Searching for a way to carefully control illumination of a project, I discovered “Blinkt!” by Pimoroni. I was hoping for something that would easily connect to a Raspberry Pi 3 with a minimum of fuss.
The Blinkt! connects straight to the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi 3, and can also work on an extension board or off a ribbon cable. A warning: many cases have ‘ribbing’ along the side that will interfere with mounting the Blinkt! directly on the Pi - NONE of my cases were compatible without the ribbon cable.
Back when I started college (2001), I remember a world where tech was, well, ‘fun’. I was a die-hard free software guy willing to put up with far-to-much in the interests of ’tweaking’ my computer. Running Linux was like drive a custom made hot-rod. I knew every piece of the system and was happy to tweak it all day long. I followed slashdot, freshment, linux games, and laughed out loud while reading userfriendly.
I’ve used mercurial for a while – simply for the ease in building repositories and setting up servers. It’s a wonderful thing to not need to worry about extracting sources and creating patch files anymore. Other than building temporary working repositories, I’ve used DVCS almost identically to other central solutions. Indeed, one of the major gripes I hear when people adopt mercurial or git is that “it works just like svn, only there are extra steps”. It’s the extra step that adds value.
In general, code bases using boost, or C++11, seem to gravitate toward shared_ptr “everywhere”, or developers avoid shared pointer altogether. When developers come from the Java/C# world, shared_ptr often stands in for garbage collection. Other develops will bash the performance hit of shared_ptr and rail against the use everywhere crowd. Neither of these is a good thing. Let’s tackle shared_ptr issues one at a time.
Multiple old school C/C++ developers see a shared_ptr and immediately think – extra clock cycles! Compared to a stack based variable, this is true – dynamic memory allocation is an order of magnitude slower than simply reserving space on the stack. However, if the object will have a lifespan to justify being placed in dynamic memory, things get more interesting.
Sadly, I let this domain lapse many years ago, only to see it taken by a squatter wanting several thousand. I’d written it off as lost. After a fairly concentrated attempt to purge from the internet, the domain is now back. So, welcome back to “textux”. Kick your feetup and relax.
Many years ago, I wrote a series of tutorials for SDL and SCons. Sadly, I let my previous domain lapse due to a serious lack of cash while finishing up college. Adding insult to injury, some vulture picked up the domain to resell me for a couple thousand dollars. I’ve noted that several people have mirrored these since then. In an effort to legitimize their posting, I’ll be attempting to pull them into wordpress here. It’s a bit tedious as they were done in hand edited HTML before. Hopefully I’ll have the motivation to go through and fix them up after I get them back online.
Still, this site isn’t intended to explore my day to day frustrations and politics. No, this is intended to detail my professional and technological developments. Hopefully in a way people find interesting enough to follow.
So, who is this person you’ve discovered online? In general, I won’t talk too much about my professional career, but if you’re curious about my CV, you’ll find that here. While I care about privacy, the internet is an excellent means to do research and share ideas without paying thousands of dollars to a large university. (Been there, done that). Hopefully others will find some use for the “code toys” I work on and publish here.
Looks like I have a job. I received the job offer on Tuesday, accepted on
Wednesday, and start on Monday. So, why do I say T-7 weeks? Well, put simply,
in my current living situation I can not really have access to a linux box.
In 7 weeks, I will be moving into a place of my own, complete with a working
network, and so forth. So, to be fair, it might be a bit more than that if I
take into account cable setup, getting the lease signed, moving time… But
basically, I need 3 paychecks to recover from the enormous financial toll
moving with less than a weeks notice and no job prospects took. Oddly enough,
now that it looks like I found something, I’m getting a lot of calls and
emails about interviews. The job I’m taking is good all around: good
location, good money, and really nice people. Only downside is that they are
a Windows based shop. (But, that just really means more job security for me
now that I think about it, especially if they ever decide to move platforms.)
