Today I was challenged with the following advanced statistics problem: Two variables are exponentially distributed with rate parameters lambda 1 ( λ1 ) and lambda 2 ( λ2 ). What is the probability ( p ) that variable 1 ( X1 ) is less than variable 2 ( X2 ) in ... Continue Reading
Today while working with a 3rd party’s codebase, I ran into a situation which git-svn could not directly handle without pulling in massive amounts of unnecessary repository history. Turns out the solution was much simpler than I anticipated, so I’m sharing here in case it’s useful for somebody else. T ... Continue Reading
Since I spent the time to dig up the method of calculating the wind chill given a specific temperature and wind speed, I figured I would go ahead and share it in case someone else finds it useful. Here’s three functions for calculating the wind chill, one each for Javascript, PHP, and Ruby. // Javascript version ... Continue Reading
A good friend of mine started a new blog on Math and Programming related topics. She has an interest in Ruby development, especially with an abstract algebra / math focus, so if you’re interested in either Ruby or Mathematics, I’m sure there will be posts there which you will find useful. Already she’ ... Continue Reading
First drawing using Brushes, originally uploaded by Jeremy Johnstone. Today I spent most of the day catching up on my blog reading and I stumbled across an article about a guy using an iPhone app named Brushes to design this month’s cover of The New Yorker. Highly impressed by the output and the video of it ... Continue Reading
Over the past week or so, I’ve been hearing a faint but very high pitched (>12k hz) whistling like sound coming from my 2006 Honda Accord V6 Coupe. It’s kind of a cross between an air leak type sound and the sound of a metal ball bearing spinning at high speed inside a metallic dish. It usually only happens ... Continue Reading
Today over lunch coworkers were talking about Wolfram|Alpha and it sparked my interest again now that it’s finally open to the public. Tonight I decided to give it a whirl and unlike two of my friends, decided to throw it a softball initially with a very easy question: what is the speed of light in free space? Pr ... Continue Reading
This weekend I finally got around to updating my website design again after a year since the last visual update. It seems it’s more or less become a once a year type deal. The old design just wasn’t doing it for me so I took the opportunity to scrap everything and start over. With the new design I scrapped ... Continue Reading
Digging around today for a PHP parser for OSX plist files, I was surprised to find no good pre-existing solutions. Even Apple’s own site gives a relatively poor solution to the problem (see here). Normally SimpleXML is enough to handle most XML parsing needs, but the plist XML format is just broken enough to make ... Continue Reading
I’m not sure what lead me to it, but I stumbled across a blog post on how to implement Enums in PHP via userland code written by Jonathan Hohle. I liked the concept he had, but the implementation was a bit unappealing because it used eval() among other more minor issues. You shouldn’t need to generate Enums ... Continue Reading
As you have probably already gathered, my name is Jeremy Johnstone. I live in Silicon Valley, California and work for a tiny web startup you probably never heard of, 
, working specifically on a widgets platform for televisions which will be on a majority of mid to high end televisions sold in 2009 and beyond.
In my day job I am a software engineer, mainly focusing on web based development. I have experience in most web development languages, but my highest proficiency is in PHP, Ruby, Flex/AS3, and Javascript. I’ve worked on a number of open source projects in the past and have also worked in a wide variety of different fields. Check out my resume for a more detailed overview of my skills and work history.
For fun, I love to travel, take photos, and scuba dive. So far, I’ve traveled all over Western Europe, all over North America, many places in SE Asia, and also have been to the U.A.E. (Abu Dhabi and Dubai specifically). My hope is that I can make it to India or South America before the end of the year, but we will see how that goes. You can view a small sample of the photos I have taken by clicking on the photos tab at the top of any page of this site. More photos are also available on Flickr via the link in the top right corner of the page. Most of my diving so far has been focused in the Caribbean, but I have also dove a couple times off the coast of both the state of California and Virginia as well as many inland US lakes.
