keep shared design elements actually shared once the CSS it generate is loaded in a browser, so I needed something that kept those links in. LESS has a horrendous syntax, and is not CSS compatible, so I rolled my own macro package that sticks with the syntax that is used in proper CSS so that things work even if people block scripts. [...]

Get your simple page comments here.

Monday 31st of October 2011, 04:08:42 pm

So I needed something to add instant commenting to random pages I write (because I don't keep all my stuff on one website, and sometimes I'll make pages that have a limited lifetime but I'd still like comments for). So I dug into my Primer on Bezier curves, and ripped out the commenting functionality as it was the most modular starter I had lying around. [...]

Let's do JS templating!

Friday 21st of October 2011, 01:17:39 pm

For no good reason, let's get some templating going on for HTML pages, without needing server-side variable substitution. I have no idea when you'd actually use this, but then again maybe it's exactly the kind of thing you were looking for. Have some.

Summer 2011 brings photographs

Wednesday 7th of September 2011, 09:32:08 pm

I've not been spending enough time posting entries, because I now have four websites on which I can post things when things happen, and no good solution (yet) on how to manage content between them... [...]

HTML5 meets Pomax

Monday 7th of March 2011, 09:10:51 pm

I like trying things because I have a need for them. One of the things I needed way back when I was writing the first revision for my book on Japanese grammar was a way to tell roughly how many pages of typeset material a plain text file would be. [...]

Bezier information for everyone

Monday 7th of March 2011, 09:07:50 pm

If you've ever wanted to know something about Bezier curves, there's a good chance I've covered it in my rather lenthly "Primer" on Bezier curves, conveniently located at http://processingjs.nihongoresources.com/bezierinfo/. [...]

Writing a shoutbox

Thursday 22nd of July 2010, 09:55:58 pm

Because I'm migrating some of the functionality of nihongoresources to a new domain, dictionaries.nihongoresources.com I figured this was a good opportunity to let people voice their opinion in a less barrier, more direct way. Shoutbox style. [...]

I, for one, welcome our North Korean traffic wardens

Wednesday 7th of July 2010, 07:51:03 pm

Futuristic deployment methods are futuristics.

Thinking of buying Ziro?

Monday 21st of June 2010, 10:44:18 am

If you're thinking of buying Ziro, the puzzle game, you may want to wait to see if the developers ever write a fix for the terrible mouse lag that the game suffers from. A game this simple (think iPhone app game) should not, and frankly speaking cannot, come with mouse lag. Yet it does. Terrible mouse lag. This makes the game utterly unplayable. Save your $5 or so for now. It really isn't worth the hatred you'll be spewing at your screen.

A simple website link mapper

Friday 14th of May 2010, 02:31:16 pm

Ever had the problem where you needed to do a forward and backlink analysis of a website? Sure, for a simple homepage it's pretty easy, and some blog software will let you do it, and if you like google analytics (why do you like google analytics?) that will conceivably be able to help you do it too, but sometimes you're like me, and you just want a tool to do the job for you. You're thinking of using wget, but it doesn't actually do link mapping, just recursive webmirroring, so what are you to do... [...]

Internationally Published Author

Wednesday 21st of April 2010, 01:33:42 am

At long last, my book "An introduction to Japanese - Syntax, Grammar %26 Language" is properly published and available for purchasing. I will be selling autographed copies via http://www.sjgrpublishing.com and regular copies are available through amazon US, Canada, UK and Germany (since there's no amazon.eu) although that said, the German site seems to sell it at a price 100% higher than they should. [...]

Computing bezier curve bounding boxes

Tuesday 20th of April 2010, 05:04:04 am

Have you ever needed to compute the bounding box for a vector shape? You may have run into the problem that computing bounding boxes for lines is really easy, and that computing bounding boxes for arbitrary curves is, in fact, not. Not to worry! If you don't mind getting your brain dirty, I suffered this problem so that you don't have to. Compute the bounding box for Bezier curves in the knowledge that math is on your side!

Let's talk about democracy

Friday 26th of March 2010, 02:26:12 pm

For the first time in quite a while, I've written a new article on my live journal. This time on the concept of democracy, and how what the US has just pulled off is nothing even close to a democratic process. Feel free to peruse it.

Photoshop CS4 without all the rest

Sunday 3rd of January 2010, 10:28:45 am

I had to redo my computer setup, as I literally fried my system disk (ever seen an HD short circuit? There's a lot of smoke...) and that meant reinstalling Photoshop CS4. This time round I wanted to make sure I only installed what I needed, without all the crap Adobe's installer forces on you, so in the hopes that Adobe doesn't delete the post, instructions on how are here. [...]

Do you use dokuwiki?

Thursday 20th of August 2009, 02:46:27 am

If you do, then perhaps this plugin that I wrote will be of use to you; it lets you use standard tab delimited tables in your wiki, turning it into proper tables when you view the page in a browser. [...]

Playing games in windowed mode

Saturday 6th of June 2009, 08:39:26 am

First off, if you play Maple Story, go away. [...]

A better layout manager

Thursday 14th of May 2009, 06:00:34 am

Layout management in Java gives me lots of headaches. Especially since I'm writing a custom text annotation tool and there do not seem to be any layout managers that are designed to do what you expect for text-like objects: format as lines and paragraphs. [...]

Unicode strings in java

Sunday 3rd of May 2009, 07:54:12 am

I got fed up with Java's inability to properly handle unicode strings due to it relying on a 16 bit "char" primitive. Unicode (at the time of writing) basically covers a space that requires 4 bytes, and char is only 2 bytes 'wide', so it just ... doesn't work. Strings report the wrong length, substring selection can chop up unicode glyphs mid-byte-sequence, it's a mess. [...]

A walk through the garden

Saturday 18th of April 2009, 05:42:15 am

With the weather being pleasant, I decided to take a stroll through my parents' garden and take a few pictures. The result is actually fairly enjoyable so I figured I'd set up a set for it, starting at this photograph.