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Making i3 windows float without for_window

Published on July 13, 2019

i3 configs often include bindings to launch applications. For example, to run Konsole terminal when Super+Enter is pressed, one would add this line to their config: bindsym --release Mod4+Return exec "konsole" The standard approach to make windows flaot is to find out the window's class and (optionally) instance

Clean inter-process communication in Electron

Published on December 29, 2018

Recently, I was working on an Electron app and I had to write a module for inter-process communication (IPC), namely between the main process ("backend") and the renderer ("browser window" or "frontend"). This is a pretty common concern for Electron developers - they often need to perform some logic in

Summer internship at UCL Surgical Robot Vision lab

Published on December 29, 2018

In the summer of 2017 I had the pleasure of spending several months as a research intern at UCL's Surgical Robot Vision (SRV) lab. I was primarily working with HoloLens, developing a system for tracking different surgical tools and displaying relevant information as holograms. Almost a year has passed since

Clearing local costmap in ROS when using PointCloud2

Published on June 16, 2018

Recently, I finished developing a simple framework for autonomous exploration of 3D environments using drones in ROS. It was my final project for Caltech's ME 134 Autonomy class. I was using the move_base navigation stack and I ran into a weird issue where my local costmap would correctly display

Emphasizing the active pane in Vim using ColorColumn

Published on May 25, 2018

Around a month ago I switched to using Vim full-time. I've already been using Vim for all of my command-line editing, but now I've enabled Vim emulation in all of the other editors I use (namely those coming from JetBrains). To keep my Vim skills versatile, my Vim configuration uses

2018 So Far: Von, Rammy, Trek*

Published on May 12, 2018

I was hoping to write at least one article every month, but as you can see this is my first post since January. I sometimes find it hard to decide which ideas or projects I want to write about, which could explain this 4-month gap. Although I didn't post anything

How I got into coding

Published on January 31, 2018

I had to move from London, UK, to Pasadena, CA, USA for a year as a part of a study abroad program. Unfortunately, I couldn't take my battlestation with me so I had to bring one of my old laptops instead. While looking through my old coding projects, I found

Responsive placeholders for lazy-loading images

Published on December 26, 2017

I was adding bits and pieces to a small project of mine (I wrote about it here) when I came across an interesting problem. I had a bunch of images that were aligned in one row and resized using display: flex;, so that all of them would have the same

Better native logging in Node.js

Published on November 21, 2017

I often have to read through piles of logs for different programs. Levels of sophistication and approaches to logging differ from program to program, but I think everyone would agree that there is a certain bare minimum of data your logs should contain to be useful. Not only that, I'd

"Always use single quotes in JS" or how to protect yourself from XSS using SQL injections

Published on November 17, 2017

Now that I'm enjoying my time as an exchange student at Caltech, I decided to look back at some of the great things that happened to me in UCL. This particular time I'll tell you about an effective way to shield your website from various exploits: by introducing more vulnerabilities.

Blitz: Yet Another Static Site Generator

Published on October 15, 2017

A small disclaimer: I was planning to write this article for a long time now, and somewhere between now and the time I released Blitz I've realised that this project was doomed from the start. Initially, this post was going to be about me telling you how cool Blitz is,

MyAnimeTimeline and Kuristina

Published on October 15, 2017

This article has been sitting in my drafts for a while now, I decided to add some minor details and publish it. Apologies if it might seem incomplete. One day I was looking through the MyAnimeList (MAL) account of mine and I've noticed that I've specified the start and finish

Akko Music Visualisation Framework

Published on October 14, 2017

It's a life-long dream of mine to invent a robust yet accessible music visualisation framework. I've tried a bunch of times in the past using Java (ActiveVisualiser, Envision) but the solutions were very obviously imperfect: first of all, I had no idea what I was doing, and secondly, they were

Readability buff

Published on October 14, 2017

If you've ever visited this website before October 2017, you might've seen some cool animations and a dynamic grid, just like the one on the gif. It looked nice and was certainly fun to implement, but god was it not readable at all. I decided to fix that. Home page

Panoramas from my trip to Japan in 2016

Published on September 05, 2017

As you might've found out from a previous post of mine, in Summer of 2016 I spent a couple of weeks travelling around Japan. The previous post focused on the pictures I've taken with my camera, while this one has a bunch of panoramas I've taken during the trip using

