Joe Bowers

I Write Software

My Resume As a Technical Generalist

People say nice things about me in my LinkedIn Profile

I Make Things

I just wrote a Clojure tool for approximate non-negative matrix factorization for feature extraction.

A blurry image that you can recognize as the Mona Lisa

An image of the Mona Lisa, with some strange artifacts in it

I wrote lzw, a pure python module for lzw compression. You can browse the documentation here, or get the module for yourself at the python package index.

Slides for Javascript Makes me Happy, a talk introducing JavaScript as a Functional Language to (mostly) C# and Java programmers, that I presented at Codestock 2009

An excuse for an Axis-Aligned Bounding Box Tree in Javascript

// Change this code to control how the swarm behaves.
    //
    // dude - this is the dude you can move or change.
    //   MOSTLY, you'll want to set dude.heading to some value
    //   between 0 and (2 * Math.PI)
    //   Dude also has posX and posY members.
    //
    // neighbors - an array of other dudes "near" your dude.
    //   They also have posX, posY, and heading
    //
    // ticks - the time, in abstract "ticks", since the last update.
    //
    // bounds - a rectangle { left, right, top, bottom } that
    //    describes the boundaries of the field.
    //
   var targetX = Math.sin(dude.heading);
   var targetY = Math.cos(dude.heading);

var targetX = Math.cos(dude.heading);
   var targetY = Math.sin(dude.heading);

var leftEdge = dude.posX + (targetX * dude.width);
   var rightEdge = dude.posX + dude.width + 
                     (targetX * dude.width);

if(rightEdge > bounds.right)
       targetX = -1;
   else if(leftEdge < bounds.left)
       targetX = 1;

var topEdge = dude.posY + (targetX * dude.width);
   var bottomEdge = dude.posY + dude.width + 
		      (targetY * dude.width);

if(bottomEdge > bounds.bottom)
       targetY = -1;
   else if(topEdge < bounds.top)
       targetY = 1;
   
   for(var nIx=0; nIx < neighbors.length; nIx++) {
       var friend = neighbors[nIx];

if(((friend.posX + friend.width) < dude.posX  ) ||
	  ((dude.posX   + dude.width  ) < friend.posX) ||
	  ((friend.posY + friend.width) < dude.posY  ) ||
	  ((dude.posY   + dude.width  ) < friend.posY)){
	   ; // NOTHING, we haven't collided.
       }
       else {
	   targetX += dude.posX - friend.posX;
	   targetY += dude.posY - friend.posY;
       }
   }

dude.heading = Math.atan2(targetY, targetX);

I wrote Some R code for generating factoradic representations of integers, and using those representations to generate permutations in a deterministic way.

Here is a simple, immutable heap in F#

I think random assignment is pretty close to magic.

I turned my shoulder bag into an evil robot with a lilypad arduino and some copper tape.

A simple C# class for binding nice colors to things you intend to use in a graph (or whatever.)

Here's version of TodBot's excellent little six line Arduino function for powering your WiiChuck (or anything else) using Arduino analog pins 2 and 3, annotated in painstaking detail

I wrote an iPhone app to ~~unleash unknowable cosmic energies~~ draw black dots on a yellow background, which look pretty cool on poorly lit video.

I think you probably shouldn't try to abstract away the web, and you definitely shouldn't try to abstract away the network.

I twitter intermittently, a phrase that sounds as if it was an elocution exercise, but is nonetheless true.

I made a couple of little animations a while back, like this one:

One of them even got on tv