Daniel Cox

I've been quietly busy this past month.

In no particular order, I...

• wrote a quick and dirty Ruby script that downloads the individual PDFs of "The Washington Post" from their Today's Paper site and stitches them together into three sections (omitting the sports page, 'cause who reads that?). Then I've been reading it. I wanted to clean up the script and make it more resilient before posting it, but then I realized that I had no motivation to do so. The issues I know about don't bother me. So here it is. Read the WP, and be informed. [UPDATE: I changed my mind and cleaned it up. Now it's shorter and bounces back from occasional WP brokenness.]
• decided to try building a game in Ruby with the Gosu game library and Chipmunk physics engine, so I wrote a bare-bones, proof-of-concept platformer with a character, physics, camera panning, a parallax scrolling background, platforms and a level editor. This was in preparation for building something more interesting with the help of a graphic designer friend, which I'll release when it's done. In the meantime, checkout the Bare Bones Platformer on GitHub.
• started building a desktop app for reading the Bible in an interesting way: I'd like to lay out the entire Bible on a single plane and allow the user to zoom into and pan around any passage they like. I expect this will help my own Bible reading because I frequently want to quickly and fluidly shift the scope of my study, which requires considerable overhead using a paper or online Bible. Ideally, I would be able to throw up passages that occur to me on the wall and move them around at will. Perhaps I can simulate some of that using the Eagle Mode project's API. This is a brilliant piece of software, and I can't believe I'd never heard of it before.
• bought some real furniture - a trying process. It's wonderful though, so I'm certainly not complaining. It's also quite a long process, because I keep having to go back to the store to fix problems.
• started trying to build a desk based on something from "Legare Furniture".
• restarted my search for a full-time job, since my iron-in-the-fire with the DoD unexpectedly fell through after months of waiting, phone calls, interviews, waiting and more waiting.