I’m a software engineer, TTRPG nerd, open-source tinkerer, and occasional writer. This is where I share what I’m building, learning, and thinking about (since 2006, for better or worse).
PortAudio Panic and No Devices Found
Leaving this here for the poor souls on Linux systems that run into errors accessing the default input or output devices using PortAudio and get nothing back.
Read all 111 wordsGetting Rusty Code and Racer to Work Together
While installing the Rusty Code extension in Visual Studio Code is pretty straightforward, Racer wouldn’t work out of the box after clicking the “install dependencies” (or whatever it was called) button. In fact, I never received a confirmation message that the dependencies finished installing.
Read all 153 wordsBye MacBook, Hello Intel NUC
For a while now, my 2011 13" i5 MacBook Air which I use for development purposes has been showing signs of pending death: flickering screen when moving the lid, excessive heat, inability to be charged, killing 2 replacement batteries and 3 chargers, slowing down with new OS X/macOS installs, etc. etc.
Read all 836 wordsElementary OS First Impressions
It’s been about a week of using elementary OS and I’ve compiled a few of my first impressions. First off, I want to start off with that I understand that elementary is still somewhat immature, so don’t take any of the criticism as me putting the project on blast. Far from it, in fact, but more on that later.
Read all 809 wordsRSpec be_truthy, exist, or be true?
The documentation for RSpec is amazingly detailed, but sometimes falls a bit short on when to apply certain matchers. In many of the specs that I’ve reviewed, incorrect matchers were used to test for pure Boolean values.
Read all 396 wordsC++ PImpl Template
If you’re not familiar with the PImpl (private implementation) idiom, read this Wikipedia article first. While this is more or less “syntactic sugar” since the templates are expanded during compilation, but I think it makes for cleaner looking code.
Read all 169 wordsC++ Events with lambda expressions, and std::function
One of the things that C++ doesn’t have out-of-the-box is events, which is not necessarily a bad thing. However, with the additions to the C++0x/C++11 specification, we can implement something like an event system found in higher level languages such as C# using relatively easy to use code.
Read all 842 wordsOpenGLBook.com Launch
Just launched OpenGLBook.com, a website on learning OpenGL 4.0 programming in online book format. The first two chapters are online, new chapters to be released periodically.
Carmack on OpenGL & Direct3D
John Carmack, of DOOM, Wolfenstein, and Quake fame, has spoken out on the issue of Direct3D vs OpenGL in an interview with the folks at bit-tech. Check out the article here. Note that Carmack is still using OpenGL in his game engines because of cross-platform compatibility reasons, but prefers Direct3D’s more modern API.
It’s sad to see OpenGL in such a state of disrepair that even a contributor (id Software) to the specification denounces the standard.
Read all 80 wordsEpic Games' New Unreal Engine at GDC 2011
More news from this year’s Game Developers Conference shows some amazing next-gen graphics from Epic Games through their Unreal Engine. It’s certainly worth checking out the article at Tom’s Hardware right here.