I recently launched a little side-project web app, School Seating Charts, which makes it easier (and faster!) for teachers to build seating charts for their classrooms. The site is built entirely in Clojure and ClojureScript, which have been a pleasure to work with. While writing this post, I realized that, for better or worse, I have […]
I’d like to introduce Digbuild, an open-source game engine inspired by the excellent game Minecraft (and Infiniminer before it — that’s right, Minecraft is itself a clone). I’ve been working on it on and off in my spare time for a few months now, and today I decided that it’s ready to show to the […]
I’m doing a little bit of work that involves frequently rebuilding the Linux kernel and installing it on a headless ARM board. The particular ARM board I’m working with has some vendor support for flashing kernels, but it’s slow and clunky, and I have to run it inside a Windows XP VM. The ARM board […]
Recently I’ve run across a few articles (on Hacker News and elsewhere) about the drawbacks of telecommuting. I agree that there are drawbacks, but I believe that they can be counterbalanced by the benefits under the right circumstances. The Right Circumstances Not every person is cut out to telecommute, and not every job is suitable […]
hide-first-letter slop·ti·mize | slop·ti·mized | slop·ti·miz·ing verb To make a program run faster by decreasing the accuracy of its output. Examples of sloptimize We sloptimized the calculations to use 32-bit floats instead of 64-bit doubles, and got a 20% speedup.
It’s been a long time in the making, but I am proud to announce the first beta release of cppsh, the bash-like shell specifically designed for those engineers who find themselves most comfortable at the reins of a C++ compiler. The best features from both bash and the C++ language come together in cppsh to […]
The C++ typedef keyword is indispensable in many situations, especially for writing portable low-level code. However, in some circumstances it can cause trouble, particularly when it comes to function overloading. Consider the following C++ template class: template <typename T> struct foobar { foobar( const T foo ) : foo_( foo ) {} […]
A code comment can be a wonderful thing. It can offer a gem of context around a quirky bit of code that will make the reader’s life easier for years to come: // Fields c and d are intentionally switched in version 3 of the // protocol; see RFC 2324 S 12. fields.push_back( a ); fields.push_back( […]