• Adding SSL to Blogger with Custom Domain

    For the longest time, my BLOG at https://blog.rickumali.com/ did not have HTTPS/SSL. With the emergence of LetsEncrypt in 2016 , and the general awareness that SSL was better, I've long wanted to add SSL to my BLOG…

  • Falling Text (in JavaScript)

    Sometime in May, about two months into my forced "work from home" stint due to the novel coronavirus, I caught a bit of inspiration.

  • Relearning JavaScript

    For the past few weeks, I've been participating in Boston PHP 's jQuery jAM . This virtual learning group is scheduled to run through the book Eloquent JavaScript , by Marijn Haverbeke. My JavaScript is rusty to be…

  • Learn Git in a Month of Lunches

    I'm writing a book for Manning Publications called Learn Git in a Month of Lunches . It should be out early next year, but you can purchase a copy of the book via Manning Early Access Program (MEAP). The material for…

  • Praising "Code" by Charles Petzold

    Last year (2013), I finished a most remarkable computer book titled Code . It's by Charles Petzold, who wrote the venerable Programming Windows 95 , among many others. "Code" takes an esteemed position on my computer…

  • Creating Top-Level Variables With CoffeeScript

    I've been working on a small "Word Finder" game , mostly as exercise to learn CoffeeScript , a language that compiles down to JavaScript. CoffeeScript hides the tricky parts of JavaScript, and brings to the programmer…

  • A View from a MOOC

    I just recently finished taking an online course titled "Functional Programming Principles in Scala". The course was offered by Coursera , and it is an example of an MOOC (massive open online course) . This class was…

  • Indie Game: The Movie

    Indie Game: The Movie (IGTM) is a documentary about independent game developers. When I saw the trailer in July 2011, I saw a shot of a real computer screen filled with real computer code. Here’s that movie about…

  • Making Wireless Work on a Dell D600 with Ubuntu

    I recently inherited an old Dell Latitude D600 laptop, but the wireless wasn't working on it. After some investigation, I learned that it somehow didn't have a wireless card! Digging around document.write(' on eBay, I…

  • Getting Twitter User IDs with PHP

    When using the Twitter API 's "Streaming API" , you often have to pass in Twitter User IDs as arguments, rather than Twitter usernames (aka "screen name"). I wrote a small command-line PHP program that obtains Twitter…