Welcome to familykuhn.net/nat!

When dinosaurs roamed the earth, I used this URL to make a few things publicly accessible. It wound up being mainly for programming projects, but there was also the occasional photo gallery.

I also had several blogs, on blogger, which I eventually merged and migrated to Wordpress. I also had, and still have, my professional website.

Wordpress does not play so well with hosting random bits of code, so that is what is left here. I hope there is something here that you at least find amusing.

Java

When I rejoined the ranks of programmers, I started with Java. Part of reason for choosing Java was that you could run it pretty much anywhere, including as “applets” in browser windows. So it was easy to throw programs on the web and share them. Those days are now part of “computer science history.” But it’s not hard to get these programs running, if you are OK with VS Code.

Flex

When I got sick of how difficult it was to build a user interface using Java’s Swing library, David Coletta suggested I check out Adobe’s FLEX. FLEX allowed you to use a scripting language called “ActionScript,” which would run in Adobe’s Flash Player, which at the time was ubiquitous. [Well, as of January 2020 anyway, I see that the past tense is somewhat premature and that Flex lives on in open-source land as Apache Flex.]

To get Flash content to run on Chrome, I had to go to Preferences > Advanced > Privacy and Security > Site Settings > Flash and flip the switch so that it says “Ask first” from the default “Block sites from running Flash (recommended).” YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary) with other browsers. It seemed to run super slowly in Firefox, and it will never, ever, ever, run on an iPhone or iPad in Safari. [As of June 2022, running Flash content in Chrome seems to be entirely dead.]

Python

Around 2013, to help me with a book that I was writing, my son Ben wrote a Python script to help with a rather complicated workflow related to making a print and e-book version from the same source. By not having time to debug it, he encouraged me to learn Python. The first serious Python project I did was something of a memorial to a mentor who died in 2012.

JavaScript

The first time I looked at any JavaScript code (maybe Kurt Grigg’s 2003 clock program), learning it was not an enticing prospect. It seemed to be full of if statements for every browser, and even for different versions of the same browser.

I managed to steer clear of it until maybe 2017, by which time it was the only game in town for “front-end” web development. Happily, by then things had improved quite a lot. I started with plain JavaScript, and then learned the React framework.