Nikola Brežnjak blog - Tackling software development with a dose of humor
Miscellaneou$

Touch Pianist app is awesome

Touch Pianist is an awesome free app which

is a musical toy / instrument that allows the user to perform hard-to-play classical piano music favorites (from composers like Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Satie, Debussy to name a few) just by tapping the rhythm of the piece’s par

From developers point of view, the app was made using Pixi.js. Since this raised quite a buzz, I’m expecting to see Attack of the Clones 😉

Pluralsight, Three.js

Pluralsight WebGL and Three.js fundamentals course notes

Recently I bought a years worth subscription over at Pluralsight (here’s my portfolio of passed courses), and here I’ll be posting my notes from the courses that I attended. Please note that this is not meant to be as a sort of tutorial, just as the name says – notes for myself :). However, one could get some useful content from these posts as I’m noting things that catch my attention.

Here are my notes from the WebGL and Three.js fundamentals course. I rated the course 4/5 and all in all it’s a good introduction to WebGL with Three.js.

//rant: I passed the exam with the whopping 100%, and actually I feel that since Pluralsight is very famous and all that, that they could improve on the quality (it’s just too easy and does not go into detail) of these certification tests.

var scene = new THREE.Scene(); //acts like a container of all items
var renderer = new THREE.WebGLRenderer(); //how our content will be displayed on the page (WebGL, Canvas or SVG renderers)

It uses a Cartesian cordinate system (x,y,z). If you don’t specify the position- it will be positioned at (0,0,0).

It has a perspective and ortographic camera:

camera = new THREE.PerspectiveCamera(
35, =>fov
window.innerWidth / window.innerHeight,
1, => near
1000 => far planes
);

You can use your dev tools console (Chrome) or Firebug (Firefox) and access items if you properly export the objects in the code (return {scene: scene}); code snippet in the listing below):

//app.js file
var example = (function(){

    "use strict";
    
    var scene=new THREE.Scene(),
    renderer = window.WebGLRenderingContext ? new THREE.WebGLRenderer() : new THREE.CanvasRenderer(),
    light= new THREE.AmbientLight(0xffffff),            
    camera,        
    box;

    function initScene(){
        renderer.setSize( window.innerWidth, window.innerHeight );
        document.getElementById("webgl-container").appendChild(renderer.domElement);

        scene.add(light);
                          
        camera = new THREE.PerspectiveCamera(
        35,
        window.innerWidth / window.innerHeight,
        1,
        1000
        );
                            
        camera.position.z= 100;            
        scene.add( camera ); 

        box = new THREE.Mesh(
        new THREE.BoxGeometry(20,20,20),
        new THREE.MeshBasicMaterial({color: 0x00FF00})
        );

        box.name="box";   

        scene.add(box);

        render();
    }

    function render(){
        box.rotation.y +=0.01;
        
        renderer.render(scene, camera); 
        requestAnimationFrame(render);        
    }

    window.onload = initScene;
    
    return {
        scene: scene
    }

})();
//HTML file
<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>
    <head>
        <title>WebGL with three.js Fundamentals</title>       
    </head>

    <body>
    	<div id="webgl-container"></div>
    	
    	<script src="scripts/three.js"></script><!--DL this from official site-->
    	<script src="scripts/app.js"></script>
    </body>
</html>

Accessing it from Chrome Console as mentioned above:

var a = example.scene.getObjectByName('box');
a.position.x = 10;
a.position.set(0,2,2);
  • Degrees to radians formula: radians = degrees *pi/180
  • Meshes – geometry + material
  • use stats.js
  • different existing controls: FlyControls.js, OrbitControls.js
  • Collision detection
  • Raycasting – returns objects that are on some other objects “ray” and Box3.
  • Physics: PhysiJS is a wrapper for Ammo.js which is a port of C++ Bullet
  • Supports gravity, mass property, friction, restitution (bounciness)

Cool 3D frogger game made by the author: https://github.com/alexmackey/threeJsFrogger

CodeProject, Quick tips

Share a web service on your local development machine with Localtunnel

I was testing Jenkins and as it doesn’t support localhost addresses I found Localtunnel, which, and I qote,

allows you to easily share a web service on your local development machine without messing with DNS and firewall settings.

