Charles Rand Barnett / Dot Trombone LLC

Musician & Software Developer

Welcome to the dottrombone.com site!

You can dig up a lot of dirt on me. I've had my fair share of rough times in life. At this point in life, I like composing romantic piano music and playing that by the fireside and with my curry dinners. Please check out my music, products, and Rand'c Curry pages to see what I'm really about.

I started programming around the time the first Apple II came out. We had an IBM PCjr. Others in the neighborhood had the Commodore 64's. They all ran Basic. I got heavily involved in music during my high school years and went on to doing that for 7 years in the US Navy. While I was in the Navy, I got into computers again during the Windows 3.11/95 years. I had a 486 DX2 50MGhz computer with a Math Co-processor!

I got out of the Navy in 2000 and did my best to make it as a musician. It didn't pan out. I'm just not social enough to make that happen. My Dirty Pot recording was about the best I did. It got to the point that I could just not gamble on music anymore and that was when I got into programming as a career. I studied the math of collision detection as a way to become a programmer. That certainly wasn't the easiest way to get into professional programming, but it did lay a solid foundation of computer programming skills.

Here is an example of the computer and math work I do. This is the math behind the menu on this website:

var slantLength = 15;// the horizontal length of the slanted line

// xO stands for x origin, the bottom left of each diagonal line
// xmn stands for x mouse now

var xmn = menuLastMouseX;
var angle = Math.atan((canvas.height + 2) / slantLength);
var sideA = canvas.height - menuLastMouseY;
var sideC = (1 / Math.sin(angle)) * sideA;
var sideB = Math.cos(angle) * sideC;			

var xOffset = sideB;

if(xmn - xOffset > xO && xmn - xOffset < xO + textWidth + textTrailingWidth)
{
	ctx.fillStyle = "yellow";
}
else
{
	ctx.fillStyle = "white";
}

But as is often the case, we don't need fancy trig to do this. We can simply use ratios!

var slantLength = 15;// the horizontal length of the slanted line

// xO stands for x origin, the bottom left of each diagonal line
// xmn stands for x mouse now

var xmn = menuLastMouseX;

// a/b = c/d
var a = canvas.height + 2;
var b = slantLength;
var c = canvas.height - menuLastMouseY;

// now cross multiply and divide to get d
var d = (c * b) / a;

if(xmn > xO && d < xmn - xO && d > xmn - (xO + textWidth + textTrailingWidth))
{
	ctx.fillStyle = "yellow";
}
else
{
	ctx.fillStyle = "white";
}

This is one of the cleanest MySQL join queries I've written. I did this in the summer of 2020 for my curry business:


$allMenuItemIngredients = queryResult("

SELECT menu_items.id as menu_item_id, menu_items.name as name, ingredients.name as ingredient, ingredients.measurement as measurement, ingredients.measurement_per_cup as measurement_per_cup, menu_item_ingredients.quantity as quantity

FROM menu_items

LEFT JOIN menu_item_ingredients ON menu_items.id = menu_item_ingredients.menu_item_id

LEFT JOIN ingredients ON menu_item_ingredients.ingredient_id = ingredients.id

GROUP BY menu_item_ingredients.id

ORDER BY menu_items.name");

foreach($allMenuItemIngredients as $k=>$v)
{
	echo $k . ' = ' . $v . '<br />';
}