Swordsman & Geek
You are reading the archive for the category: Geek Stuff
(06/05/2009)
On Tuesday I hosted another online web seminar dealing with embedded web development. Specifically, I covered AJAX with the Rabbit embedded microcontrollers.
Not for everybody, but pretty geeky:
Rabbit Webinar Link
I also wrote up a beginner’s workbook which I think is pretty nifty. It makes me think I could do the same kind of presentation and workbook for fencers someday.
(5/21/2009)
With my apologies to Lewis Carroll and dedicated to programmers everywhere:
Twas pasty, and florescent light
Did shine and flicker in the cube;
All buggy was the code that night,
And gremlins were being rude.
Beware the IX register, my son!
The costate bytes, the bits that latch!
Beware the far pointer pointer bug, and shun
The unbalanced stack!
He took his laser mouse in hand:
Long time the logic error he sought —
So he rested by the coffee machine,
And sucked caffeine in thought.
And, as in java-haze he stood,
The compiler went down in flames,
Came error messages that were no good,
And he cursed some names!
One, two! One, two! and pointers too
The mouse went clicky-click!
He found the bugs and recompiled
And that had done the trick.
And has he slain the pointer bug?
We pump our fists into the air!
Then another bug drops into the inbox,
And he pulled out his hair.
Twas pasty, and florescent light
Did shine and flicker in the cube;
All buggy was the code that night,
And gremlins were being rude.
~ Puck Curtis
August 10, 2007
(5/8/2009)
Puck’s Review – A+
I went to see the new Star Trek film last night and the thing that struck me was that all the reboots of recent franchises like Batman, James Bond, and Star Trek are grittier and more difficult for the characters.
American action movies developed this cliche where the hero would punch some trash-talking bad guy and then recite a canned pithy statement. It was tame and safe violence that reinforced the cowboy aesthetic that we were always right and violence was justified. We’ve lived through the Bush era now and Americans as a culture have begun to understand that the pithy cliches have consequences in the real world.
In the film Witness, we see this play out magnificently when Harrison Ford is accompanying an Amish community into the local town. When a redneck heckler starts bullying the Amish, Harrison Ford punches him. It’s classic cowboy cliche and we’re all prepared to lean back and feel good about it until the camera remains on the scene and we start to see the uncomfortable consequences of the violence.
In the first five minutes of the Star Trek film, we see an unwinnable conflict in which people die. I remember when Americans thought women shouldn’t be in combat, but here you see women not only fighting, but dying as well. It’s harsh, jarring, and more sincere.
It’s clear that these characters are paying a price for their actions. When Kirk fights in the bar it isn’t Smokey and the Bandit, it’s more like Fight Club and his face is so bloody and battered at the end, that you worry he’s going to lose teeth. Kirk’s life is hard and he’s struggling to cope. His battered face and the visible emotional struggle behind it are light years away from Shatner’s suave, father-knows-best character.
That’s what makes the film so fresh and powerful.
(5/6/2009)
While I was in Spain, I presented a web seminar or “webinar” on embedded web development with the Rabbit family of embedded computers. It was the highest attended seminar in our company’s history and it has been posted on the web here:
http://www.rabbit.com/company/events.shtml
The nice thing is that our stuff is very easy to work with and making an interactive web page to control or monitor hardware is pretty easy. I’ll probably be doing a sequel in early June which I like to call Web Dev 2 – Wrath of RabbitWeb.
A Midsummer Night’s Blog · Performancing's TDAge Theme by Thord Daniel Hedengren · Log in · Powered by WordPress