PostgreSQL with Node.js: Migrations and schema dumps

Published on August 05, 2017

While working on the Fizzyo project for one of my summer internships I've noticed the lack of articles on database migrations and database integration testing for Node.js projects. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of resources talking about each part separately, but you still have to do the

Returning an array of JSON objects in PostgreSQL

Published on July 24, 2017

For my internship with Microsoft and UCL Institute of Child Health I had to work with PostgreSQL. My back-end was running on Node.js, so naturally I was interested in getting JSON formatted data out of Postgres whenever possible. Alternative solution was to handle all the logic using JavaScript and

TCP client in a UWP Unity app on HoloLens

Published on July 21, 2017

If you've ever had the pleasure of implementing a TCP client that would work in both the Unity editor (for development/debugging) and UWP on HoloLens (for production) you will know how painful the whole process is. Below you can find some info on how I tackled this problem. My

Automatic Node.js testing and linting using Git hooks

Published on June 29, 2017

In Summer 2017 I was working on an internship with Microsoft and UCL. I was put in charge of designing and developing the backend architecture for a reasonably big system. Continuous integration (CI) and deployment (CD) were a must, so I tried to automate as many things as possible. As

PEACH Reality featured on official HoloLens homepage

Published on June 29, 2017

Today was truly an amazing day. A video about the project I worked on, PEACH Reality, was featured on the official homepage of Microsoft HoloLens. It was a very interesting journey and I'm very thankful to Microsoft for helping us out and shooting this video about the project. The video

HoloLens Development: First Steps

Published on June 14, 2017

As you might've found out from other posts in my blog, I've spent quite a lot of time developing a Microsoft HoloLens application during my 2nd year in UCL. In this post I'd like to outline several things that beginner HoloLens developers might find useful. If you have the time,

My trip to Japan in Summer 2016 (Pictures)

Published on May 06, 2017

In June of 2016 I spent 2 weeks travelling around Japan with a bunch of friends. We've covered a fair bit of southern Japan, including Hiroshima, Osaka, Kobe, Nara, Kyoto, Atami and Tokyo. It was an amazing experience and since I'm no wordsmith but I still wanted to document my

COMP207P Compilers Guidelines Part 2: Java Bytecode Optimisation

Published on April 06, 2017

As described in the previous article, during my time in UCL I had to work on several pieces of coursework related to the development of compilers. In this article I'll be expressing some thoughts and suggestions about the second coursework, the one concerned with altering Java bytecode to implement things

My Linux dotfiles

Published on March 10, 2017

I've finally gotten to customising my Linux setup and put some of my dotfiles on GitHub, including a pretty handy installation script. Check out the README.md file in the repo linked above to see the description of the tools I used. As I'll keep updating that readme as I

Discord Spoiler Bot

Published on February 25, 2017

I was elected as the treasurer of UCLU Anime Society 2016/17, and since I was a computer science student I was also responsible for IT in our society. Half way into the academic year we created a Discord chat for our society, and people begun requesting various features. One

Spotify playback and volume control using keyboard shortcuts on Linux

Published on February 18, 2017

Recently I've been playing around with my new Ubuntu setup (using bspwm, seen below) and I needed to get my keyboard playback and volume controls working to use Spotify efficiently. While this topic has been covered extensively on the web, the knowledge is currently spread among multiple websites and this

COMP207P Compilers Guidelines Part 1: Lexing and Parsing

Published on February 17, 2017

During my 2nd year as a computer scientist at UCL I got a chance to work on an amazing compilers coursework. It was a part of COMP207P Compilers module and together with 2 of my teammates I was faced with a challenge to develop the compiler front-end for a fictitious

Presenting to Steve Guggenheimer, Corporate VP of Microsoft

Published on February 13, 2017

On December 5th, 2016, I got a chance to present the PEACH Reality project I've been working on to Steve Guggenheimer, who is (at the time of writing) the Corporate Vice President & Chief Evangelist at Microsoft. Presentation The presentation itself lasted around 15 minutes during which my team had a

Hiding compiled JavaScript or CSS from GitHub diff

Published on February 04, 2017

While working on Blitz, a static site generator I'm developing, I wanted to prevent compiled JavaScript from cluttering the diffs. I was using TypeScript which was compiled into JS, so I was really only interested in the changes to TS source code. Solution To avoid wasting your time, let's jump

