BenHollis.net

I’ve been using Emacs regularly for at least 10 years, for all of my programming tasks that don’t involve Java or .NET. Amazingly, for most of that time I’ve used a pretty stock installation of Emacs with only a few cargo-culted customizations stolen from my co-workers’ .emacs files. However, as part of switching to a new job in the last month, I’ve taken the opportunity to invest in my shell and editor, and I’ve fallen deep down the rabbit hole of Emacs customizations. My continually-evolving config is publically available on GitHub. The difference between stock Emacs and one loaded up with custom packages is astounding - I can’t believe that I had been missing out on all of this. But this is not an article about setting up Emacs to be your perfect editor. Instead, I wanted to provide a tip for Node developers that I hadn’t found the answer to when I went looking.

The other day I was working on a Node.js script, and I was constantly switching back and forth from Emacs to the terminal to run the script, hit some error, remember the line number, go back to Emacs to look up the error, etc. Then I remembered that Emacs has the compile command, which will run a shell command and show the output in a separate window. Now I could split my frame into two side-by-side windows, edit my script on the left, and run compile to test out my script with any test command I liked (and then use recompile or g in the *compilation* buffer to re-run the command). But there’s another neat feature of compilation-mode - it can understand stack traces and provide hotkey access to the line that triggered an error. Unfortunately, the stack traces from Node were not being recognized correctly, and Emacs thought the last number was the line number, when it’s really the column number.

To fix this, I simply needed to add a new regexp to the list of patterns compilation-mode understands:

;; Add NodeJS error format
(setq compilation-error-regexp-alist-alist
      (cons '(node "^[  ]+at \\(?:[^\(\n]+ \(\\)?\\([a-zA-Z\.0-9_/-]+\\):\\([0-9]+\\):\\([0-9]+\\)\)?$"
                         1 ;; file
                         2 ;; line
                         3 ;; column
                         )
            compilation-error-regexp-alist-alist))
(setq compilation-error-regexp-alist
      (cons 'node compilation-error-regexp-alist))

Writing that regexp would have been hard, but of course Emacs has a solution. First I found the current value of compilation-error-regexp-alist-alist using describe-variable in order to get an example regexp to start with. Then, in the compilation buffer where my stack trace was, I ran re-builder, which pops up a little mini window where I could tweak my regexp and see immediately whether or not it was matching correctly. Then I just added this to my init.el, evaluated it with eval-region, and my next compile had the errors highlighted correctly, and I could immediately go to the offending code with next-error or by putting the point on the stack trace line in the compilation buffer and pressing RET.

Hopefully this helps out some fellow Emacs-using Node developers, and serves as a reminder that your tools can always work better for you.

Early in August, my partner, Eva Funderburgh texted me from her bronze casting class:

Hey! I’m one of only two people in the class. I get as many investments as I want. Can you come up with a good plan to make an apple of Eden model by the time I’m home?

Until recently, I’ve been a big fan of the Assassin’s Creed series of video games, especially since it intersects with my interests in parkour and climbing, history, and science fiction. One of the key artifacts in the games’ fiction is the Apple of Eden, an ancient piece of technology that gives its owner magical powers and the ability to influence people’s minds. The plot of the games often focuses on finding or controlling these artifacts.

My partner had been branching out from ceramic sculpture to bronze casting, and we’d talked a bit about making a replica prop of the Apple out of bronze, but I never wanted to take up space and materials that she could use for her actual art. But now we had the opportunity, and better yet, a deadline. Within a week, we needed to have the wax form of the Apple built and ready.

While I don’t build replica props myself (with the exception of this project), I enjoy reading Harrison Krix’s exhaustive build logs for the amazing props he builds. The rest of this article will detail how we designed and built a life-sized, illuminated replica of the Apple of Eden cast in bronze.

The first task was to actually design the Apple. We knew it needed to be a sphere, and from game screenshots we figured out a rough size based on how it looked in characters’ hands. More troublesome was the pattern on the surface of the sphere, which was hard to pick out from screenshots, and which was not consistent from shot to shot. We ended up designing our own pattern of channels inspired by the common patterns from screenshots and fan art.

To start with, we needed a hollow wax sphere. In lost wax casting, a wax form gets encased in plaster and then melted out, and bronze is poured into the holes that are left behind. To get a good sphere shape, we made a plaster mold from a cheap toy ball that was already the right size.

First, half of the ball was covered in clay to make a “rim” for the plaster to form up against, and then we mixed up a batch of plaster and slopped it onto one side of the ball with our hands. As long as the interior surface is nice, it doesn’t matter what the outside looks like.

