Alex Cruikshank

About Alex Cruikshank

Alex is Carbon Five's resident mad genius. He is recently very involved in functional languages, and has been anchoring teams at C5 for the past decade.

Interactivity in HTML5 Canvas Visualizations

In the last canvas visualization post I discussed the canvas API’s transform functionality and how it greatly simplifies drawing complex visualizations.  In this post, I’ll talk a little about making canvas visualizations interactive and about problems you might encounter when … Continue reading

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Taming 2D Transforms in HTML5 Canvas

This is the second post in a series on creating custom interactive visualizations in canvas.  The first post is here. The canvas API contains five methods (rotate, scale, translate, transform, and setTransform) used to transform the drawing context. We typically … Continue reading

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Visualizing Skillsets in HTML5 Canvas: Part 1

As Courtney chronicled in the d.build journal, Carbon Five recently engaged in a group exercise to create a physical diagram of our skills and interests.  The activity was entertaining and produced a rather attractive artifact on the wall, but we … Continue reading

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A 3D Flocking Simulation using HTML5 Canvas

I recently unearthed an old Java applet that I had written many years ago and decided to see what it would look like as a single page canvas application (an HTML5 compatible browser is required to view this page). The … Continue reading

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A few experiments with HTML 5 applications

I’ve had a long-standing interest in taking client-side programming beyond display logic and input validation. The new HTML 5 technologies are making full-scale application development in the browser increasingly practical. Unfortunately, the needs of Carbon Five’s clients generally exceed the … Continue reading

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Screw.Unit JS Testing in Maven: javascript-test-maven-plugin

I’ve written a maven plugin to integrate Screw.Unit javascript tests into a maven build. The project is inspired by the Blue Ridge testing framework for Rails, but it’s a bit more light-weight by design.

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Secure Email with Spring’s JavaMailServer and Gmail

Both Carbon Five and my ISP have moved email management over to Gmail.  While this has been a net improvement for me as an end user, it’s made it a bit more difficult to configure my applications to send outgoing … Continue reading

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Parameterized REST URLs with Spring MVC

At Carbon Five, we’ve been working REST-ful practices into our web applications for some time now. Providing simple URLs for application entities is a key principal of this style, but parsing parameters out of the request path has been klunky … Continue reading

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Using classpath*: vs. classpath: when loading Spring resources.

After a few hours of hair-pulling and a deep tour of the Spring source, we realized that the problem was that our test Spring configuration was in a different classpath root from our Hibernate mappings, even though both directories were in the test’s classpath. Continue reading

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