At yesterday’s Chicago Python User Group (ChiPy) meeting, I gave a presentation on the Python pickle module; I’d always been curious in the internals of how serialization works “under the hood” and wanted to learn enough about it to give a talk that was accessible to Python newcomers and veterans alike. I’d like to thank Robert Zeh of GETCO for hosting the meeting, and everyone for attending–we had a great turnout. ... Read more

Breaking the drake's will was the easy part.

The dragon "Emberstrife" faltered before her, his wings flailing in the air, struggling to support his massive and broken frame. Ichor fell from his wounds, sizzling into the water below him in a crimson torrent.

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Last week, I spent a few days on Second Life and read The Unofficial Tourists’ Guide.

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At yesterday’s Chicago Python User Group (ChiPy) meeting, I gave an informal presentation on PyPy, a project that I’ve been interested in lately. I’ve posted the slides here as a PDF. Be warned, though, that PyPy is by no means my area of expertise, so these slides may not be terribly accurate. I’ll be fixing them as I learn about their errors.

In late 2005, three colleagues and I founded a company called Humanized. A little over a month ago, we released our first two products, Enso Launcher and Enso Words. I’m indebted to my incredible co-workers, Jono DiCarlo, Aza Raskin, and Andrew Wilson, for making this possible. Working at Humanized has certainly been the best job I’ve ever had, not to mention an excellent learning experience. Naz Hamid was also instrumental in providing us with superb graphic design and was very helpful as a business mentor in general. ... Read more

Back in 2005, while I was taking a class taught by the late Jef Raskin at the University of Chicago, I was inspired by his program The Humane Environment to write some Emacs commands that would make software development a little easier for myself. Based on some interest from the Chicago Python User Group, I’ve polished the code a bit and published it here. Read more about pymdev, A Python Emacs Development Module. ... Read more

GuildPal is a World of Warcraft addon that adds two simple slash commands to your World of Warcraft interface, intended to facilitate the communication between members of a growing guild.

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I recently played through the single-player demo of Monolith’s upcoming suspense-themed first-person shooter, F.E.A.R., and decided to write about it.

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After learning about Google Earth and discovering Sam Perkins-Harbin’s excellent overlays including CTA maps and Chicago traffic overlays, I decided to play around with the technology a little myself. Since I’m currently in the middle of reading Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago and I’m interested in Chicago history, I decided to start out with a few overlays related to those topics.

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The following is a summary of stuff I worked on before the new Toolness was created, but after I stopped maintaining any of my old sites. Programming Narrowcaster - During the summer of 2004, I realized how great RSS syndication was and decided to get an aggregator. Unfortunately, all of them were horribly complicated: highly modal interfaces, tons of tabs and controls and buttons to mess around with and what have you. ... Read more