Plaster hardens in minutes, after which we removed the clay. The clay had some registration keys (little dots) in it so that it would be easy to pair up the two halves of the plaster mold again. A bit of clay was used to preserve the pour spout so we could pour wax into the finished mold.

Once the mold was finished, we heated up casting wax in an old crock pot, and poured the wax into the mold. By pouring in wax multiple times and sloshing it around, we were able to get a mostly even shell of wax with a nice spherical outside. It was important to make sure the shell was still thick enough that I could carve the decorative channels in it without breaking through. We cast a few wax spheres so that we could experiment with different designs and carving techniques.

The channels were first drawn lightly on the wax, then carved in using a clay-working tool that has a looped blade at the end. I tried to make the depth nice and consistent, but this was all freehand. I didn’t mind a bit of variation because I wanted this to look like an ancient, handmade artifact rather than a machined, perfect piece. The pour spout was widened to provide a hole to stuff electronics into. Eva turned a cover for the hole on her potter’s wheel directly out of a bit of wax.

At this point the wax looked generally good, but it had a lot of little nicks and scratches and even fingerprints from where I was working with it. Eva wiped the surface with turpentine, which smoothed out the surface quite a bit.

Once we were happy with the shape, Eva sprued the wax onto a sprue system that she was sharing with a bunch of other small pieces. Where many artists would make a single piece at a time, Eva makes complicated sprues of many small pieces, because her art is generally on the small side. The sprue system provided channels for the bronze to flow to the piece, and for air to escape as the bronze flowed through all the spaces. Eva had to build a complex system of large inlet paths with many small outlets, being careful to make sure that there was always a vent at the highest point in the piece, so that air bubbles wouldn’t get trapped. Finally, bronze pins were inserted at points around the sphere so that the plaster in the middle wouldn’t just drop when all the wax was melted out.

Then, we moved to Pratt Fine Arts Center, and all the sprued pieces were placed in cylinders made of tar paper and chicken wire, and filled with a mixture of sand and plaster. The sprue system was shaken a bit to get rid of bubbles and make sure the plaster got into every corner. The plaster cylinders, called “investments”, were then moved into a large kiln, upside down, and heated to 1200°F to melt out all the wax and burn out any other organic material (like the toothpicks used in the sprue system).

We returned a week later for the bronze pour. We helped dig out the sand pit, and half-buried the investments in sand to contain any bronze in case they split open. Once the bronze had melted in the crucible, it was lifted up by a crane, and Eva helped pour the liquid bronze from the crucible into the pour holes in the investment. This video shows the process much more clearly:

Play Video: Casting the Apple of Eden in Bronze

The bronze inside the plaster investments cooled off in about a half hour, and we were able to take axes and hammers to the plaster to free the bronze within. After the pieces were separated from the plaster, they were pressure-washed to get rid of more plaster. The bronze looked super crufty at this point because of oxidation on the surface, and flashing and bubbles that had stayed in the investment and got picked up by the bronze.

Taking the bronze home, we separated the pieces from the sprues using a cutting wheel on a die grinder or a hacksaw. The extra bronze from the sprue gets recycled for the next pour.

The bubbles were popped off with a small chisel, and then Eva went over the surface with a coarse ScotchBrite pad on her die grinder to smooth off the surface. She then took another pass with a fine ScotchBrite pad, and finished with a wire brush. The transformation is remarkable - at this point the Apple was glowing, bright metallic bronze.

However, we didn’t want an Apple that looked brand new (or looked like shiny metal). This is supposed to be an ancient artifact, and fortunately there’s an entire world of bronze patinas that can be used to transform bronze surfaces with different colors and patterns. First, we tried applying a liver of sulfur and ferric nitrate patina, brushing on the solution while heating the surface of the bronze with a blowtorch. Unfortunately, there was a bit too much ferric nitrate, and a bit too much heat. The effect this produced was striking, with metallic, iridescent splatters forming over the smoother parts of the Apple, and a dark red patina for the rest.

As cool as this patina looked, it wasn’t exactly what we were looking for, but one of the nice things about bronze is that you can always just remove the patina and start over. Eva scrubbed off this patina with a wire brush, and tried again, this time with less ferric nitrate and going lighter on the blow torch. Despite using the same process, the result was very different - a dark, aged bronze that was perfect for the Apple. Eva sprayed on some Permalac to seal in the patina.

One feature I was particularly excited about was lighting. The Apple glows along its surface channels, and I planned on using EL wire to provide this effect. EL wire glows uniformly along its length, uses very little power, and looks very bright in low light. First, Eva polished the inside of the channels with a wire brush to provide a bright reflection of the wire. Then, I worked out how to take the EL wire I had bought and work it into all the channels in a single continuous line with a minimum of overlap. This required drilling holes in strategic intersections and running some of the wire internal to the sphere. We tried some different options for attaching the wire, like silicone caulk with glow-in-the-dark powder mixed into it, but in the end it looked best to just superglue the wire into the channels. The battery pack and transformer fit snugly inside the sphere and connected to one end of the glowing wire.

