2021 1

Unofficial Guide to Programming Minecraft with Websockets. My daughter got me hooked on Minecraft. (If you see me staring intently at you during a Zoom call, I’m probably fighting a mob.) As it turns out, Minecraft is pretty programmable. You can send it messages using websockets that can place blocks, create mobs, get information, and more. None of this is officially documented, though. So I spent a few weeks reverse-engineering this and put together a guide to programming Minecraft. ...

2012 1

Colour spaces

In reality, a colour is a combination of light waves with frequencies between 400-700THz, just like sound is a combination of sound waves with frequencies from 20-20000Hz. Just like mixing various pure notes produces a new sound, mixing various pure colours (like from a rainbow) produces new colours (like white, which isn’t on the rainbow.) Our eyes aren’t like our ears, though. They have 3 sensors that are triggered differently by different frequencies. The sensors roughly peak around red, green and blue. Roughly. ...

2010 1

R scatterplots

I was browsing through Beautiful Data, and stumbled upon this gem of a visualisation. This is the default plot R provides when supplied with a table of data. A beautiful use of small multiples. Each box is a scatterplot of a pair of variables. The diagonal is used to label the rows. It shows for every pair of variables their correlation and spread – at a glance. Whenever I get any new piece of data, this is going to be the very first thing I do: ...

2006 2

Great essays

Great essays by Dan Norman on design Paul Graham on life and programming Edward Tufte on visualisation

What programmers do

What programmers do.

2001 1

Microsoft interview question

“Write a one-line C expression to determine if a number is a power of 2”. Microsoft is famous for asking such questions to their programmers. Or you might want to find out what the assembly code CWD XOR AX, DX SUB AX, DX does. Satish’s site has the answer, but not the question. More questions: 1 2