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Hiding HTML Using Data URIs and base64

I've been spending the past few evenings noodling with the HTML5 <canvas> element. I often bring up the HTML Canvas 2D Context Working Draft specification. The spec shows what functions are available to the canvas' context, and the examples are instructive. However, the spec also introduced me to a method for "hiding" HTML text directly inside another HTML file, using the "data URI" technique.

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Solving Invisible Geometry with Correct Winding

While teaching myself Microsoft DirectX, I fell into an issue that is best described as "invisible geometry". This is the unfortunate situation when lines aren't appearing when and where you expect them to. You've told DirectX to draw something, but you don't see it. The difficulties with getting this simple "two-faced triangle" to draw seemed to represent the difficulties with working with DirectX in general.

Debugging Tagadelic Tags in Drupal

I added a tag cloud to this BLOG. It looks quite nice, and I was happy with the tags except when I saw that that they didn't accurately reflect my content.

When I first deployed this change, the biggest tag was for "drupal", but when you clicked on that tag, you saw only one story. And conversely, the "c++" tag is smaller than the "drupal" tag, but there are three "c++" stories. Why was the "drupal" tag so large? And why was the "c++" tag so small?

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Tetris Update

I've been on a roll with my Tetris development the past few days. Of late, I've implemented "pause" and "fast fall" (or "fast drop"). I've also added the ability to build a "mound". While working on the code to make the mound (the collection of pieces that pile up on top of each other), I found it helpful to dump the contents of my "grid" to a file. Here's my grid after playing the game for a few minutes. Clearly I now have to work on "clearing the rows" next!
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Filtering the Problems View in Eclipse

In the world of Java development, you're bound to throw some projects into Eclipse that fill up the Problems View with so many issues that this view becomes unusable. That happened to me, and it quickly reduced my productivity. This view lets you find compilation and build issues that require fixing. The team leader on my project said "you've got a lot of errors there; let's filter them." He showed me how, and I was amazed. Apparently, this great and obvious piece of functionality was available, seemingly right under my nose!

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