Jeremiah Oeltjen

links for 2007-11-26

• Life of a java disciple: JSSE: How to ignore CertificateException: Couldn't find trusted certificate"?
  This is useful for writining intranet apps that need to make SSL connections to hosts using self signed certs
  (tags: java ssl)

links for 2007-11-21

• A List Apart: Articles: How to Size Text in CSS
  Notes on how to get consistent text sizing across browsers
  (tags: css web design tips)

Sierpinski Triangle

Inspired by Sam Ruby's Penrose Tiling demonstration this week's programming exercise has been an implementation of a Sierpinski Gasket drawn as an SVG graphic using an L-system in ECMAScript.

To get the progressive drawing effect I made each recursive call to the drawing function via the setTimeout function. With that I found that because setTimeout returns immediately and does not block execution I couldn't pass the operational state of the algorithm via the function's parameters or I would wind up with concurrency issues. This also meant I could not simply iterate through all of the steps in a given rule within one call of the function. I had to actually make successive calls to the drawing function for each element in the current rule. See the source code for the details.

links for 2007-11-01

• ishida >> utilities: Unicode code converter
  This is just way too cool. (via Simon Willison)
  (tags: i18n web unicode tools)