Polling is always wrong
I read this article on reddit and while I thought the author was correct that RSS is really a bad design, I think he missed the real underlying reason why. That reason is that polling is always wrong. Always. Really!
The iPhone is not expensive
Every review I read about the iPhone whines that the price is high. So let’s see how high it really is.
Tivo Desktop on Linux
I tried out TiVo Desktop on my Mac and it was kind of cool… I found some articles and discovered the TiVo Desktop is just a http daemon plus some mdns stuff. Sounds easy enough!
Efficient JavaScript or Inefficient Browser?
I caught “this article”:http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/48/ on “Reddit”:http://reddit.com this weekend and had definite mixed feelings about it. Many of their suggestions were obviously good ideas. But some of what was masquerading as optimization “advice” seemed more like work-arounds for a substandard javascript implementation.
Calling Applescript from Perl
I needed to call some Applescript from perl and was quite proud of my end result.
…
In the end, I like that it fits on one line and that it lets the Applescript sit in the program in its native form.
Darwin Ports Pextlib Problem
I deleted all the Tcl-ish things in /usr/local/bin (and didn’t find anything anywhere else, oddly enough), reinstalled Darwin Ports, and it worked! Yay.
“Commit Patch”: Managing your mess
If I’m working on a bug or a new feature I end up making other random enhancements or fixes that aren’t at all related. With commit-patch, I now can precisely specify the patch I want to commit and leave the rest behind as uncommitted changes in my working directory.
Closures In Straight C
Turns out, I’ve been using the concept of closures forever. I would say almost since I first learned C on my Macintosh back in high school.
3 big problems with Javascript
I really love javascript, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its faults. I can make a number of little nitpicks but I want to focus on three major deficiencies of the language.
Hardware friendly C structures
What I really want is a language that has really good structures. That is, they can represent hardware/fixed layouts effectively.
Scotch tape and chewing gum should fix that right up!
We came in today and went directly to the practice track. While waiting in line there we did a few warm up tests and discovered that the steering was not working right. It was turning hard left no matter what we did. So we took a look around and discovere the belt that turned our … Continue reading Scotch tape and chewing gum should fix that right up!
DARPA Grand Destruction Derby
Tried to get the code I wrote all night to compile but I was litterally falling asleep on the keyboard. I made Jim get my stuff to compile and he had to delete large rows of ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss and such from the source code wherre I had fallen asleep and my hands had rested on the … Continue reading DARPA Grand Destruction Derby
Coming out of the chute
I finally got some sleep. But we got up at around 6:30, breaking my personal commitment to never wake up before 7. We went to the speedway and… I don’t even remember. Dead battery. Rechard went and bought a new one. Thought the servo was blown again. Re-centered it. Completely removed MiniPod, everything started working … Continue reading Coming out of the chute
Race day (or so close, yet so far)
Jim and Richard had left when I woke up at 7am so Maribeth (Richard’s wife) and I drove to the speedway where the opening ceremony was about to begin. All the robots were lined up and the press was there mingling among the teams and everyone was inspecting everyone else’s robot. There was a surprising … Continue reading Race day (or so close, yet so far)
Off to the races!
Today I spent the afternoon at my house rewriting the visualization code in perl and OpenGL. I ended up getting bout 60 to 100 frames per second and the LADAR data now plots in real time and looks real good. I put in waypoint plotting code so we can see big squares where the waypoints … Continue reading Off to the races!
Slow and steady loses the race
Today started off great with me writing a really nice framework for our controller visualization program. I wrote a driver for the LADAR and we got to watch actual driving LADAR data for the first time. You could see blips where cars were on the road and even see the road boundaries and intersections pretty … Continue reading Slow and steady loses the race
Hassled by “The Man”
I woke up late today after being awake all night yesterday. I stopped by Indigita and borrowed some boards from to use as backups in case we needed to redo any of the controllers. We probably wont need them though. From there I got stuck in traffic and decided to reinstall Mac OS X while … Continue reading Hassled by “The Man”
Midnight and the tweaking of stop and going
Today started badly when I couldn’t get my Titanium Powerbook to use the wireless connection reliably. I had a 10.3 beta installed on so I thought maybe that was the problem. I tried to update to the latest beta (since Apple didn’t have the downgrader for the version I had installed on their site any … Continue reading Midnight and the tweaking of stop and going