Processing is a wonderful little language. It’s designed to be easy to pick up by artists who want to learn some programming, etc. However, it’s a real programming language. If you haven’t played with Processing, I’d recommend you go do that right now. They have a great series of tutorials, and of course the entire SDK is [...]
Text editors. Yawn. Who cares? It’s just text! For many people, it really doesn’t make a difference. But I’m a programmer. I edit code for a living. My editor is the tool of my trade and I want to use the most efficient tool available. I’d be preaching to the choir if I was telling [...]
The find utility is so useful for automation that it deserves a special mention on its own. I will not attempt to cover all of its features, only the ones that I use on a daily basis. I typically use find for two purposes: To create a list of files matching some search terms. To [...]
I’d like to show off some projects of mine that are currently on the back burner, to avoid them from gathering too much dust. Here is a video of a game prototype I was working on in UDK. My idea is to express the feeling of being in zero gravity in a way that hasn’t [...]
I was fortunate to get several chances to play Nidhogg at GDC 11. I’d like to share my first impressions of the game. Nidhogg is a brilliant fighting game for two players created by Messhoff (Mark Essen.) I suck at most fighting games, although I have a lot of respect for the people that play [...]
Tee is a wonderful but often-overlooked core utility. It’s purpose is to intercept a pipeline, write the output to a file, and pass the output along the pipe. It can be used to easily add output logging to any command pipeline or script. To get the most out of tee, it pays to read up [...]
Today, I would like to highlight the usefulness of the file utility. It is a command-line utility that is common on Unix systems. File will take one or more files and try to determine what type of file they are by examining their contents. It’s the most accurate general-purpose tool of its type that I [...]
Using just the shell and the coreutils, it is possible to write commands which wrangle massive amounts of files, translate data into the format you want, etc. But what if you want to take things to the next level? This is where scripting comes in. You can write scripts which are capable of performing a [...]
From here on out, I’m going to assume that you have access to a Unix environment. If you use Windows, I suggest that you install Cygwin to get a Unix environment on your machine if you want to follow along. The default Windows terminal is also pretty crappy so I recommend installing the rxvt-native terminal from within [...]
Anything that’s tedious is repeatable; anything that’s repeatable should be done by a computer. -Robert Muller I spend a lot of time working on my computer every day. Many of the tasks that I need to perform on a computer can be incredibly tedious. Copying and pasting text from a website into a spreadsheet. Renaming [...]
My name is Eliot. I love learning, I love programming, and I love making games. Welcome to my website!
