Will Scott

Blog

  • A unique time

    The last couple weeks have got to be one of the most interesting times in my life so far.

    Specifically, I am currently in a Beijing hostel waiting for it to be late enough to be late enough to go to sleep. I spent the last hour talking to a conspiracy theorist about why the Whitehouse being colored pink for breast cancer awareness month was actually a sign of collusion with the Chinese. Its nice that my Chinese is good enough that I can follow conspiracies in both English and chinese, I guess.  The middle aged conspiracy theory lady was interspersed with a teenage girl from Jiangsu taking pictures of me and giggling. Once the lady left she told me it was because a friend thought I was cute, rather than my ineffectual attempts to change the topic of conversation.

    This is on the other side of an airplane ride from staying up all night in New York and somehow getting dragged to Korean food at 3am (the rationalization was that I had to leave at 4 for the plane anyways). This was my first trip to new York as an adult, and it seems like a fun place – if somewhat expensive/fast paced.

    The conferences were excellent. Bigger media deals than I had come to terms with previously, but a very good set of connections to start making.

    The only glitch so far is that I was planning to bring a bottle of mustard back with me since it seems almost impossible to acquire it at PUST, however the supermarkets I visited this evening didn’t stock it either. I guess it doesn’t have quite the following here as elsewhere in the world.

  • Code for America

    I’m super excited to help out Code for America, by volunteering as a Code for Seattle brigade captain over the next year. The parent organization and local chapter are focused on encouraging Civic Hacking – getting programmers to volunteer time towards improving our local community.

    This to me is the flip-side of government transparency, where transparency is encouraged through citizens taking an active roll in publishing and promoting data. This lets us have the conversation of what data we want collected in a concrete rather than abstract way, and makes the data this is collected more valuable.

    The C4A Announcement of Brigade Captains was nice enough to put Seattle first.

  • Pyongyang

    I’m spending this fall teaching Computer Science in Pyongyang. It’s every bit as much of an adventure as I was anticipating, and while I don’t understand the culture or individuals of this place yet, it’s certainly different from the preconceived notions I had before coming.

    Sign-revolutionary
    Street-schoolkids
    ariranggames

  • Wandering through China

    I spent the remainder of June wandering through the Xinjiang province in China.

    lakeurumqistation

  • QingHai

    I just finished the first of four days biking around QingHai lake in china. The road was pretty amazing, changing from high Tibetan plains to desert to marsh to lakeside. No rain and the temperature was very nice. The route today had a total of one turn over 77km. Our bikes weren’t quite the right size, but they should get us around the lake. They’re also mountain bikes, but the road seems to necessitate the wider tires.

    IMG_20130616_173608

  • Google Dependance

    I’m spending a few weeks in China, and one of the frustrating developments since the last time I was here is that access to Google services is largely unavailable from many public connections. Notably, both the standard WiFi and the public internet cafes claim to be unable to resolve secure connections to Google.

    I’m realizing at this point that this will make communication quite hard, since it greatly complicates stuff like getting email, posting photos, or chatting with friends back home.

  • nginx conditional redirection to php

    I recently spent a few hours struggling with nginx to recreate a previous apache rewrite rule. The goal was that
    for requests with a specific prefix, where the file is not found, redirect the request to a php script to attempt automatic thumbnail generation.

    My eventual location block looked like

    location ^~ /assets/ {
    try_files $uri /assets/thumbmaker.php?src=$uri;
    include fastcgi_params;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root/assets/thumbmaker.php
    fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $uri;
    if (!-e $request_filename){
    fastcgi_pass php;
    }
    expires max;
    log_not_found off;
    }

  • Korean

    I’m signed up for the Beginning Korean class at UW this summer. It’s been a decade since I learned a new language from scratch, so we’ll see if I can keep up. The good news is that Korean uses an alphabet, rather than 汉字. The bad news is that korean grammar is difficult, and I’ll have to handle a level of conjugation that I haven’t seen before.

    안녕하세요!

  • TinyToCS

  • JS1K


    m="left|width|height|top|background|color|position".split('|');q=Math.random;A=
    120;d=(r=document)[N='createElement']('textarea');k=r[N]('a');k[D='style'][m[6]
    ]=U='absolute';n={6:U,0:0,3:0,1:z='300px',2:z,4:T='transparent',5:T};for(x in n
    )c[D][m[x]]=d[D][m[x]]=n[x];k[D][m[0]]=(c[m[1]]=c[m[2]]=v=parseInt(z))+14+'px';
    b[C='appendChild'](d);b[C](k);e=c.getContext('2d');s=[];L='length';d.onkeyup=f=
    function(k){c[m[1]]=v;e.font=d[D].font='14px arial';n=d.value.split('\n');l=0;
    for(x in n)e.fillText(n[x],3,l+=F=14);l=e.getImageData(0,0,v,v),o=l.data;for(i=
    0;O=s[i],i<s[L];i++){o[O[0]]==0&&(s[i]=[0]);for(j=0;j<O[L];j+=2){r=q();o[O[j]-2
    ]=O[j+1]+F*r+A;o[O[j]]=2*A;if(O[L]>F)continue;r<.05&&s[i].push(O[j]+A*10,A*r)||
    r<.1&&s[i].push(O[j]+4,A*r)}}for(i=0;!k&&i<o[L];i+=4)if(o[i+3]!=0&&q()<1/s[L])s
    .push([i+3,A]);s=s.filter(function(n){return n[L]>1});e.putImageData(l,0,0)};g=
    "lufituaeB = erutaN = modnaR".split('');setInterval("n=g.length&&(d.value+=g.
    pop());f(f(n))",v);k.innerText="Add your own Text and let the Moss take over"

    See it Here