Added a menu page under ‘The Sandbox’ menu that points to my github page and provides a quick list of projects that I’m hosting there (just one as yet).

I’ve got a number of other toy projects to play with as time permits. Lots to do and interesting possibilities touching a broad range of technologies. At the moment, work is far more software management than software implementation so I’m looking to keep the fire burning here in the sandbox…

I’ll be updating that set of notes to reflect activity on github as things progress. Hopefully by this time next year there will be a good sized list of interesting projects up there.

I signed up for several Udemy courses while they were offering them for around $10.00.

The first pair was a pure impulse buy. I have been poking at OpenGL and related 3D rendering technologies for some time. Written a bit of code in that area a long time ago. When I saw the match pair of Blender and Unreal Engine courses I decided to dive in.

I’ve also grabbed some coursework in the web UI and full stack side. Probably totals to more than I have time to complete reasonably, but at $10.00 a course I’m willing to take that chance.

• Angular 2/4
• MEAN
• Web Developer Bootcamp

Currently I’m spreading a pretty wide net. The web side is probably where I have the greatest need for outside guidance as things move incredibly fast and there are many options to choose from. Figuring out what makes sense and isn’t already obsolete is challenging from the outside looking in.

We’ll see how things go…just getting started…

And…just added one more…and Android programming course. That completes the list of pieces (mostly) that will make my photography management tool for vacation work…adding more content to an already full slate but…

I’ve finally gotten around to dedicating some time to home front sandbox coding.

I’ve had a github account for some time (with nothing in it until recently) at https://github.com/ninecrows.

This weekend I started finally using it. I’ve wrapped together a little windows service coded in C# that can monitor (or selectively stop) selected services on a given system at C9ServiceManager.

I’ll likely keep moving forward and putting more toy projects up here as things move forward. I’ve got plenty of things, large and small, that I want to play with and I’m going to be making time to mess with them.

I expect that by the end of the weekend I’ll have this little tool doing its base job of logging service state changes and selectively stopping or starting services.

There is quite a bit more I want to do with this one so stay tuned:

• Persistence for previous state…probably JSON serialization stored under a registry key.
• RESTful interface for external access and control. Likely to use OWIN and NancyFX though .NET Core might get the  call (reading Microservices for .NET core).
• Simple, probably single page, Web UI to allow human interaction without excess pain. Likely through the same infrastructure as the RESTful interface. May very well use Angular2 to support the client side part. Things to play with here that are worth learning about.

Once that is all in place I’ll most likely move on to another project (and/or spend some time on the Udemy classes I signed up for that parallel some of this effort).

I’ve been reading my kindle copy of WebGL: Up and Running as a way of starting to play with OpenGL and related technologies.

Adding in three.js (main site here) to the mix seems like a good idea as it provides pretty decent tools for wrapping the details of WebGL. I’m also going to dig through the code a bit to see what the back-end looks like…I’m more than a bit curious about how the tools add in elements along the way (the samples I’ve seen have no explicit canvas so I’m guessing it gets added by three.js.

If I can get some WebGL code up and running, next step will be to build some PHP based RESTful interface code to talk to the front end and see what makes sense (JQuery, Angular) for the rest of the browser side code.

Looking at putting together a simple web based board game as something to play with. Can add sophistication later. Plenty to play with.

Looking at web user interface libraries. I have at least one project that would like some UI functionality with a PHP/Restful back-end and much of its content likely rendered in a canvas using WebGL (and probably three.js but I’m not familiar enough to be certain).

Angular, bootstrap, JQueryUI seem to be names that come up in searches. Angular 2 downplays its UI aspect. I’ve got quite a few books in this area that I’ve read parts of. In the end I expect I’ll just pick something that I have decent documentation for and dive in. Given the WebGL aspects, I expect that much of the heavy lifting won’t really care which kit of tools (or any) I use.

I’ve been noticing that my technical book buying seems to be shifting in the last few years.

For a long time APress and O’Reilly were my preferred sources for high quality technical books (with a bit of Prentice Hall and Addison Wesley).

They’re still in the mix, but I’m finding more and more that Manning and Packt are front and center. Not sure whether this is the result of an actual shift in the books or a result of my interests broadening out into Java, C# and JavaScript.

Just had this come up in my facebook memories feed

It is a reminder that while I learned some things I’m happy to have learned while at Amazon, the culture there was more than enough of a mismatch that I’m vastly happier to have made the switch to KMC.

It’s worth taking chances outside your comfort zone but it’s just as important to be willing to call it when things aren’t working out.

I’m much happier as a lead and with a broad based, cross disciplinary role to fill at KMC. Looking forward to future robots 🙂

I’ve been digging through node.js code more over the last few weeks. Coming up to speed on JavaScript idioms and best practices (and a few things that feel like worst practices) . Looking at IDE options to streamline things as node has less structure to it than the languages I’m used to and emacs doesn’t help much on that front.

• Visual Studio 2015 has some node support but at first look it doesn’t seem to do the sorts of things for JavaScript that it does for C# or C++. It is also terribly slow.
• There are eclipse based options that I’ve seen. I’ve downloaded a  copy of one option (Nodeclipse) but haven’t tried playing with it much yet.
• Folks at work use Sublime Text and seem moderately happy with it…not sure that it provides too much more than emacs does though.
• There’s another free editor that came up called Cloud9 that I’ll probably take a look at. Actually, now that I see their terms, nope…it would have to be something radically wonderful for $20 a month for personal use.
• WebStorm looks potentially interesting. It seems to get good reviews. It is a paid product but for personal use might be workable and if it looked sufficiently valuable might be worth swinging a license for it at work.

Much more to learn here…got to dig out my copy of Effective JavaScript when I get home and read through it again…I suspect that I’ll take away more from this reading now that I’ve been struggling with the stuff for a while.

I’ve been doing more reading on node.js, mongodb and related stuff (a bit of angular 2 in there as well). I got notification that my M3D Pro printer will be delayed by about two months. Work is keeping me busy as well.

On the 3D printer front I need to make a decision soon. I can defer delivery till summer and get a final production model or I can take delivery in my defined time slot and get the early production item that I ordered. I’m a bit torn as currently things are busy enough that I might very well get the thing on time and wind up leaving it on the bench in the basement until summer anyway. On the flip side, I’d like to find the time to get things started.

I do think that mongodb will likely work better for my needs than MySQL. The stuff I’m looking at doesn’t need the hard guarantees that MySQL provides and the flexibility of mongo would be nice. More reading to do. Need to get coding a bit soon as well.

After finding that my two oldest spare computers (old core-2 machines) were dead, I’ve loaded Linux on my workbench machine (madhatter) in the basement. The install was a bit rocky as Ubuntu 16.10 didn’t seem happy booting with the ATI video card the machine had in it. Once I switched that out for one of the old NVidia cards from one of the dead machines things progressed smoothly.

I’ve now got SSH and XRDP up and running. SSH went smoothly as expected while XRDP took a bit of configuration tweaking in order to get a real desktop on the remote session. When it first came up, every window was in the upper left corner of the screen, laid one on top of the other. After installing gnome (not sure this was required, but the web page I found called for it) and adding a ‘dot’ file specifying the desktop manager, things seem to be working.

I’ve added node.js, the compiler set for c++, mono and emacs. This  should get me most of what I need at this point. The main reason for bringing this machine on line was to make sure I could run node stuff that needed Linux but I’ll be happy to have a general purpose Linux target around for various purposes.