Travis McArthur

Well...it has indeed been awhile. Between the end of my semester, packing up and moving back home, and starting some work and research opportunities, it's been very busy for me. My webserver also went down for awhile, something that most people apparently were aware of before I was! That being said, I was amazed at the public outcry for downtime of a free hosting serve. But I digress...

Much to the dismay of those who said I would never make it to my twentieth birthday, I am now twenty!

Basic implementation of some graphics stuff. Multi-edge handling still leaves much to be desired, and most of the graphical subroutines are O(n) or O(n^2), and could be reduced to something much faster, so look for that in the next release. For now, enjoy. A brief summary of things you can do and should do:

Commands:
Left click in empty space - creates point
Left click on point while no point or edge selected- selects point
Left click on selected point - deselects point
Left click on point while another point selected - connects points

I think almost everyone has had an experience where something they love was brutally defiled. Sometimes this befoulment is performed by the movie or recording industry, sometimes it it performed by a horrific play, sometimes it is performed by a friend creating a horrible mental association, and sometimes it's something entirely different. No matter how it happens, the result is inevitable: your old love is never the same. Where once there was only joy, joy is now mixed or entirely replaced by negative memories.

This is just an alpha release, it can do lexing and parsing, but once it generates and annotes the AST it quits. That said, this verison has a few interesting features, most notably that it can print out the AST in GraphML for verification purposes and amusement. Since this isn't all that hard, I imagine I'll keep it in the final version. Being able to show people the syntax tree really makes it more clear how the language design process goes, and being able to create one on the fly by writing code is a nice thing for explaining how languages work.

It has been quite awhile since I managed to fire off a post here. I had actually gotten most of the way through writing a post about a new project I'm working on that is a numerical methods library I wrote during my spare time, but thanks to an error I deleted it accidentally and was unable to recover it. I suppose that serves me right for trusting my browser.

Lots of new happenings, but most notably I have tons of projects I'm working on. I'll be releasing more information as I can intermittently, but for now here's a brief outline of everything I'm currently working on.

Introduction
Over and over I see new people I work with to develop web applications make the same major security mistakes. Time after time I end up explaining to them for a period of hours why they need to not do things a certain way, or why taint checking matters, or why injection attacks are actually a viable attack vector. So, after all of this, I've decided to write a brief tutorial so I can just point new people I work with to so they can see my opinions about security.

I'm always looking for a good new project to work on. It's in my nature to work on projects, sometimes I even complete them. As of late I had really had no huge projects to work on, so I took an extended hiatus, instead consulting with colleagues on various endeavors ranging from the simple to the complex. I'm proud to announce I have begun to contribute more directly in several ways.

In numerical methods the other day we were working with approximating roots, so I figured I might as well post about it since I had to study it so thoroughly for the homework and exam. For this post I'm going to focus on fixed point iteration.

I'm going to try to stay away from too much theory at this point primarily because I'm too tired to write it all down, but all of this rests upon many of the results found in calculus and analysis, and I'll go into some of the very basic hows and whys. There are much better and more comprehensive articles written by many smarter people, so I don't feel too bad. So let's get started.

Well! It only took me a few days and my new site is ready. This site will make me much more inclined to update things than my old site. It is based on drupal with many third party modules including a few custom modifications by yours truly. Most notably I'm pretty pleased with the ability to embed mathematical expressions in LaTeX into the page easily, for instance I can easily embed an expression such as with little ambiguity. My new site has many other cool features. Right now it's mostly empty, but I've ported most of the important content over, and I'll begin posting code from projects tonight along with some other stuff. Over the next few days I expect to fill the site up a bit more.

If you have any feedback on the new design, suggestions, etc, please feel free to let me know. A contact form should be up...sometime soon :)