The last bit to figure out was the cap. Since it was cast from bronze, it was hard to make it mate up with the hole in the sphere perfectly, so we hadn’t bothered. We bridged the gap by heating up some Shapelock plastic, forming it around the base of the cap, and then pressing it into the hole. We trimmed all the excess plastic so it wasn’t visible. Once the Shapelock cooled, it formed a perfectly fitting seal that allowed us to press the cap onto the sphere and it would stay put unless pried off with fingernails.

We really had two deadlines – the first was the bronze pour, but we also wanted to have the Apple finished in time for PAX, a big gaming convention that’s held every year in Seattle. We didn’t have time for full Assassin’s Creed costumes, so instead we carried the Apple around the show and took pictures of other video game characters holding the Apple. Oddly, we didn’t find any Assassin’s Creed cosplayers.

I’m really glad that we got the opportunity to work on this fun and nerdy project. The Apple sits on my mantle now, and it’s fun to light up and hold – there’s no substitute for the weight and feel of real metal. I plan to bring the Apple with me to PAX again next year.

You can view all the progress photos and PAX photos on Flickr.

A few weeks ago I finally released Maruku 0.7.0 after a short beta that revealed no serious issues. This was the first release in four years of the venerable Ruby Markdown library. I inherited Maruku over a year ago and I’m very proud of the work I’ve put into it during that year. I’m glad that I was able to fix many of its bugs and update it to work in a modern Ruby environment. However, I want to recommend that, if you have a choice, you should choose a different Markdown library instead of Maruku.

When Natalie Weizenbaum handed Maruku over to me, my interest in the library stemmed from its use in Middleman, and my desire to default to a pure-Ruby Markdown processor in the name of compatibility and ease of installation. The two options were Maruku and Kramdown. Maruku was the default Markdown engine for the popular Jekyll site generator, but was old and unmaintained. It also used the problematic GPLv2 license, which made its use from non-GPL projects questionable. Kramdown was inarguably a better written library, with active maintenance, but under the even-more-problematic GPLv3 license. The GPLv3 is outright forbidden in many corporate environments because of its tricky patent licensing clauses, plus it has all the issues of GPLv2 on top. I emailed Thomas Leitner, Kramdown’s maintainer, about changing the license to a more permissive license like the MIT license (used widely in the Ruby community) but he declined to change it, so I set to work on Maruku.

As I explained in my initial blog post, my plan was to fix up Maruku’s bugs and relicense it under the MIT license and release that as version 0.7.0. I did that, and then the plan was to release 1.0.0:

I’m thinking about a new API and internals that are much more friendly to extension and customization, deprecating odd features and moving most everything but the core Markdown-to-HTML bits into separate libraries that plug in to Maruku, and general non-backwards-compatible overhauls. […] Overall, my goal for Maruku is to make it the default Markdown engine for Ruby, with a focus on compatibility (across platforms, Rubies, and with other Markdown interpreters), extensibility, and ease of contribution.

However, in March of 2013, Mr. Leitner decided to relicense Kramdown under the MIT license starting with version 1.0.0. I continued to work on finishing Maruku 0.7.0, but I knew then that for people looking for a capable, flexible, well-written pure-Ruby Markdown library, Kramdown was now the correct choice. All of the things I wanted to do in Maruku for 1.0.0 were in fact already done in Kramdown – better code organization, better modularity and extensibility, good documentation, a better parser, and improved performance. Soon after Kramdown 1.0.0 was released, I switched Middleman to depend on it instead of Maruku.

I will continue to maintain Maruku and make bugfixes, because it’s the right thing to do. That said, I’m not sure I can justify doing much work on the 1.0.0 milestone knowing that, given the choice, I would use Kramdown or Redcarpet over Maruku. My recommendation to the Ruby community, and Ruby library authors, is the same: use a different Markdown library, or better yet abstract away the choice via Tilt. Please feel free to continue to send pull requests and issues to the Maruku repository, I’ll still be there.

My partner Eva Funderburgh is a professional artist, and has been making sculptures full-time since we both moved to Seattle in 2005. I don’t have much talent for clay, so my main contribution is to help with her website. A few weeks ago we launched the third iteration of her site, which we’d been working on for several months.

