Joseph Petitti's Blog

Last week I flew out to New Mexico to spend 4 days backpacking in America's oldest wilderness area.

I look back on everything I did in 2025.

Last weekend I headed out into one of the most remote parts of the White Mountain National Forest to climb Mount Isolation via some less-used trails.

Early Spring can mean a variety of conditions in the mountains, and I got to experience exactly that when I went on an overnight backpacking trip last weekend.

I look back on everything I did in 2024.

Advent of Code is an annual set of programming puzzles that I've written about previously.

This past weekend I took a day off work to get in some solo backpacking in New Hampshire's Presidential Range.

It's no secret that Studio Gainax likes to hide references to other anime in their shows, with varying degrees of subtlety.

While waiting for this year's Advent of Code to start I've been going back to complete some of the challenges I never got around to finishing in previous years.

Over the past 14 months I watched every TV episode, OVA, and movie in the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise in production order.

A lot of people seem to be afraid of hiking in the winter, but it's actually my favorite time of the year to get outdoors.

This past weekend I participated my first game jam—a competition in which individuals or teams rush to design and create a new game within a time limit, in this case 48 hours.

A brief outline of my goals and approach to my thesis project, using Android UI context to enable the detection of stealthy malware.

As you may know, JavaScript is a bit of an indecisive language.

As smartphones become more powerful and ubiquitous the incentives for malicious actors to hijack them continue to grow.

Despite the huge effort that goes into making browsers secure, there are still a few ways they can expose your private data to attackers if you aren't careful.

I had last Friday off from work on account of Independence Day weekend, so I decided to spend the day hiking one of New Hampshire's most famous 4000-footers.

It's nice to see that Japan is getting better at 3D animation.

I've always liked word games like Scattergories and Scrabble, they tend to be a good mix of creativity and strategy.

Sidney Lumet's 1976 classic Network ends with a blunt summary of its plot: "This was the story of Howard Beale, the first known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings."

I've had a trackball mouse for a couple of years now, and while I like it for most casual browsing it is definitely not good for games.

In this post, I examine some of the philosophical meaning behind the film Groundhog Day, and argue for an existentialist reading of the film.

Thirteen years after Episode 2, Valve finally returns to the Half-Life universe with a VR-exclusive prequel titled Half-Life: Alyx.

For the past few months I've been workin on a procedurally-generated top-down twinstick shooter game for the web, as I've written about previously.

In many games or other graphical applications, there is often a need to draw a ray from a point until it hits an object.

In my last blog post I wrote about the game I'm working on with two of my friends.

Continuing to work on a project I started last term in AI for Interactive Media and Games, I designed a flexible power up system in which power ups synergize with each other automatically.

Koel is a cool web application built on PHP and Vue.js for streaming your music collection over the internet.

It's the start of a brand new year!

FLCL, a classic six-episode OVA series from Studio Gainax and director Kazuya Tsurumaki (known for his work on Evangelion), is well known for being kind of confusing.

Everyone's read Dilbert in the daily newspaper or seen it taped to a boss or professor's door, but few know about the animated TV series based on it that ran for 30 episodes in 1999-2000.

This term I decided to branch out from my usual computer science courseload and try out a class from a very similar department: Interactive Media and Game Development.

For the WPI course IMGD 3000 - Technical Game Development 1, I worked over the course of seven weeks to make a fully-featured game engine in C++.

The C programming language has a bit of a reputation for having weird syntax.

Taking notes by hand is so old fashioned.

Because programmers have nothing better to do with their free time, they often amuse themselves by finding clever solutions to difficult logic problems.

About once every four years the powers that be slide an extra day into the calendar between February 28th and March 1st, to ensure that our timekeeping system stays in sync with the actual rotation of the Earth.

Last week, after spending a day at Fuji-Q Highland, I set out with a group of three other students to climb to the highest point in Japan, the summit of Mount Fuji.

This weekend I traveled across Japan to climb Mount Fuji, the highest mountain in the country and one of the most beautiful and recognizable mountains in the world.

I've written previously about my love of Audica and Beat Saber but those aren't the only rhythm games I play.

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I'm spending three months in Japan to work on my Major Qualifying Project, a graduation requirement of WPI.

After an exhausting 44-hour journey involving planes, trains, and automobiles, I arrived in Seoul, South Korea this past Sunday.

Some of the most amusing or intriguing studies, reports, and scientific papers I've stumbled across

There are plenty of times in front-end web development where you want to toggle between two different CSS rules when an element is clicked.

Part 2 of an ongoing series about setting up a network of virtual servers.

Wordpress has a nasty habit of redirecting you to what it thinks the correct domain name is, and this value is hidden in multiple obscure places in the database.

Part 1 of an ongoing guide documenting my process of setting up a virtual network of servers to host various services for me

Nobody wants to deal with the hassle of maintaining hardware.

Director Shinichirō Watanabe is well known for his science fiction and fantasy anime worlds filled with memorable characters, creative technology, and wonderous adventures.

Very rarely do you get such a perfect case study handed to you as with Audica and Beat Saber.