Words, code, and information security in Portland, Oregon

This is the website of Erik L. Arneson. I am a freelance writer and software developer in Portland, Oregon.


Blog Posts

  • Integrating Cedexis Radar with WordPress Sites

    Cedexis Radar is a real user monitoring (RUM) system that collects millions of metrics every day. It’s used to measure the health of networks in order for Cedexis Openmix to make intelligent routing decisions for web service users.

  • Web Page Size is Vital

    When I first learned how to program a computer, optimization was a big deal. Figuring out how to squeeze every bit of performance out of a subroutine was difficult but rewarding. Articles were frequently written about how to best go about optimizing source code.

  • Hypothes.is Web Annotation Tool

    While working on the Philalethes E-Bulletin Online Reader, I came across a useful web-based annotation tool called Hypothes.is. It’s worth checking out. The tool uses a browser plugin to provide a number of cool features.

  • Philalethes E-Bulletin Online Reader

    I began working on the Philalethes E-Bulletin in the Fall of 2013, and published the first issue in January of 2014. The E-Bulletin is published quarterly in EPUB and MOBI formats.

  • An English-language Stemmer for OCaml

    A stemming algorithm attempts to reduce words to their stem. For instance, “swimming” would be reduced to “swim”, and “avocados” would become “avocado”. This is useful in a number of situations, most especially in searching text. This library is a direct port of the Porter English stemming algorithm.

  • Handling Widows and Orphans in EPUB Files

    For a little over a year, I’ve been working with the EPUB format to build electronic books. I’ve been working on a software package to build EPUB files in Emacs, in fact. This has required learning more about design, and a great deal more about book layout. As with many design elements, once you’re made aware of them, you notice them all of the time. EPUBs, for instance, are not very good at handling widows and orphans.

  • Official Release of Libbucket 1.0.4

    I’ve tagged version 1.0.4 of libbucket over on GitHub. You can download a tarball at this link. If you’d like to read more about libbucket, see my post from earlier this week.

  • Small Team Software Change Management

    Until October, I’d been using a paid GitHub account to manage source code changes and issue tracking for private projects. GitHub is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product providing a web-based interface for source control management and various project tracking tasks. Some people love it and some aren’t fond of it.

  • Modernizing libbucket

    If you’re here to learn about my experience in software development, you’ve probably poked around my GitHub page. One the older projects on there is libbucket, a very fast dynamic string buffer library. I originally wrote it while working for Musician’s Friend, and was given permission to release it as an open sourced library in 2005.

  • Bootstrap and WordPress

    I’ve used Twitter Bootstrap many times in web applications. It really makes building an application interface fast and easy, primarily because I don’t have to worry much about design. Bootstrap makes things a lot easier for a developer who doesn’t do good design work.

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