Localtunnel will assign you a unique publicly accessible url that will proxy all requests to your locally running webserver.

You can  install it via npm:

npm install -g localtunnel

Then, start your project on some local port (for example 1337), and make sure all works well locally. Now, request a tunnel to your local server:

lt --port 1337

And you should get an output like:

your url is: https://awesome.localtunnel.me

You can use this link now and any requests to that url will be routed to your service on port 1337.

Stack Overflow

.htaccess – subdomain not working with www

profile for Nikola at Stack Overflow, Q&A for professional and enthusiast programmers
I’m a big fan of Stack Overflow and I tend to contribute regularly (am currently in the top 0.X%). In this category (stackoverflow) of posts I will will be posting my top rated questions and answers. This, btw, is allowed as explained in the meta thread here.

My question was:

I have a domain www.example.com and I have set .htaccess file to redirect all example.com to www.example.com

Now, I made (through my plesk 10 interface) a subdomain abc.example.com and what I would like is to also have www.abc.example.com so I entered (also in plesk) this:

www.abc.example.com.    CNAME   abc.example.com.

But it’s not working. Do I need to reload/restart dns?(if so, please tell me how?) Or do I just need to wait certain time for this until it propagates?

Since my mentioned CNAME didn’t work, I also added the .htaccess (which might be wrong (I know, not much of a server person 🙁 )) in the abc folder which looks like this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^abc.example.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://abc.example.com/$1 [R=301]

but with no luck, so please shed some light.

I found the solution myself in the end:

In Plesk I made one subdomain.domain.com pointing to lets say abc folder, and then I added the www.subdomain.domain.com also through Plesk but pointed it to the same abc folder. Then I added the .htaccess file inside this abc folder (where all other files for this subdomain reside) which now guarantees that all requests to subdomain.domain.com get redirected to www.subdomain.domain.com. Here is my .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On    
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.subdomain.domain.com$ [NC]    
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.subdomain.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Hope this will help someone beginning with this stuff like me.

Just to note, the credit for the idea of pointingthe www.subdomain inside the same folder goes to user Bryan White on serverfault

Books

Brain rules for baby – John Medina

My notes from the book Brain rules for baby by John Medina:

Babies develop an active mental life in womb. Stressed mom, stress baby. Eat right, stay fit.

Newborns remember sounds they were exposed to when they were still in the womb. 

Baby will love to eat with mother ate during pregnancy.

Larger babies are, to a point, smarter.

Mothers can boost baby brain development by proper gain weight, balanced diet, modern exercise and stress reduction.

Happy marriage, happy baby.

I’m spiteful of my husband because he gets to sleep through the night. My daughter is nine months old and she still wakes up three times a night. My husband sleeps right through and then wakes up so exhausted.

Children have never been good at listening their parents, but they have never failed to imitate them.

Mothers milk is the silver bullet. Breast-feeding makes baby smarter.

Speak to your children as much as you can.

Do not tell them they are smart! Praise the effort, not IQ!!!

Make the child understand that the mistakes occur because the lack of effort, and not from the lack of ability.

The amount of TV a child should watch before the age of two is zero. But, after the age of five it is good, but only those shows that teach them.

No T’s in kids rooms! Research shows these kids scored way worse than those kids that don’t have TV in their rooms.

Brain loves exercise.

Intellectual pressure (expecting too much too early stage) can actually hurt your child intellectual development.

Miscellaneou$

Microsoft HoloLens and VR in general may just be our doom

I’m all about advancement, but this just kinda starts to freak me out, fearing that we just may end up as in the movie Surrogates. But, it’s so cool 🙂 – can’t wait to see how will they make fighting games for it. Yeah, I’m sure pr0n industry will have it’s market for it too 😉

So, I guess, it’s just as with everything “groundbreaking” – shut up and take my money 🙂 But, on a more serious note – we just may wanna keep our vigilant eye open…

edit: Today (9.05.2015), on a developers conference in my hometown I tried out Oculus Rift, and  all I got to say is that I’m still feeling dizzy and sick, so yeah, this just may not be for everyone – not for me that’s for sure :/.

