Robotics Competition

For those you that don't know, our high school is involved with the FIRST National Robotics Competition. The competition was very professional-looking. Most of the robots were supported by large sponsors, and were built in the most professional manner. Some of the robots looked as if they were never touched by a student's hand. Still, our robot ended up being pretty sweet, but it didn't exactly do what we wanted it to do. Despite a few minor complications, we were able to play some great defense. Other than that, though, we were kind of bad. We were unable to score effectively. What I Learned: The simple machine wins. The machine with the most simple design was in 1st place. Who would've thunk it?

Comments

Beware the Ides of March...in 9 days

Stupid heading for this blog, but whatever. I was amused. So, a lot has happened since my last entry, which I believe was sometime in January. I have officially started a new business -- OnlineFixShop, LLC. The web address is http://www.onlinefixshop.com/ . Check it out! For the next few months, my business will be focusing on home PC repair. I am offering services that can help you: Rid your computer of spyware and viruses Retrieve lost information and data Gain access to the Internet Increase your computer's performance and speed Learn your way around various types of software Setup a secure wireless or wired network Back-up personal and valuable data Secure your computer(s) and protect your data Eventually, I am planning to focus on repairing computers over the Internet using remote administration technology, which I have yet to design. Right now, I am working to setup an onlin...

JavaScript Sticky Footer and Scroll Effect

This post talks about two different HTML/JavaScript effects: How to keep a page footer stuck at the bottom of the browser window. How to create a scrolling <div> without using a scroll bar OK. So... you have a website. You want a header stuck at the top of your page and the footer stuck at the bottom of your page. The stuff in the middle, you want to be able to scrollable. But, you don't want those ugly scrollbars to the right of your scrollable text. Maybe, instead, you'll have up arrows and down arrows above and below your <div>. When you mouseover the arrows, the text in the <div> will move up or down and create a scrolling effect. Suppose your page looks like this... <html> <head> <title>Test</title> </head> <body> <div style="position: relative; width: 700px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"> <div id="header">Header</div> <div id="scrollUp...

Developing a lightweight WebSocket library

Late in 2016, I began development on a lightweight, isomorphic WebSocket library for Node.js called ws-wrapper . Today, this library is stable and has been successfully used in many production apps. Why? What about socket.io ? In my opinion, socket.io and its dependencies are way too heavy . Now that the year is 2018, this couldn't be more true. Modern browsers have native WebSocket support meaning that all of the transports built into the socket.io project are just dead weight. On the other hand, ws-wrapper and its dependencies weigh about 3 KB when minified and gzipped. Similarly, ws-wrapper consists of about 500 lines of code; whereas, socket.io consists of thousands of lines of code. As Dijkstra once famously said: "Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability." ws-wrapper also provides a few more features out of the box. The API exposes a two-way, Promise-based request/response interface. That is, clients can request dat...

Blake Miner's Blog

Search This Blog