Archive October 2008

Evolution of the Civil War LAN Poster

October 19, 2008 in Design

One of the project I recently finished up was the poster for the Civil War Lan. This poster had originally been designed as a spin-off of the emu lan 3.0 poster. However the design ended up not working out so well. Lee asked me to look into doing a kind of “capture the flag” themed poster.

Extending your web apps with peripherals

October 9, 2008 in Web Development

You may not know it, but it’s relatively simple to extend the value of your web applications with peripherals like barcode scanners and magnetic stripe readers. These devices can both be purchased inexpensively (sub $50 in most cases) and will hookup to any computer via USB. When you’re shopping for these peripherals make sure they have “Keyboard Emulation.” This means that when you hook them up to a computer they will act like a regular input device and simply dump their output as raw text.

5 essential features for database abstraction layers

October 1, 2008 in Web Development

Computers are much better suited for repetitive tedious jobs like organizing data than programmers. We can avoid writing countless lines of code by making systems to do the work for us. Rather than building components from the ground up we like to write reusable systems that address basic feature requirements then combine them in different ways to solve similar tasks. By doing this we spend less time writing the same patterns over and over again.