Welcome to the dottrombone.com site!
If you've come here looking for my programming business, check out the clients page.
Rand's Curry is now a shopping list generator.


Welcome to the dottrombone.com site!
If you've come here looking for my programming business, check out the clients page.
Rand's Curry is now a shopping list generator.
I started programming around the time the Apple II came out. We had an IBM PCjr. Others in the neighborhood had the Commodore 64's. We used the Apple IIc's at school. They all ran Basic. I got heavily involved with 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 just wasn't social enough to make that happen. My Dirty Pot recording was about the best I did. It got to the point that I couldn't 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.
Drag the green circles on top of each other to create that cool Star Trek communicator effect!
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";
}
Privacy: The only tracking that this site does is recording ip addresses on the ticker. This clues me into how many human visitors I get and how long they browse.