Posts on technical topics. The sub-category provides the specific area of interest.
The ‘effective’ book on C# is being updated for C# 6.0. It is on Amazon for pre-order. I have found the books in this series to be wonderful, concise views into the idioms and best practices for various programming languages. I’m looking forward to seeing what this new volume brings to the table.
Good timing too as I’m going to be doing a significant amount of C# ofer the next year or so…
It has been a while since my last post here. Mostly busy with work things and home stuff. Still digging into JavaScript, WebGL and a bit of node along the way.
Tracking things I’ve looked at on this page. Continue reading JavaScript, Node and Sandboxes…
Something I’ve felt to be true for some time now. Bruce Schneier backs this up here in his article and linked sources. Continue reading Frequent password changes reduce security…
I recently ran into a chunk of JSON data that kept being rejected by JSON.parse but worked as expected if I used eval (nasty, but this is local data so livable-ish).
I had looked at the raw data and saw nothing out of the ordinary. At first I suspected the quickly tossed together code I was working with. When I finally pasted the document into a JSON validator it immediately pointer to the ‘//’ comments that someone had inserted. Continue reading JSON doesn’t support comments…
I just went through some contortions trying to recover one of my 128 GB flash drives. I use these with my Pixel-C android tablet to load files to the device.
It appears that android (at least stock android) only understands FAT32 and windows refuses to format a flash drive of this size with anything by exFAT or NTFS.
After cancelling a format operation on windows (and thus invalidating the format on the drive) I found that the Pixel-C would format it to FAT32 itself. Not sure why the conflict, but it was certainly frustrating.
I still can’t find an SD card reader that will work with the Pixel-C. I now have a couple with USB-C connectors and then work through an adapter to my older devices. None show up on the Pixel in any way. I’m not sure whether the device that work have extended driver support (they’re Samsung devices) or whether the Pixel-C intentionally defeats access to external media readers.
I have finished my HTML5 refresher reading. I did skim past some sections, but I expected I’d do that…if those areas become important as tome point I’ll dig in deeper.
Continue reading Starting to read about WebGL…CSS and JavaScript refresher come next.
I’ve been reading through HTML5: The Missing Manual, Second Edition in order to get my HTML up to date (I am very familiar with 4.01 but haven’t done anything that needed the newer stuff till now). Having reached the section on canvas and being interested in pictures and games related stuff, I was interested to find that the API looks pretty much one to one a mirror of the postscript level 2 rendering engine (without the forth heritage and stack machine framing). This goes right down to the endcap styles on lines and join types for figures. Continue reading HTML5 Canvas API looks very much like PostScript
I find myself back again reading the documentation to OpenGL. There are so many cool things that can be done with this stuff. At this point it is a bit like a whole new API though as the programmable pipeline is new since last time I took a serious look. Much more capability, but in many ways a completely different way of making things happen.
The issues around gimbal lock with Euler angles and transformation matrices (which is the approach I’ve used in the past) are making me seriously look at quaternions again. They’re a bit of a strange hybrid, but it seems as if they offer a means to manage rotations that may have fewer sharp edges than what I’ve used in the past.
I think I may wind up buying the paper copy of the the OpenGL Superbible as it is likely to be more pleasant to flip around in than the kindle version I’ve been reading. Also suspecting that HLSL is important enough that the OpenGL Shading Language reference may be something I want on my bookshelf. Add in the OpenCL Programming Guide that I picked up when I was job searching (thought there might be some CT related opportunities and for projective reconstruction, OpenCL seems very interesting) and all sorts of stuff should be possible.
