Chris Price

Tech

Mobiumata

Mobiumata (a concatenation of Möbius strip and cellular automata) is a small interactive art piece that allows folk to play god to 1,500 LED cells wrapped into a Möbius strip.

Chris Price · 31^st Jul · 16 min read

Artificial Intelligence

Prompt engineering with spreadsheets

When we couldn't find a tool to meet our prompt engineering needs, we decided to create a universal tool that allows anyone to build their own – all within the familiar spreadsheet environment. An Excel add-in that lets you use OpenAI models in Excel formulas.

Robat Williams, Chris Price · 10^th Jan · 5 min read

Tech · Video

GPT3: How do you get creativity from determinism?

We've all now seen the apparently creative outputs of Generative AI, with astonishing results that seem to border on human creativity. How does GPT-3 achieve this? In this short talk, I lift the lid to reveal the probabilistic elements that allow an otherwise deterministic model to give all the appearances of creativity.

Chris Price · 5^th Jul 2023

Artificial Intelligence

Catching up with OpenAI

It’s been over a year since I last blogged about OpenAI. Whilst DALL-E 2, ChatGPT and GPT4 have grabbed all of the headlines, there were a lot of other interesting things showing up on their blog in the background. This post runs through just over six months of progress from Sept 2021 - March 2022.

Chris Price · 12^th Apr 2023 · 6 min read

Podcast

Beyond the Hype: Blockchain is dead, long live blockchain

In this episode, I’m joined by colleagues Oliver Cronk, Peter Chamberlin and Chris Price for a lively discussion about blockchain, including the mechanics of bitcoin, the proof of work consensus, and technologies which are blockchain-like, but prefer not to use that term. Finally, we ask ourselves the question, is blockchain just hype?

Colin Eberhardt, Oliver Cronk, Chris Price · 15^th Dec 2022 · 1 min read

Tech

Building a Rust-y Vim clutch with the Raspberry Pi 2040

A Vim clutch is typically a repurposed keyboard/guitar pedal that enters insert mode when you press down on it and leaves it when you release it. This can and has been accomplished in a great many weird and wonderful ways. This post adds yet another to that list.

Chris Price · 8^th Dec 2022 · 10 min read

Podcast

Beyond the Hype: Most-loved language – does Rust justify the hype?

In this episode, Simon Martin, Chris Price and Rob Pilling share their interest and insights into Rust. This relatively new programming language has caught the attention of the development community, being voted the ‘most-loved’ language seven years in a row in the StackOverflow survey.

Colin Eberhardt, Chris Price, Simon Martin, Rob Pilling · 1^st Aug 2022 · 1 min read

Artificial Intelligence · Video

GPT3 - Creativity from determinism

I talk about GPT3, one of the massive and very impressive AI models to come out of OpenAI. I quickly cover off the basics of how it works and where its creativity comes from, before accidentally delving into existentialism.

Chris Price · 5^th Nov 2021

Tech

Efficiently loading massive D3 datasets using Apache Arrow

In a previous blog post, Colin focused on rendering massive numbers of points using D3. In this post I'll consider how you can efficiently load that data using Apache Arrow.

Chris Price · 15^th Oct 2021 · 23 min read

Artificial Intelligence

How the OpenAI Codex JavaScript Sandbox works

The OpenAI Codex JavaScript Sandbox and the API which backs it, have (rightly!) generated a lot of interest and comment in the development community. When faced with something so different to what we expect, it's easy to assume it's all magic. In this post I'll peel back some of the layers and try to describe what's going on.

Chris Price · 24^th Sep 2021 · 12 min read

Artificial Intelligence

A primer on the OpenAI API - Part 3

...or what I should have known before I jumped in and started playing around. In this post I cover few shot learning and fine-tuning.

Chris Price · 2^nd Sep 2021 · 3 min read

Tech

A primer on the OpenAI API - Part 2

...or what I should have known before I jumped in and started playing around. In this post I cover logprobs and the "creativity" controls.

Chris Price · 1^st Sep 2021 · 5 min read

Artificial Intelligence

A primer on the OpenAI API - Part 1

...or what I should have known before I jumped in and started playing around. In this post I cover the basics of tokens, the model and prompt design.

Chris Price · 31^st Aug 2021 · 5 min read

Tech

Fixing the d3-zoom API... for my use-case

d3-zoom is incredibly robust, powerful and flexible. However, its flexibility means it can be quite complex to configure and use correctly. This post covers one way of wrapping it up, reducing its flexibility but vastly simplifying its use for my use-case.

