General thoughts, usually on some technical or engineering development related topic. A place for me to chat about things I think might be of interest.
I spent my sandbox time this weekend bouncing between JavaFX and various java spring topics.
I have pretty much concluded that JavaFX isn’t somewhere I want to spend sandbox time. It appears to be less capable and productive than WPF for local UI work and Angular on Spring appear more broadly useful in the environments where Java reigns supreme.
Continue reading Monday morning after some java spring for the weekend…
Heading for home after a few days in California for my daughter’s wedding. Going to try to keep up with the C# sandbox projects and fit in a bit of playing with Kotlin and the intellij idea IDE. I’m thinking that Kotlin looks like a less constrained Java and there is so much JVM code out there that it could be an interesting option in my kit of tools.
Also looking as if I should get my PHP back in shape as this hosting runs PHP and I’d like to do a little single page application game work. As that will need a back end I will need some restful PHP code for persistence and some rules engine logic.
I’ve spent a good chunk of my career using emacs as my primary means of generating code. I’d hop over to other platforms (Visual Studio, Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA) for debugging or an occasional search for something.
I’ve been doing a lot of C# work in the most recent project I was software lead on and I’m finding myself shifting over to Visual Studio for the speed with which it allows work to progress.
I’m expecting to play with Idea and Eclipse a bit more in the near future as I am playing with Javascript, Java and Kotlin on the side at the moment.
It does seem that the ‘hard’ documentation is less complete or available these days than it used to be. I’m guessing that this is a direct result of the rise of very capable code completion and related helper tools.
I’ve been doing a bit of reading on machine learning lately as the field shows great potential for making a range of hard things easier.
One thing I have noticed pretty consistently in the books I’ve been going through is that they address the recognizer and statistical side of things in great detail but pass by the feature extraction side rather quickly.
It seems as if this approach misses some of the most challenging aspects involved in making a useful machine learning system. Given a blob of raw data, the identification and extraction of features that are suitable for processing by the ML system on the back end is non-trivial. Most of the sorts of data that I’d find interesting to process fall into this category.
Perhaps I’m missing something here, but it does not appear to me that feeding the entire photograph or audio stream to the machine learning algorithm is the intended approach. I’ll keep reading and sandboxing things (no real sandbox activity on this front yet as other priorities are ahead of ML in my queue). Hoping that I’ve missed something and this is less challenging that it appears from my current perspective.
I’ve gotten great value out of the several android tablets I’ve had. They’re relatively reasonably priced, have long battery life, are lightweight and pretty capable.
They get used for reading technical books, checking things on the web and social media and remoting into my bigger systems if I’m elsewhere in the house. Continue reading I just noticed that google has stopped selling tablets
Came across a few items I had not seen before. WeakMap and the Map and Set types in ES6 look useful. I think I had seen the map, reduce and filter methods on array but had not really considered their usefulness.
There were probably a bunch of other minor items that I picked up along the way. All in all, worth the small investment of time. I learned a few things and can feel more comfortable that there aren’t core concepts that I’ve missed by jumping into the middle up front.
One day soon I’ll likely read through the ES6 standard document. Ultimately that is the only way to hit all of the high points (missing details of products specific quirks, but then that is what the other books can do).
What I really need to do now is put together a small node based sandbox project with a web UI on the front end…
I’ve been doing some deep dives into TypeScript and JavaScript and related technologies. Much of that has been looking at newer features and advanced topics.
I’m now reading through O’Reilly’s Learning Javascript to make sure I’ve covered the basics and pick up any language idioms I may have missed along the way. I expect this to be a quick read as I’m pretty familiar with the language and tools. Once I’m done I should feel good about having filled in any gaps that may have been present previously. Continue reading Backfilling on JavaScript…Touching base with the basics
I did finally give up on fixing the issues with my Ubuntu 17.04 install and nuked it to install 17.10.
I’m still not all that thrilled with the remoting capabilities. Neither RDP nor VNC seem particularly robust. I can SSH but then I have to do everything through a console window…workable but less than ideal. Continue reading Loaded Ubuntu 17.10
I have Ubuntu 17.04 installed on one of my NUC machines as a place to run Linux code. I haven’t used it in a while and now I’m finding that it fails to connect with its apt-get repositories and cannot update to 17.10. I’ve done enough google digging and come up with nothing convincing and so I’m on the cusp of blowing everything up and loading it clean.
I think I may just go with the LTS version 16.04.3 as I expect that will have longer useful life and be easier to upgrade to version 18 when it drops. I’m mildly tempted to go to 17.10 and just accept that upgrades to Linux are really clean installs. Not thrilled with that as it means reinstalling everything else each time but I’m finding that I don’t do enough Linux work to maintain the skills to dig deep and fix the routine issues that pop up.
I had a bit of a buying spree from Packt and Manning over the holidays. I’ve got extensive reading for the next several months at least. At the moment I’m going to be reading through ASP.NET Core 2 and Angular 5 from Packt.