UCL PEACH Reality with Microsoft HoloLens

Published on November 20, 2016

As a part of COMP204P/COMP205P System Engineering modules in my 2nd year of study in UCL I've been given a chance to work with Microsoft HoloLens and I became a part of the PEACH project, namely the Reality group. In this article I'll be talking about PEACH Reality itself

Spark: Ambient Lighting System

Published on November 10, 2016

I have recently put together a new rig, and it just so happened I had several LED strips leftover from one of my previous projects. Sadly, I couldn't get my hands on a monitor with built-in ambient lighting so I decided to build my own solution. This was the core

Reflex PHP

Published on October 30, 2016

I was thinking about an easy way to simulate various APIs, and I was looking for a reusable solution that doesn't require much setup and if possible is platform/language independent. The primary application would be in development of apps that rely on some API that has not been made

Higher order functions in C

Published on September 02, 2016

It's not a secret that for almost all people attempting to learn C pointers are a grey area. I personally was struggling quite a lot understanding them but I was saved by a huge amount of amazing guides on pointer usage you can find online. That said, I still feel

Understanding two-way data binding in JS

Published on August 29, 2016

In the recent years, two-way data binding has become a very popular technique among all sorts of JavaScript frameworks and other tools, and I felt like an article about the basic concepts behind it might be useful for someone who wishes to understand how exactly two-way data binding works. In

Foxy Panda Source

Published on August 21, 2016

Source code First of all, you can find Foxy Panda source code on its GitHub page. If you're interested, there is also a repo of an older version of Foxy Panda written on Angular 2. Below you can find some more information about the history and the purpose of this

Digit recognition in JavaScript

Published on August 17, 2016

During the summer of 2016 I took an interest in the concepts behind neural networks and machine learning and after doing researching I decided to apply my newly acquired knowledge. Recently I've begun working with TypeScript quite a lot and decided to stick with it as my primary language of

LaTeX Bootcamp

Published on April 30, 2016

During my first year as a computer scientist at UCL I found myself using $\LaTeX$ quite a bit, and I have to be honest here - for someone with absolutely no prior knowledge in that area it wasn't an easy road and the learning curve was quite steep. Naturally, after

JS Gaussian Elimination

Published on March 12, 2016

While doing some coursework for MATH6301 module for uni I decided that it takes too damn long to write out basic gaussian elimination operations. Additionally, I felt like procrastinating and doing something that will involve using gulp which I have only recently discovered. The result was this gaussian elimination visualiser

Auth-chan

Published on August 10, 2015

Before I realised I should probably make the source code of my projects public (instead of just dumping tens of hours into them and forgetting about them), I made a bunch of cool things that I've never shared with anyone. Today I've discovered another gem I've made back in August

Reddit Themes

Published on July 24, 2015

Some time around 2014 I was an avid reddit user (I mostly lurk nowadays) and I made quite a lot of themes for various subreddits. Below you can see some of the themes I have actually released. In reality, there were a bit more but I've never gotten a chance

HyperBlocks

Published on March 21, 2015

A quick overview HyperBlocks is a WYSIWYG editor for sidebar content on Reddit. Its main aim is to allow moderators to easily organise the contents of sidebars in their subreddits in a neat and well-structured way without any prior knowledge of CSS or Markdown syntax. You find a video of

Dota 2 Icons

Published on January 17, 2015

I used to make various mods for Dota 2, and as you've probably guessed some of these mods were icon mods for various heroes. In this post you can see some of the icon sets I bothered to complete. I no longer mod Dota 2 so I have no idea

Active Visualiser

Published on January 17, 2015

Back in 2014 I decided to develop a music visualiser, and since I was mostly working with Java at the time my choice fell on this very language. Sadly, I couldn't find any decent tutorials or examples of music visualiser implementation in Java, so I decided to make one myself.

Synlighter

Published on April 10, 2014

Synlighter is a simple syntax highlighting plugin I developed a while ago. I used it primarily as an exercise to study regular expressions, so it is still far from being called a complete product and it only supports HTML, CSS and JS highlighting. Sadly, I'm no longer developing it so