Elf Sternberg

Introduction Two months ago I was complaining that I didn’t have a job, and then suddenly I had one. I work for Splunk now, an enterprise-level machine data analysis company. Their core product is pretty magical: you can shove just about any logfile, real-time stream, script-generated datasource, or anything else at it, and then interrogate [...]

Following on my adventures in job seeking, several weeks ago I landed a great new job with Splunk. They do big data for “internal intelligence”; monitoring your toolkit and helping you do analytics on masses of what is generally thought of as unstructured data. I help customers visualize their data, and have been doing javascript [...]

I wonder if anyone else has this problem. This week, I finally wrapped my head around Tumble, the basic parser engine I’ve been working my way up to since about January or so.  It really shouldn’t have taken so long, but I had a lot to learn, a lot of false starts, a change of [...]

I really like Tumblr’s templating language.  It’s simple, it makes sense for small contexts, and it’s easily extensible.  So I decided to make my own.  This will be the core of the next generation of the Narrator engine, the thing I use to render my stories and series.  It’s also not restricted to HTML; it [...]

I’ve been looking for work.  My last employer decided that remote didn’t work well, and gave its four remote workers the options of moving to California or accepting layoffs.  I accepted the layoff.  I was worried about looking for work; even a year ago, my search took several weeks and a lot of rounds of [...]

This screenshot more or less perfectly illustrates what I consider wrong with the Udacity HTML5 game development class.  We’re in the middle of a routine for drawing sprites to the screen, and so far this particular lesson, on asset atlasses and sprite packing and all the rest, has been fine, but there’s something in this [...]

So, I’ve been taking Udacity’s “HTML5 Game Development” course, and I have some first impressions. First, Udacity.  It’s a “free, online courseware” thing that grew out of some private money thrown at Stanford University.  Wikipedia gives great article here.  But it’s free.  And, sure, maybe there are classes that would be of more use to [...]

It’s been awhile since I worked on a personal project.   I have an idea for a simple to-do list, just like everyone else’s.  But mine will be better!  I promise!  It will!  Or, at least, it’ll be mine.  Basically what it comes down to is that I hate every to-do list.  There are a few [...]

Below are my answers for SftI Chapter 2. I’ve also included some commentary on interesting things I realized as I did the problems.

I’ve been having this headache for days.  A very large illustration application I’ve been writing for my employer works on every platform– including the Barnes & Noble NOOK Color!– but not on the iPad.  On an iPad, it was just blank.  I have an iPad3, and it was puzzling the heck out of me. For [...]