NodeJS

Cannot start OpenDebug because Mono (or a Mono version >= 3.10.0) is required when debugging Node.js applications with free Visual Studio Code on a Mac

This error come up when I tried to use the debugging tools for Node.js program using Visual Studio Code, as outlined in their official tutorial.

The solution was quite easy actually – on a Mac all I had to do was run the following command:

brew install mono
Quick tips

Free Visual Studio Code

You’ve all heard the news – Microsoft made a free editor for developers called Visual Studio Code. You can download it from the official page here. The cool thing is that it works on Windows, OS X, and Linux, with support for IntelliSense, debugging, and GIT.

It’s worth making a distinction between Visual Studio 2015 which is still the full integrated development environment (IDE), while Visual Studio Code is “just” an editor – but from what I saw so far, a good one.

Miscellaneou$

MaxCapacity Training program

For the past 26 weeks I’ve gone through the MaxCapacity program 2 times (2 * 12 weeks + 2 weeks rest time between), and I can tell you that the program is all but easy. I really like it, but no matter what others say – I don’t recommend it for beginners (I did, and it didn’t work out so well). So, if you can’t do like 10 pushups straight, there’s really no sense in trying this workout as it will leave you disappointed.

The app (Android and iOS) is free to download, so this is a review in a way to say thanks to the author Samy Peyret (you can support him by buying his book on Amazon).

So, the main breakdown is pretty simple; you have to exercise only for 16 minutes, 3 times a week for 12 weeks. Honestly, if you don’t have 16 minutes for exercise, then something is seriously wrong, but that’s another topic… Exercises are very well planned and they grow in toughness as the weeks go by. Main idea is that in 3 weeks you do the same set of 4 different exercises on Monday, a different set of 4 exercise on Wednesday and  a different set of 4 exercise on Friday. You rest on Saturday and Sunday.

First week is a 50/10 regime, meaning that you are doing the exercise for 50 seconds and then you rest for 10 seconds – you should log your best (usually the first set) score. Second week is a tabata (20/10) regime, and here you should log your weakest score (usually one of the last sets – here you have 8 sets since the exercise is only 20 seconds long). The twist comes in the third week where you have to beat the time and do the calculated amount of repetitions ([max 1st week score + min 2nd week score] * 3) as fast as you can – and if you can do it below 16 minutes, you Rock.

I logged each and every set (you can download the full excel file: MaxCapacityTrainingLog), and as you can see it turns out that the second time I got to do the exercises, I did them with a whopping 24.32% increase in number of repetitions, so yeah – it works in only 16 minutes 3/week! The 24% increase is the average of all the exercises, some of course vary as you can see in the aforementioned excel file. The biggest advancement I noticed was with the diamond pushups, where I did a 150% increase in number of repetitions for the max count, and 135% in total sum!

So, to sum up – very much thanks to the author for making this a free resource. If you like it, you can support him by buying his book on Amazon.

An example of the first week the first time I went through the program compared to the second time I went through it:

Monday
[table id=1 /]

Wednesday
[table id=2 /]

Friday
[table id=3 /]

Give it a try and hit me back with your numbers and let me know what you think!

App idea alert!: Maybe a good idea would be to make a repository of scores so that one could see where he stacks up between others!?

Miscellaneou$

Overworking and not sleeping is the new badge of honor which will burn you out and then kill you!

An eye opening post from Jason Lengstorf.

After a few days of too little sleep, you’re a drunken zombie. We wouldn’t go to work drunk, so why the hell do we go to work on four hours’ sleep, when we’re more impaired than if we were hammered? To make matters worse, sleeping less than six hours a night may lead to an early death.

If any of these sound familiar or if you can totally relate (like me :/), then something needs to change

Feeling Guilty About Any Time Away from Work — Even Time with Family and Friends

Frequently Working More than 40 Hours a Week

Frequently Sleeping Less than 6 Hours a Night

So, yeah, advancement is good, but not worth it in the long run in terms of sacrificing the time spend with your child, spouse, friends. I’ve read a quote somewhere that goes something like “On his deathbed no man ever wished he spent more time in the office”. I believe balance in all mayor areas of your life is key but, of course, not easily attainable.

The author goes on to say how he managed to work less time, but in turn be more productive.

I know this may sound too idealistic, but at least from time to time – why not give it a try, right?

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