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I’m setting three resolutions for the next year:

  1. Go for a 10 mile run each month
  2. Study Spanish for at least 10 hours each month
  3. Run my first triathlon

Each of these are things that I think are very achievable, and likely not to be achieved if I don’t resolve to do them. They also don’t take up so much time and effort that they prevent me from coming up with new goals during the year.

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Perfectionism is stifling.

A perfectionist should look for good strategies to get work done despite their perfectionism.

Some strategies, such as trying to fake being a non-perfectionist, are not good ones.

Under this strategy, the perfectionist works against their advantages, while making a pathetic attempt at denying their true nature.

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In the past, DigitalOcean had a big security issue, and I told people that I don’t recommend using them. They responded to the issue pretty well, but I felt that the issue they had should not have happened in the first place.

Some time has passed since then without any major issues, and they hired an all-star systems administrator. Recently I was working on a project using AWS, and in my search for information, I came across some useful tutorial pages on their site. Because of this, when the time came to switch hosts for my personal site, I started using DigitalOcean and have had a great experience. I can heartily recommend them now.

Of course, they may still have major security issues, but I expect that they’ll have better than average security going forward.

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I built a random-color angular directive with a test on the same page. I started by using plunkr but gave up and used Bower because my connection was unreliable. I learned that angular-mocks is a counterpart to Jasmine in that it exports global variables for convenience. Also, angular-mocks must be loaded after Jasmine. I learned this the hard way.

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Encoding to binary:

'hello'.replace(/./g, function(c) {
function pad(n) { return (n > 0) ? ('0' + pad(n - 1)) : ''; }
var s = c.charCodeAt(0).toString(2);
return pad(8 - s.length) + s;
});

Decoding binary to a string:

'011101110110111101110111'.replace(/.{8}/g, function(s) {
return String.fromCharCode(parseInt(s, 2));
});

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I like building up a project from small parts but sometimes it’s good to try using a full framework to see what parts I’m missing. Today I tried starting a mean.js app with yeoman. It comes with a lot preconfigured, including five different authentication options, and since I chose it, an articles model. I removed four of the five authentication modules and changed the name of Article to Bin. In the process I found where things are stored in mean.js. It seems to do a good job of following the rails mantra of Convention Over Configuration.

  • The Code (unfinished, and most of it isn’t mine, the commits show what I did)

I want to return to this experiment and get it working the rest of the way and deployed on Heroku. The basic idea is a minimalistic jsfiddle.

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I used d3 to make a map. It was good practice. I had forgotten how d3?s chaining API works. When a function mutates an element, it returns the same element back. When a function appends something to an element, it returns the new element back.

I also tried using patterns in svg. I still have to learn some more to understand them and to get the results I want, and I also need to brush up on biezer curves.

Update: I adjusted the vertical offset of the pattern to remove gaps between states.

doge-usa