January 2012
5 posts
Brave New Thermostat →
Very interesting article about the Nest, that new thermostat I’ve wanted since the moment I saw it.
Arduino-Based Curtain Automation →
His righteous indignation at the lack of a DHCP implementation is pretty awesome.
I was so offended by the halfassery inherent in shipping something that calls itself an “Ethernet” board that doesn’t do DHCP that I wanted to throw it away on that basis alone.
The Little Coder's Predicament →
An interesting article that should ring home with just about every developer I know. I was actually just telling someone my programming history the other day, which started with the ubuiqitous QBasic and program listings from my older sister’s math book, of all places. And, seriously, how many of us didn’t dream of one day writing a game as beautiful and compelling as Gorillas.
Crash-only Design →
“Crash-only programs crash safely and recover quickly. There is one way to stop such software—by crashing it—and only one way to bring it up—by initiating recovery.”
“The price of reliability is simplicity, and for many engineers that is too high...”
December 2011
7 posts
S: Apparently there is a c++ version of this thing too (cause they wanted it to be fast!) and someone rewrote it in clojure because we only had 2 c++ developers
S: of course we only have 1 clojure developer
S: so that was a stupid idea
Nest | The Learning Thermostat →
This is basically what I’ve been wanting to build, but even cooler.
Browse vs. Search: Which Deserves to Go? →
Some interesting views on user interface design.
Cheap Tools →
I often joke that since buying a house, my life has become short stints of work and sleep between trips to Home Depot. Between items on my todo list like painting our vaulted living room, building a…
November 2011
7 posts
“It seems a creative group of Winsted guys were sitting at a Legion meeting one...”
– Original nail gun idea started in Winsted
“Tilera processors feature a switch in each core to route data through an on-chip...”
Things that Turbo Pascal 3 is Smaller Than →
I remember my dad being very excited about Turbo Pascal, and even trying it out some, a long, long time ago. But Visual Basic eventually won my heart. Perhaps it might have been Delphi, had it been free.
First manned flight with an electric multi-copter →
Awesome that they got off the ground and all that, but how long until I can fly one to work?
“Do not type the numbers on the far left of these lines. Those are called...”
– http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ex1.html
October 2011
12 posts
Everything I Ever Learned About JVM Performance... →
Introducing Android WebDriver →
Selenium WebDriver for Android. Now we just need a cluster of phones.
2 tags
Codify -- Make anything on your iPad →
This actually looks pretty awesome. I’ve been looking forward to a good development environment on one of the tablets, though I have to admit that I thought Android would get there first.
Greenfoot →
Greenfoot teaches object orientation with Java. Create ‘actors’ which live in ‘worlds’ to build games, simulations, and other graphical programs.
Node JS is Cancer →
More of the previous. It’s funny that he acknowledges Nginx as a solution to Node’s blatantly obvious incompetencies, as Nginx itself is built on a event loop.
Straight Talk on Event Loops →
I suppose disagreeing with this guy makes me a complete idiot (according to him at least), but he seems to be neglecting something important.
OpenTSDB - A Distributed, Scalable Monitoring... →
Open source product built on top of Hadoop’s HBase, specifically geared towards storing time-series data.
Fork of Nagios with a brand new interface; open... →
Dogs on Roofs →
Only pictures of dogs on roofs. No other animal or location allowed. Strictly enforced.
September 2011
6 posts
“I hope that this doesn’t cause another US Civil war.”
– Are you threatening me, or are you just insane?
http://www.socialistpartyoftx.org/2011/08/letter-to-obama.html
“Until [the public] sees a man going through the streets with a coil of No. 12...”
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photophone
Dandruff
Melinda: you had like dust specs all over your camera at the grand canyon
Melinda: I thought I had wicked bad dandruff but it's in all the pics
Melinda: lol, oh
Melinda: I should wipe my screen off every now and then
FinePix X10 →
matty:
Fuji couldn’t keep the X100 in stock, even though it’s over $1,000 for a practically-point-and-shoot camera with a fixed, prime lens. They’ve just announced its little brother, the X10.
August 2011
7 posts
Now here's a worthy goal. →
h4x0r: Autcomplete is banned until people learn how to spell
h4x0r: Autocomplete, rather
justin: rofl
3 tags
Creative Audigy SPDIF Output in Windows 7
A few days ago, my Creative Audigy sound card randomly decided to go missing. It showed back up on a reboot, but Windows insisted on reinstalling all the drivers as if it’d never seen the thing before, and afterwards, I no longer had ‘raw’ SPDIF output to my receiver. I use this machine as an HTPC with its crowning achievement being a Bluray drive, so this really threw a wrench...
5 tags
Netduino NMEA Parser →
My first revision of an NMEA parser designed particularly with the Netduino (an “open source electronics platform” that runs the .NET MicroFramework on a 48MHz ARM processor with 60KB of RAM) in mind. None of the existing parsers I could find were what I would call efficient.
July 2011
7 posts
A color palette with a more detailed project page... →
The Largest...
Triple Island — That’s an island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island.
Dog — As big as a full-grown lab when he was 5 months old…
Panorama — 1.24TB raw image; I don’t even own a hard drive large enough to fit that (this may not technically be the largest panorama, but it’s huge)
WIRELESS INTERFERENCE (1909) →
Interesting article about some of the early challenges the Navy faced with wireless communication.
The iPhone SLR Mount →
It’ll be the death of Micro 4/3rds.