This summer, I had the pleasure of working again with the great team at Square Design here in Brooklyn. For our last project, we built an LED Mirror for their annual holiday party. Our goal this time: build a giant robotic version …
Happy Spring! It’s been shamefully long since my last post, but I’ve been really busy. Among other things, I’m now serving as the Hacker in Residence at the Columbia Startup Lab! The Columbia Startup Lab, or CSL, fosters innovative new businesses founded by recent …
Background For a new project under development, I began playing with Polymer for programming web user interfaces. Polymer is a framework for building Web Components, a developing standard for the next iteration of HTML. Web Components and their associated technologies promise to fulfill some longstanding desires: they encapsulate …
This past Fall I had the pleasure of working with the folks at Square Design, a custom design and fabrication business in lovely Gowanus, Brooklyn. In the course of that project, I programmed a series of NeoPixel strips to light in …
As a coder who’s also a lawyer, I’m often asked by other programmers about free and open-source (“FOSS”) licenses. In particular, people want to know What do the various FOSS licenses mean? Is there a reason to use one license over …
This post continues my summary of lessons learned in implementing SwiftSquareCam, a Swift version of Apple’s SquareCam demo project. As described in my prior post, the original Objective-C code provided a number of core features: – taking input from either the front or back cameras, if both are present, and …
Video Preview and Facial Recognition in Swift, Part 2: Saving a Photo with Overlays Read more »
Recently I set out to implement Apple’s SquareCam demo app for iOS in Swift. The experience proved interesting for a number of reasons, one of which I’ve already discussed: Swift’s apparent preference for optional chaining in lieu of other error detection and handling …
Video Preview and Facial Recognition in Swift, Part 1: Affine Transforms Read more »
Much (virtual) ink has been spilled on the topics of learning Swift and transitioning from Objective-C to Apple’s new language, so I’ll keep this one light. While working on SwiftSquareCam (in progress), a number of Swift’s features (or idiosyncrasies) stood out, not merely for being different or new, but …
Swift’s Optional Chaining as an Experiment in Modifying Programmer Behavior Read more »
Recently I pushed a development version of the enroute web service to heroku! Enroute is an idea born of several road trips: we wanted something that would tell us not what’s around us right now, or just near our destination, but what’s on …