Chris Price · 22^nd Oct 2020 · 7 min read

Tech · Video

Realising the most value from legacy applications using desktop containers

There's a standard approach to migrating legacy applications into desktop containers: the desktop equivalent of the strangler pattern – but this has its drawbacks. Is there another way? In this webinar, I shed light on an alternative that addresses these drawbacks and opens up new opportunities for old tech. And I explain what on earth rollercoasters have to do with it.

Chris Price · 9^th Sep 2020

Tech

Which WebGL drawing call should I use?

WebGL presents you with a blank canvas (literally!) and leaves you with what feels like an overwhelming set of decisions to make before you can render your idea on screen. This post introduces a quick reference guide to picking the right draw call for those trying to decipher the difference between drawArrays, drawElements and their oddly-ANGLE'd instanced equivalents.

Chris Price · 16^th Apr 2020 · 4 min read

Tech

Rendering charts with OffscreenCanvas

Rendering charts can be a very intensive operation for the browser, especially multiple charting widgets in the context of a wider application. OffscreenCanvas is growing in browser support and allows canvas rendering to be delegated to a WebWorker. This post looks at what performance improvements we can realistically expect and some gotchas that can crop up along the way.

Chris Price · 19^th Mar 2020 · 8 min read

Resources

White Paper: The Web Assembles

WebAssembly is a new runtime for the web; a fast and efficient compilation target for a wide range of languages that could have a far-reaching impact on the web as we know it. This paper looks at at the performance limits of JavaScript and how WebAssembly was designed to tackle them.

Colin Eberhardt, Chris Price · 24^th Apr 2018 · 1 min read

Tech · Video

Higher or Lower – ML in JS

This talk will introduce the recently launched TensorFlow.js library, demonstrate what’s possible right now (with some audience participation!) and ponder on the future directions this technology might take us.

Chris Price · 27^th Feb 2018

Tech

Another reason to use noopener - A deep dive into renderer process allocation

In highly-visual, rapidly-updating, multi-window, buzzword-laden apps performance is a big concern. With WebWorkers, SharedWorkers and ServiceWorkers we have a number of options for moving complex scripting tasks off the critical path. However, rendering can be more of a dark art. In this post I'll dig into how one browser (Chromium) uses renderer processes and how you can use this knowledge to your advantage.

Chris Price · 7^th Feb 2018 · 4 min read

Tech

Adding WebDriver tests to create-react-app generated projects

This post demonstrates one way to add Selenium e2e tests to a `create-react-app` generated app. It uses Jest as the test runner, embraces modern JavaScript features (including async/await, modules, fat-arrow functions, templated strings, etc.) and attempts to ensure that modern editors are able to provide useful auto-complete suggestions when authoring tests.

Chris Price · 24^th Aug 2017 · 11 min read

Tech

Efficient SVG layout with d3

When creating d3 visualisations it's common to want some form of responsive layout. However, SVG and canvas don't provide a native way to do this. Most examples found online either use fixed dimensions or resort to some form of manual layout to achieve the required effect. This post introduces an alternative approach using CSS and custom elements.

Chris Price · 10^th Jan 2017 · 11 min read

Tech · Video

Once Upon A Time, There Was An App Store

Pull up a comfy seat and listen to Chris Price tell a story about the Tortoise and the Hare, the App Store and Progressive Web Apps.

Chris Price · 7^th Dec 2016

Tech

Highlights from JSConf.IS

My highlights from the inaugural JSConf.IS 2016 hosted at Harpa, Reykjavik.

Chris Price · 1^st Sep 2016 · 6 min read

Tech

Using d3-force to control a massive tiny display

This post describes my entry into one of the hack events at JSConf.IS which challenged us to take control of the Northern Lights. It hopefully also serves as a nice introduction to creating visualisations with d3-force.

Chris Price · 1^st Sep 2016 · 7 min read

Tech

Building Components with D3 Data Join

This post quickly introduces data join before moving on to some of the edge cases we've run into when building components on top of data join. It covers how you can solve them with vanilla D3 and why you might find our d3fc-data-join component useful.

Chris Price · 17^th Aug 2016 · 19 min read

Tech

ES6 Iterators, RxJS, IxJS and the Async Iterators proposal

A quick walk through ES6 iterators and iterables. It covers extending d3fc's random data component to implement the required protocols and how this can lead to greater interoperability with utility libraries like RxJS/IxJS.

Chris Price · 29^th Jun 2016 · 6 min read

Cloud

Mondo Bank webhook to Pebble Watch Timeline using AWS Lambda functions

Inspired by Colin's article on building an expenses app with the Mondo API, I wanted to create something to make use of the webhook API which fires in real-time (ish) whenever a transaction happens. In this post I'll cover subscribing to the Mondo webhook, creating the glue code as an AWS Lambda and pushing pins into the Pebble Timeline REST API.

