Click Modifiers

Click Modifiers logo Click Modifiers is a Firefox extension I created to allow users to change the action that occurs when you click on a link while using a modifier key or middle mouse button. I created this since I frequently like opening links in new windows on my Mac laptops which have single button trackpads and when using the command key Firefox normally opens links in a new tab instead.

Tempest in a Java Pot

Screenshot of Tempest in a Java Pot Tempest in a Java Pot is a small Java application I made to test out how well computer monitors work as radio transmitters after I read about Tempest online. The monitor is used as a transmitter by displaying specially constructed images on the monitor with the intent of generating a desired radio wave from the electromagnetic emanations leaking out of the monitor.

The Computer Language Benchmarks Game

Many of the personal programs I write do lots of resource intensive image or data processing and I'm also not a fan of bloated software so I've been interested in The Computer Language Benchmarks Game for getting a rough idea of how the various programming languages and their implementations perform against each other. Now don't get me wrong, for many things performance isn't everything so it might make sense to use a higher level but slower, more memory consuming language. I've contributed several programs to the game mainly because it didn't make sense that several of the C programs were performing poorly but also partly for bragging rights too since many of my programs are among the fastest, least memory consuming, most portable, and best documented. ;-) Here's a list of programs I've submitted and their standings as of March 2019:
  • Binary-Trees C program - Second fastest program. Could easily be faster if the game rules had less restrictions regarding use of custom memory management.
  • Binary-Trees C program - Was the fastest overall program for a couple years.
  • Fannkuch-Redux C program - Currently the fastest program and has been for several years.
  • Fasta C program - Was the fastest overall program for awhile and served as a basis for the second fastest program.
  • K-Nucleotide C program - Was the fastest overall program for a couple years and still is the second best program for run time, CPU time, and memory usage. Could easily be faster if the game rules had less restrictions regarding use of custom hash table implementations.
  • Mandelbrot C program - Was the fastest overall program for awhile and still might be the fastest of the non-vectorized programs that aren't possibly stretching/breaking the game rules regarding manual loop unrolling.
  • N-Body C program - Second fastest program.
  • Regex-Redux C program - Was the fastest program for awhile, still is the second fastest program, and also served as a basis for the top program (which was submitted by one of the PCRE developers and mainly just updated my program to work with a new version of PCRE).
  • Reverse-Complement C program - Was the fastest overall program for awhile, still has the third best run time, and still has the best CPU time.
I also created an archive of a bunch of the Computer Language Benchmarks Game content in April 2018 prior to the deprecation of the Debian Alioth server that it used to be hosted on. This archive is available at https://gitlab.com/Zerf/ComputerLanguageBenchmarksGame2018Archive and this may be the only place on the Internet that still has a lot of the old Computer Language Benchmarks Game content.

HTML/CSS/JavaScript Experiments

Various HTML/CSS/JavaScript things that I've toyed around with before that might be of interest to some people:
  • CSS Spinning 3D Letter - Just a simple letter spinning in 3D on all three axes with a motion blur effect solely using HTML and CSS with no JavaScript or WebGL. The animation can be a little jerky on some browsers or slow computers though.