• Chris M Smith
    • Tinkerer I like to learn new things. Not just new things about programming, though I like that too. (Arduino, Woodworking, Baking, ...)
    • Developer I like to solve complex problems. That can be figuring out how to optimize styles to match a style guide, programming a camera driver to track objects in real time, or control LEDs with an Arduino.
    • Software Engineer When I program I do so as a professional. I follow best practices and use appropriate software patterns in design and implementation.
  • About Me
    I'm a full time programmer with a BS in Software Engineering. I have worked as a System Admin, an Application Developer, and a Web Developer. I have worked in a Large Multi National for a Large Multi National, a Small Startup, and a Medium Size Multi-National. Each job, each project, has offered it's own opportunity to learn and grow. I activity explore technology in my own time and look to share and learn from those around me.
  • Blog
    A while ago I started a blog to keep track of things I found challenging, interesting to learn, would be fun to share.
  • Projects
    This are some projects I worked on to learn about a technology or to just amuse myself. Some of them may also be covered by my Blog.
    • WegGL using Three.js Demo
      This was a project I started to look into when trying to learn about 3D programming. I started with and old WPF 3D project I had used but wanted to look into other frameworks. WebGL is similar to programming in OpenGL and DirectX. There are still meshes, shaders, and similar patterns. Three.js was a library that looked to simplify that and the Three.js Boilerplate project makes it even easier to get started. This was also a fun way to look at terrain generation algorithms and implement one myself.
      You move around with the W A S D keys.
      YOU WILL NEED Google Chrome OR ANOTHER BROWSER THAT SUPPORTS WebGL AND HTML5.
    • Faux Postnet Barcode Encoder
      I have always liked barcodes and one day though it would be fun to implement the Postnet barcodes from most U.S. Mail. Looking into the Postnet code the USPS offers documentation on how the codes are generated and even gives test data to work with. However the system is used mostly for encoding numbers. Looking at each bar I realised that they could encode 4 bits. So I put together a sample app that would encode text data into a Postnet like barcode. The technology used was jQuery and CSS image offsets so only one image has to be loaded for the four different bar positions.
    • jQuery / jQuery UI / Color Box Demo
      I had run into a nice open source image popup library while working with some vendor code. I had touched a little bit of jQuery in the past but never built anything that big with it yet. So I decided to build a page that loaded images and would use the image popup library so show larger versions of them. Also I found a site that had an image store that let you specify the image size in the request URI. This meant that I could use jQuery to build the entire page dynamically.