• Interrupt by Jeff Carlson. Apparently the publishing business is booming, because somebody thought this was worth horking out there. Poorly written, dumb characters, just ughh. save your brain. no idea why I downloaded this.
• Killed at the Whim of a Hat by Colin Cotterill. This is a very funny mystery set in Thailand. Awesome characters, great atmosphere. The GWB quotes sprinkled throughout are the cherry on the top.
• Pereira Maintains by Antonio Tabucchi. In pre-WWII Portugal, Dr. Pereira awakens to rise of fascism. Starts slow, slowly accelerates, and ends on a bang.
• Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West. A fairly brilliant travelogue/history of the Balkans with deep insight about humanity everywhere. After reading this, I feel pretty shallow, this is a long and deep book.

Yet another small device to figure out how to use, this one a melding of arduino and Bluetooth. Super small form factor, the box is matchbox-sized, and I ordered a bag of them. Crowd funding IOT devices is awesome and disastrous — I get a new bag of toys all the time, but now I have to figure out what to do with them all…

I am just one of the crowd per geekwire

One milestone of my new career direction is my first accepted pull request to an open source project (the node.js mappings for opencv). Ok it was a silly little bit of frippery, adding line thickness to some line drawing routines, about 4 lines of code, but it has been a long long time since I contributed any code to any effort so it makes me kind of happy.

I have a more sizeable contribution chunked up and ready to go soon, so hopefully this won’t be the last.

Been quiet on the blog. Super busy learning about modern software development. In no particular order, I’ve been playing with: webgl, three.js, node.js, shaders, opencv, 0mq, travis ci, ansible, raspberry pi, arduino, resin.io, docker, vagrant, coreos, objective-c, github, hadoop, ubuntu and debian and raspbian and fedora and centos and RHEL, and about 100 more things. Having a blast!

We are looking to hire a few people and if any of the mishmash above appeals, let me know…

Just a reminder to self — some of the kits out there come with <1 amp supplies, and most come with 1 amp. The 1 amp supply is barely adequate for the base rpi plus camera. Less than 1 amp and camera use will drop your internet connection.

Now if you add in a USB wifi dongle, 1 amp no longer is sufficient. I am having to use a powered hub.

I’d suggest a 2 amp minimum supply.

I am hosting the webview controller in an OSX app. I have followed the code sample in calljs and i can successfully call javascript functions inside script tags from objective-c. This integration requires that the objective-c program know the name of the javascript function. for instance i have a javascript function called “objective_c_entry()”, and in my objective c wrapper, i can call that entry point using:

NSString *callResult = [[webView windowScriptObject] callWebScriptMethod:@"objective_c_entry" withArguments:args];

Now I want to move all my javascript into require.js modules; i am not clear how to reference a function in a require.js module from within objective-c. if i am moving my “objective_c_entry” function into a require.js module named “integration”, what string do I pass to callWebScriptMethod?

http://noncombatant.org/2014/03/03/downloading-software-safely-is-nearly-impossible/ — and this only scratches the surface. Of all the reasons why I don’t use a Windows machine for development, this is the stupidest, and simplest to fix. Just ship a reasonable ssh client, it is not that hard.

• Tune In by Mark Lewisohn. Fascinating telling of the Beatles’ early years. Massive detail. Uplifting in many many ways, the group overcame great odds, while staying true to themselves. But never let your kids catch you admiring this book, the young Beatles were not exactly role models.
• All The Songs by Jean-Michel Guesdon and Philippe Margotin. Exhaustive notes on the writing and recording of every Beatles’ song, which provides an interesting window onto the arc of the group.

Quite an achievement — Dendritic Inhibition in the Hippocampus Supports Fear Learning — and won’t be his last. I am jealous, I have aspired to go down the research path at many different points in my life but it has never worked out. Huge congrats!

Bigotry, poverty, abuse, healthcare, education, government waste and incompetence — I could go on, these are big issues in our society, and I can get outraged about them and have occasionally done so. There are certainly other issues in this category.

Whether or not a certain kind of taxi service can operate in a certain way, or whether or not cars can be sold in a certain fashion at a certain location? Yawn.

Javascript tools suck, all the sample code on the web is invariably wrong in some way, variable scoping as practiced is horrible, debugging is terrible. And I am just focused on a single browser target! I’ve spent a day chasing after some pass-by-reference and scoping problem. Grrr.

Of course when I spend a day on Objective-C problems, I am pretty convinced it is the worst tool ever with its bloviated syntax and huge masses of obsolete sample code.

And when I spend a day on python I get so cranky about crappy IDEs and crappy debuggers and crappy library documentation.

The only constant is me, probably I am doing it all wrong, regardless of the environment.