You're visiting webonastick.com, Darren's web site. It doesn't get updated that often, to be honest. It's just... there, man. You can also check out his Twitter feed, his sporadically-updated LiveJournal blog, and his profiles on LouisvilleMojo and on Facebook.
If you scratch a cynic, you'll find a disappointed idealist.
— George Carlin, 1937–2008
On two occasions I have been asked, — “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
— Charles Babbage
Perfection is attained, not when no more can be added, but when no more can be removed.
— Antoine de Saint Exupéry, from Terre des Hommes

Hello, mortals.

I'm Darren Embry. I do computer programming for web sites, along with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, for a living.

Minor Open Source Projects

I work on or have worked on a few small programming projects. Nothing big. They're all GPL- or LGPL-licensed. Enjoy.

vtclock
An easy-to-read ncurses clock for text-only terminals.
tdu
A text-mode disk usage visualization utility.
js-gallery
It's like Google Maps, only for image galleries.
rpncalc
An interactive reverse Polish notation calculator that's keyboard driven like it should be.
Shared Calendars for OpenWebMail 2.10
I did this for Moatware a long time ago.

For GNU Emacs

A collection of snippets of Emacs Lisp. I wrote them for GNU Emacs version 22. They may or may not work with XEmacs or earlier version of GNU emacs.

custom-faces-file.el
Allows one to split face customizations off into their own file.
hide-mode-line.el
Hides the mode line when there is only one window in a frame. Not yet ready for prime time.
fix-horizontal-size
A handy function that makes a frame (or window) 80 columns wide.

Other Stuff

Stuff I Like

Because I like these things, you should consider them awesome. If they weren't awesome, I wouldn't like them.

Computer Stuff I Like

  • Debian GNU/Linux, a distribution of the Linux operating system, GNU utilities, and other software.
  • Perl, a programming language.
  • Emacs, the be-all and end-all of text editors.
  • Firefox, a web browser.
  • Mutt, an email reader.
  • Tiling window managers
  • The Unix Philosophy, the correct software engineering ethos.
  • Higher-order programming
  • Mason, a web site development and delivery engine based on Perl. It's kind of sort of like PHP, but on steroids, and based on a programming language characterized by 98% less suck.
  • irssi, an IRC client that doesn't have the arcane scripting language of ircII/epic or the retarded default behavior of BitchX.
  • VisiBone — Their HTML and JavaScript reference cards put all the others to shame.
  • TeX
  • jQuery, a JavaScript library that makes AJAX and DOM manipulation a hell of a lot easier.
  • Subversion, a version control system. It's not distributed, but it's good enough to replace CVS.
  • JavaScript: The Definitive Guide and JavaScript: The Good Parts — All other JavaScript books suck.

Stuff That Is Fundamentally Wrong

This list has moved to a separate page.

It includes neoconservatives, Microsoft, and more.

Copyright 1994–2009 Darren Stuart Embry

This page works on any web browser. It ain't that hard.