The previous version (shown above) was launched around 2008 and was basically just a Wordpress theme. Eva had hand-drawn some creatures and wiggly borders to make it all feel less digital, but there’s only so far you could go with that on a web page. The resulting site had a lot of character, but ultimately failed to put her gorgeous art front and center. Worse, it had failed to keep up with the increasing sophistication and complexity of her work. It also scaled poorly to mobile devices, and just plain looked outdated.

I had a lot of goals for the new site. First and foremost, it needed to be dominated by pictures of Eva’s art, especially on the homepage. The way I see it, any part of the screen that doesn’t include a picture of her sculptures is wasted space. I also wanted the design to be clean, contemporary, and focused. We have so many great pictures of her creatures that any ornamentation or empty space is a wasted opportunity. Beyond that, I had a bunch of technical goals befitting a website built in 2013. The first was that the site should work well on mobile, with a responsive design that supported everything from phones to tablets to widescreen desktop monitors. A related goal was that the site should support high-DPI or “retina” screens – both of us are eagerly awaiting new Retina MacBook Pros, and browsing with high-resolution phones and tablets is more and more popular. It seems safe to assume that screen resolutions will only increase over time, and I wanted Eva’s art to appear as sharp and beautiful as it could on nice devices. Also related to the goal to work on mobile, I wanted the site to be fast. This meant minimizing download size, number of external resources, and JavaScript computation. It also meant leveraging CSS transitions and animations to provide smooth, GPU-accelerated motion to give the site a nice feel. Helpfully, one of the decisions I made up front was that this site was going to target the latest browsers and the advanced CSS and JavaScript features they support. Fortunately, most browsers aggressively update themselves these days, so the age of supporting old browsers for years and years is coming to a close.

The site itself was built using Middleman, an open-source static website generator I help maintain. This allowed me to use CoffeeScript for all my JavaScript, which I have come to appreciate after a rocky first experience, and to use Haml and Sass/Compass for HTML and CSS respectively. One of my coworkers challenged me to write all my JavaScript without using jQuery, which was actually pretty straightforward and improved the performance of the site while dropping quite a bit of size from the overall download. I did rely on the indispensable Underscore for templating and utilities, however.

The redesign started with the new homepage, which presents a grid of cropped pictures that fill up the whole window. First, we chose a basic grid unit or “block” that the whole page is divided into. Eva selected a bunch of pictures she liked, and used Lightroom to crop them all into tiles of specific sizes, with dimensions of 1x1, 2x1, or 3x1 blocks. She also exported double-resolution versions of each block for retina displays. Each picture was associated with a full-frame version on Flickr. JavaScript on the homepage uses that information to randomly select images and las them down like a bricklayer would to make a wall, creating a solid grid of pictures. If the browser reports itself as high-DPI, the double-resolution images are used to provide retina sharpness. A quick CSS transition animates each block into the page as they load. To make the page responsive to different browser sizes, there are media-query breakpoints at each multiple of the block size and when the browser is resized, the blocks are laid out again. You can see the effect by resizing your browser – it will reduce the width of the grid one block at a time. Once the browser gets below a certain size, the block size is halved to fit more images onto a smaller screen. Using blocks for the breakpoints instead of the classic “iPhone, iPad, Desktop” breakpoints means that the design works nicely on many devices and browser window sizes – this way it looks good on devices from non-retina smartphones all the way up to HDTVs, and not just the Apple devices I happen to own.

The other part of the homepage is the “lightbox” that appears when each tile is tapped. This is built from scratch rather than using any lightbox plugin, and uses CSS transitions to display smoothly. It also allows for keyboard navigation, so you can use the arrow keys to browse through pictures. The full-size image for the lightbox is linked directly from Flickr, and I use the Flickr API to select the perfect image size that won’t stretch and blur, but won’t waste time with a too-large download. This can end up showing a dramatically different sized image between a phone and a Retina Macbook!

After the homepage, the rest of the site was relatively easy. For the most part, it’s still a Wordpress theme, though it reuses the responsive breakpoints at each integer multiple of the block size to provide nice reading on every screen. I also reused the exact same code from the homepage to provide a row of random tiles at the top of the page. Beyond that, there are just some SVG icons for the social media links (to ensure that they too display nicely on retina screens) and a few more subtle fit-and-polish tweaks to make it feel great. The “Art” page was designed by hand to provide high-resolution banners linking to Flickr, Etsy, and the various galleries that showcase Eva’s work, and the rest is editable directly from Wordpress so that Eva can maintain and update the content. A series of IFTTT rules make it easier for her to update the site while she’s working by piping specially-tagged Flickr uploads into the blog (and to Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter).

I’m rarely satisfied with the website designs I produce, but this time I’m extremely proud of what we’ve built. Please check out the site, resize your browser, try it out on your phone, but most of all, enjoy the pretty pictures.