Henry Catalini Smith

Manhattan Trump Protest

No Cigar

Lost in space

Simulating gravity has made all the other space-related code I’ve written so far for this project seem easy. This has been one of those demoralising problems that you think you’ve solved until you try a new test scenario and suddenly you’re back at square one because it turns out it was never really working right at all. For a good while I genuinely didn’t think I was going to be able to make it work at all.

Scalable spacetime

After building last week’s Solar System renderer, I was excited to move on to the fun stuff and see some planets moving around. I rushed on into implementing motion, which on the face of it is pretty simple. If Earth is moving along at 30,000m/s, for example, then you can just add its velocity to its current position once per second and get its new location.

Apple Pie From Scratch

This is a quick write-up of my solution to one of the first problems I bumped into in my latest project. I’m building a JavaScript model of the solar system, which in the end will hopefully feature all the planets orbiting the Sun according to some approximation of Newtonian gravity.

DownloadHelper Source

Gaming's Persecution Complex

I watched a shit documentary recently. It was called Video Games: The Movie. The central theme was a kind of chronological look back through the history of the gaming industry, which turned out to be a goldmine of little video clips of games from decades ago. That part was alright. As a plain nostalgia session, it was okay. Alongside that, though, was this weird little parallel story about “gamers”.

That Weird Keyboard

At the start of 2014 I started to pay the price for years and years of typing. A horrible RSI was causing shooting pains in my wrists by mid-afternoon each day. Something had to change, but obviously not typing any more wasn’t an option. The solution I settled on was an ergonomic keyboard, specifically the Ergodox.

Monty Is Wrong

Last Friday, at All Your Base 2014, MySQL creator Monty Widenius said some controversial stuff about women. There was a lot of backlash.

I am not planning any nuclear attacks

I recently wrote about a strange phone call that I received from the letting agents in charge of the house I live in. They’d recently carried out a routine visual inspection of the house, and were concerned about my whiteboard diagrams for a game idea I’d been working on.