Chris Price · 19^th Apr 2016 · 9 min read

Tech

d3-path - what is it good for?

d3-path is an abstraction over SVG path creation which uses the canvas element's Context2D interface. Previously creating path generation code involved a lot of concatenating SVG path commands like M0,0 or L2,2, and the somewhat more cryptic C70 20,120 20,120 10. Even with ES6 string interpolation such code can be incredibly hard to read (and write!).

Chris Price · 10^th Mar 2016 · 4 min read

Tech

Deconstructing a tweet-sized D3 creation

I recently created a site which I'm proud to say now hosts an impressive collection of tweet-sized D3 creations from the hugely creative people of the internet. In this post I'll talk through deconstructing one or two of those creations with the aim of giving any aspiring artists a starting point.

Chris Price · 8^th Mar 2016 · 3 min read

Tech

A Case for Hot-Reloading

Hot-reloading UI is a **hot** topic at the moment. I want to take some time to explain why, in the class of applications I typically work on, I believe it to be such an important feature for future UI frameworks to have.

Chris Price · 27^th Jan 2016 · 6 min read

Tech

Improving D3 Performance by Embracing the Flux

While d3fc (a toolkit of charting components built in the d3 style) embraces the philosophy of simplicity over performance, there's no point in creating a chart with lousy performance. In this post I'll run through some of the tips and tricks for squeezing the best performance out of d3fc without compromising on its flexibility.

Chris Price · 2^nd Nov 2015 · 7 min read

Tech

An Adventure in SVG Filter Land

I've been working on an open-source charting library called d3fc. And following Colin's lead, was looking for a creative example to replicate. I think I found it...

Chris Price · 6^th Aug 2015 · 29 min read

Tech

OAUTH2 Authentication with ADFS 3.0

A quick run through of the steps involved in integrating a Node.js client with Active Directory Federation Services for authentication using OAUTH2.

Chris Price · 9^th Mar 2015 · 5 min read

Tech

ELK - 3 things I wish I'd known

I’ve recently completed an ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash & Kibana) real-time log processing implementation for an HTML5 FX trading platform. Along the way I’ve learnt a few things I wish I’d known beforehand. This post shares some more details of the project and hopefully some time saving tips.

Chris Price · 19^th Dec 2014 · 5 min read

Tech

Arrow functions in Knockout.js

Recently, Knockout's original author Steve Sanderson released a plugin called knockout-projections which optimises the performance of the observable array methods filter and map.

Chris Price · 28^th Feb 2014 · 5 min read

Tech

Knockout.js + Node.js = What.js?

Recently I contributed a change to Knockout which allows it to run without hacks in a non-browser JavaScript environment.

Chris Price · 8^th Mar 2013 · 4 min read

Tech

Jekyll - A Developer's Wordpress?

We're very soon to launch a site documenting an open source project we've been hard at work producing. As the project is hosted on github, we'll be making use of the Github Pages hosting feature which itself is built on top of Jekyll.

Chris Price · 17^th Dec 2012 · 3 min read

Tech

JSConf EU 2012

Hot on the heels of Reject.js was JSConf EU, a weekend conference about, well, JavaScript!

Chris Price · 12^th Oct 2012 · 8 min read

Tech

Reject.js

Last Thursday I headed to Berlin for Reject.js, a community JavaScript conference organised to coincide with JSConf.eu.

Chris Price · 10^th Oct 2012 · 3 min read

Tech

TypeScript versus Closure

How does Microsoft's TypeScript, the new kid on the block, compare to Google's Closure?

Chris Price · 2^nd Oct 2012 · 4 min read

Tech

Converting an HTML5 App to a Native App with Titanium

In this post Colin Eberhardt's Property Finder app gets another outing, but this time with a native twist.

Chris Price · 1^st Oct 2012 · 7 min read

Tech

Just what is the CSS 3D perspective property?

Most of us have had a play with CSS3 3D transforms, stacked a few elements, rotated them, maybe even made a cube out of them.

Chris Price · 19^th Sep 2012 · 1 min read

Tech

Making the most out of JavaScript Intellisense in VS2012

Intellisense for JavaScript has always felt to me like an unfinished addition to Visual Studio, something that promises so much but doesn't deliver for larger projects.

Chris Price · 18^th Sep 2012 · 1 min read

Tech

You can build feature-rich apps with HTML5, but should you?

HTML5 versus native (iOS:Obj-C, Android:Java) mobile development is a hot topic at the moment, with Facebook's ditching of a hybrid HTML5/Obj-C app in favour of an Obj-C-only app the latest blow to land.

