So a few weeks ago I started in on a ground-up rewrite of an existing project. Its currently using a framework that based around my CWFC libraries. It works very well, but its starting to show its age. As more and more features got added to the project, things have gotten more and more cumbersome to maintain in a… Read More »
So last week for my birthday, Jessica told me that I had to buy myself a present to open up in front of our oldest son. She wants to stress the importance that all birthdays aren’t about him (he’s three). I’d been looking at a new headset with microphone to use at the office for a few months… Read More »
Yesterday I attempted to upgrade from Ubuntu 13.10 to 14.04 on my office system. It failed. Everything appeared to go smoothly, but after rebooting, I got a black screen. No grub menu, no grub failure menu. I attempted to reinstall grub from a live image, but that failed too. I had an extra Intel 160GB SSD so I… Read More »
With this week’s announcement of the Amazon Fire TV, I thought it would be a good time to review our Chromecast. Though I don’t see myself purchasing a Fire TV box, as we already have a Roku, there are quite a few comparisons against the Chromecast and the Roku both, so I thought I’d share our experiences with… Read More »
So, I’ve been working with JetBrains PhpStorm for about 6 months or so now. Only recently have I started forcing myself to serious work with it. Part of the reason why I used tabbed terminals and VIM for so many years is that it is very fast. No mouse clicking, my hands never need to leave the keyboard except… Read More »
So I’ve encountered a strange exploit being attempted against the VoIP system I maintain. Its not actually against the softswitch, though, but rather against the end customer’s ATA. We first saw this particular exploit three or four months ago, and its a rather strange, but at the same time rather ingenious in its effectiveness. By not targeting the… Read More »
After I posted Google Protocol Buffers Where Have You Been All My Life, I started thinking about the multiple inheritance issue a bit more. After a couple of initial trials, I believed it wasn’t going to work. I kept thinking about that, became somewhat obsessed and needed to figure out why it wasn’t going to work. So today… Read More »
So two weeks ago I discovered Google’s Protocol Buffers, and I have to ask, where have you been all my life? The project I was working on requires speed and scalability, both vertically and horizontally. The component I was working on is a C++ daemon that listens for HTTP requests and returns an XML document. It needs to… Read More »
A few months ago we moved into a new place with a much smaller living room, it didn’t have nearly enough room for a full size computer case in the room. So it was time for a new, much smaller frontend for our MythTV setup. Size, noise, and being able to “hide” it are the primary concerns with… Read More »
I’ve been writing code in PHP for a long time now, both for my own projects and as a freelancer. I’ve seen well written code and truly horrific code and everything in between. Much of the work I’ve done for my personal projects has been using a framework that I’ve built and added on over the years, my… Read More »