Clinton Montague

Developer, learner of things, functional programming enthusiast, hacker, and all round inquisitor.

The first language switch: Week 2 – Io

June 19, 2011

What I’ve learnt / haven’t learnt about Ruby Well, there’s still a hell of a lot to learn about Ruby, but I feel that I now have enough of a grounding in it to start to know what I don’t know. I do know the basic structure of the language, how to read it, and […]

Reflections on a week with Ruby

June 18, 2011

Well, my date with Ruby is almost over. Tomorrow, the 7 languages in 7 weeks study group moves onto Io. I’ll tell you what though, I’ve learnt more about Ruby, it’s syntax, and how it generally feels to use in the last couple of days than I had done while attempting to learn it before. […]

7 languages in 7 weeks

I have been very lucky in two respects over the last couple of days. Firstly, I had a book recommended to my called 7 languages in 7 weeks. The basic idea is that you’re taken through seven different programming languages in seven weeks. The author skips over things like how to install the environment, what […]

Lunch-time hack: Day 3 – Visualising forces between repelling particles

June 9, 2011

See demo → var WIDTH = 500, HEIGHT = 500, PARTICLES = [], STARTING_COUNT = 100, MAX_PARTICLES = 200, DAMPING = 0.05, CURRENT_FRAME = 0; var canvas = document.getElementsByTagName (‘canvas’)[0]; canvas.width = WIDTH; canvas.height = HEIGHT; var ctx = canvas.getContext (‘2d’); init (); function random (min, max) { return (Math.random() * (max – min) + […]

Lunch-time hack: Day 2 – self organising particles

June 8, 2011

In today’s hack I wanted to play with a self organising particle system, so I set about writing a loop which worked out the distance between each particle and generated a force based on that. It was a lot to think about so I didn’t quite get it working in 15 minutes and decided to […]

Lunch-time hack: Day 1 – playing with processing.js

June 6, 2011

It’s certainly not the most exciting thing you’ll ever see, but hopefully things will start to change over the coming weeks/months when I really start to get a feel for which effects are created by certain of code. For my first lunch-time hack, I thought I’d give myself an introduction to processing.js. It’s not very […]

Introducing the lunch-time hack

Do you ever think it would be cool to tinker with a new technology/framework but never get to the end of a project because it gets stale and boring? Me too. So I’ve invented a new part to my daily routine called the lunch-time hack. The mission is simple: create something cool in 15 minutes. […]

Notes on a week of cycling

June 5, 2011

Up until this time last week, my shiny new bike had mostly been sat there collecting dust, then having it washed off by the rain ready for the cycle to complete. That’s not a happy life for a bike. So last Monday, I took it for a ride to work (yes, I know it was […]