Fun

I enjoy running my own blog at codinginthetrenches.com because I am a technologist that likes to write. Unfortunately, sometimes my interests as a technologist get the better of my interests as a writer. This last week my competitive interests resulted in my blog being visually broken for several days. Furthermore, the competition has resulted in a few select articles being mis-formatted and visually broken for much longer than a week. Today’s post is about what I’ll be doing to avoid these problems and how they can apply to your own writing platform. ...

In the last few weeks I have been slowly learning about the cocos2d-x framework. cocos2d-x is a C++ based cross platform game engine. The makers of the engine also produce a UI creation GUI called Cocos Studio. Today’s post is a brief one about loading scenes from Cocos Studio into a cocos2d-x based application. ...

I’ve written before about how it’s better to write straightforward code than trying to be clever and pre-optimize. Another example of where this rule is true is the cost of iteration between different styles of array loops in JavaScript when executed within NodeJS. ...

I recently starting using Kivy, a cross platform Python based native UI framework for a personal project. While searching forums, documentation, and Stackoverflow I have noticed several posts with code that takes the hard road to updating an on screen graphic. This post presents an example of using Kivy’s Kv language in combination with Python to draw an object that rotates in response to user input. ...

Just a quick fun post on a wonder of Sun and Oracle marketing: The product named ‘Java’. There is no one thing that the product name Java refers to and depending on the context it may be a cloud service or a programming language. Here is the list to get it out the way quickly: Java the programming language Java the virtual machine (which Java the language runs on) Java the set of standard libraries leveraged by Java the language (and a whole host of other languages) Java the browser plugin that comes bundled with Java the virtual machine (this is the one always in the news due to security flaws) Java the cloud service offered by Oracle (also with recently discovered security flaws) In more detail:...

A (really) short post on the priorities of hobby projects, 1st draft projects, final production grade ap­pli­ca­tions. As per the post tag the below is only 1/4 serious and 3/4 for fun- Hobby / 1st drafts: Novelty (Can I use this new shiny thing?) Per­for­mance (Can I make this new shiny thing go faster too??) Re­li­a­bil­i­ty (Oh yeah–it fails sometimes, but I just restart it.) Cor­rect­ness (Wait you mean it was supposed to solve problem X and not problem Y?...

I’ve been brewing and developing systems for a few years now. Today’s post is about some similarities and differences I have noticed between brewing and developing and differences (this will make more sense later). ...

A short post on the priorities of hobby projects, 1st draft projects, final production grade applications. As per the post tag the below is only 1/4 serious and 3/4 for fun. Hobby / 1st drafts: Novelty (Can I use this new shiny thing?) Performance (Can I make this new shiny thing go faster too??) Reliability (Oh yeah–it fails sometimes, but I just restart it.) Correctness (Wait you mean it was supposed to solve problem X and not problem Y?...

In this post we’ll discuss what it means for a piece of software to be done (if ever) and some of the implications of that. ...