Chris Price · 29^th Aug 2012 · 3 min read

Tech

gum-cube

Captured webcam frames arranged in a 3D rotate-able cube for your viewing pleasure. A simple tech demo trying out the new getUserMedia API in Chrome 21, with some 3D transforms and canvas based pixel manipulation thrown in for good measure.

Chris Price · 8^th Aug 2012 · 1 min read

Tech

Using PhoneGap Build with Maven

PhoneGap Build is a hosted service which wraps HTML5 applications into native applications. The plugin connects to the service, uploads the exploded WAR directory, waits for the builds to complete and then downloads the native binaries installing/deploying them as attached artifacts.

Chris Price · 29^th Jun 2012 · 4 min read

Tech

Moving to the Web 2: Dark Territory

This series of posts (part 1) are attempting to do the impossible, to try and give desktop developers a brief introduction to developing on the web.

Chris Price · 17^th Apr 2012 · 5 min read

Tech

Explodz - A Webkit DOM Visualizer

A little while ago Colin showed me a tool for inspecting the visual tree of a Silverlight/WPF application.

Chris Price · 9^th Mar 2012 · 2 min read

Tech

Does delete walk the prototype chain?

This is a quick post relating to a Rhino bug I've just fallen foul of. This probably isn't very interesting for most folk, but if you've come here from Google then hopefully I can help you out!

Chris Price · 6^th Mar 2012 · 1 min read

Tech

Moving to the Web

This post is an attempt to do the impossible, to try and give desktop developers a brief introduction to developing on the web.

Chris Price · 2^nd Mar 2012 · 5 min read

Tech

A TodoMVC Closure Example

I recently had a need to create a demonstration application showcasing some of the features of the Closure toolkit. Whilst I was trying to think of a suitable example to implement, I remembered coming across a project called TodoMVC.

Chris Price · 17^th Feb 2012 · 1 min read

Tech

Movember Themed Bookmarklet

I recently came across the mustachify.me service. Inspired by Movember, I just had to spread the mo-ssage.

Chris Price · 24^th Nov 2011 · 1 min read

Tech

Full Frontal Conference 2011

Last Friday I headed down to Brighton for the annual Full Frontal conference.

Chris Price · 15^th Nov 2011 · 5 min read

Tech

Dart - a few wildly speculative thoughts

Colin's post on Dart and the other fallout from Google's announcement across the web sparked a few thoughts in my mind.

Chris Price · 13^th Sep 2011 · 1 min read

Tech

Bezier demo

I was reading over one of the tutorials over at html5rocks.com (if you haven't had a look through them before I'd thoroughly recommend it!) and came across an article by Ilmari Heikkinen on creating a "kiosk-mode" for chromeexperiments.com.

Chris Price · 23^rd Aug 2011 · 1 min read

People

Scott Logic Newcastle Grand Prix

Last Thursday night saw a tense battle for the podium at the inaugural Scott Logic Newcastle grand prix. The race was held south of the river at Karting North East in Sunderland, but most people didn't let that, or the afternoon of torrential rain put them off!

Chris Price · 9^th Aug 2011 · 1 min read

Tech

A Webapp By Another Name II - The many pitfalls of using the application cache on mobile platforms

In part one I discussed my objective to create a "web-less webapp" which could masquerade as a native application on all modern mobile platforms.

Chris Price · 10^th Jun 2011 · 3 min read

Tech

A Webapp By Another Name - The many pitfalls of using the application cache on mobile platforms

In this first installment, I'll introduce the appcache, talk about some gotchas of using the appcache and hopefully give some helpful hints for debugging it based on my experience.

Chris Price · 3^rd Jun 2011 · 3 min read

Resources

White Paper: Flex, Silverlight or HTML5? Time to decide...

When meeting current and prospective clients the subject of web technology choice often arises. There has been a great deal of confusion and uncertainty out there, even before Microsoft's perceived change of stance with respect to Silverlight emerged.

Colin Eberhardt, Graham Odds, Chris Price · 5^th May 2011 · 1 min read

Tech

HTML5 Charts vs Flex Charts vs Silverlight Charts - a Test of Performance

This post follows on from the comparisons by Colin, of two Silverlight chart libraries, and Graham, of Flex and Silverlight chart libraries.

Chris Price · 29^th Nov 2010 · 4 min read

Tech

What is this?!

This post discusses the this keyword, what it represents, how it can catch you out and how to avoid those problems. It also introduces the functions call and apply from the Function prototype.

Chris Price · 5^th May 2010 · 3 min read

Scott Logic / Altogether Smarter

Chris Price

Catching up with OpenAI

How the OpenAI Codex JavaScript Sandbox works

Talks