Fire! Fire!

On Khan Academy a few days ago, a user asked for help. He said I was known for my animations, and that he needed fire for a game. A couple of days later, I tried writing a fire system. A couple of hours after that, I was done.

The result: a program that many people enjoyed. In only 20 hours, 46 users had voted it up. It has been 4 days since I wrote the program, and it now has at least 97 up-votes.

To create the fire, I used a particle system of a lot of transparent ellipses, a good bit of math, and Perlin noise. I added the wind yesterday, using Perlin noise to make transitions smoother. The program doesn't interact with the user; it's only supposed to look cool.

Live Chat

I recently discovered a really great website: firebase.com. It will store data for your applications, enabling you to write really awesome programs (such as multi-player games) using it - and the Development account (which I used) is free!

To communicate with the API, I had to learn HTML. I also learned some CSS and jQuery to make things easier. Then I wrote a live chat app using my knowledge.

In the app, you can use HTML to format your comments. At one point I allowed use of the &ltscript&gt tag, but after users abused it I disabled it. I also added a couple of new tags: &ltconsole&gt and &ltincode&gt You can post a comment by either clicking "Post Comment" or pressing the Alt key on your keyboard.