# Your Name as a Number in Base-36 (Some Notes on Number Systems)

Your name (or any word) can be converted to a decimal number.

Take my name. This could be read as a base-36 number: $\ \mathrm{matthew}_{36}$

While base-36 may sound unusual, it is just a number system that follows the same rules as any other; for any base $b$, the largest digit that can be represented before having to carry is $b-1$.

For example, in decimal (base-10), we can count up to 9, but once we reach 10 (the base), we reset the current digit back to 0 and carry the 1. A base-36 number system would obey the same rules; once we count up to 35 ($b-1$), counting any further would require a digit carry until we reach 35 again.

# A Pattern in Quotients of Seven and Rational Pi

A quotient of seven will always have this repeating pattern in the mantissa (the fractional portion beyond the decimal point). This pattern also “shifts” a certain predictable amount of digits every division. We could also think of a quotient of seven as a circular queue, with its mantissa “wrapping around”, like a speedometer or certain type of combination lock.

# Extra Steps Needed for Setting Up Octopress With GitHub Pages

Having to set up Octopress to use with GitHub pages again, I realized there are a few extra steps I needed to perform that weren’t in the default instructions on the octopress website.

# Hosting Git Repos With a Web Frontend

Hosting your git repositories yourself is as simple as git init --bare (or git clone --bare for existing repos) in a directory on your server, and then adding the remote to your local repo: git remote add myServer ssh://me@server.address/path/to/repo/project.git.

Having your repos on GitHub too makes for a nice redundancy (or on any other git server), and a remote on your server, on GitHub and a local copy makes for three redundancies. You can push to multiple remotes by adding a few lines in your project’s git config.

# Game Development - Text-based Level Editing and Phaser JS

If you are familiar with roguelikes (turn-based dungeon crawlers) such as Nethack, then you are no doubt familiar with the idea of a game’s elements being displayed entirely as ASCII characters.

Here I will explain how I use a similar approach to create the layout of rooms in a game I am working on and how I use Phaser (JS game engine) to render the rooms based on my layouts.

# Chromebook Linux - From Crouton to GalliumOS

I love my Chromebook (as evidenced in this post); I bring it everywhere as it comes in handy for long commutes and, weighing in at around 3 pounds, isn’t the least bit cumbersome.

However, the restrictions ChromeOS placed on me had been noticeable since the beginning; and I knew I would be restricted to Chrome Apps, extensions, and Play store applications, but didn’t count on how annoying this restriction would wind up being. Fortunately, there were workarounds.

# Parsing In-line PHP With Nginx

### My Environment

• Nginx version
• 1.10.0
• PHP version
• 7.0
• FastCGI processor
• php7.0-fpm
• Kernel
• Ubuntu 16.04

## The First And More Obvious Step

To enable parsing of PHP in HTML files, editing a server block’s location block to include files with an HTML extension should be sufficient.

# Chromebook Web Development

## Quick Rundown

• Machine:
• Samsung Chromebook 3
• Environment:
• ChromeOS for a GUI and native drivers
• Lubuntu for server-side programs and scripts (treated as headless)
• Text Editor/IDE

I recently purchased a Samsung Chromebook 3 so I could work on projects during my long commute or at my local coffee shop without worrying about losing or breaking my other more expensive portable machine. It’s really nice and light, and with a little configuration, makes for a great portable web development environemnt. After all, ChromeOS is itself a linux distro, but things are a little hidden in this environment as ChromeOS is meant to be easily accessible and to leave the user as little room as possible to screw things up.

# Quick and Custom AddThis Setup

Getting AddThis sharing set up exactly how I wanted took some digging the first time around. Maybe, like me, you wanted AddThis’s functionality but with your own styles, and not the AddThis brand buttons. Here’s how I set it up, allowing for full customization.

# Animating With GreenSock

Originally written for The Charles NYC.

I’ve recently been introduced to animating with the powerful JavaScript library GreenSock. It’s quite impressive, notably for how manageable its animations are. Unlike CSS3, which measures its animations with percentages, GreenSock uses seconds for timing. GreenSock is also capable of applying multiple animations to a single element, each running either consecutively or simultaneously, which is something CSS3 is not capable of either.