Hello Again, Macbook

Well, that didn’t take too long.

If you’ve been following along, you know that I’ve been trying to use Linux for my local development purposes on an Intel NUC (as well as a Lenovo laptop). I have to say, I still love the NUC and am going to find another use for it somehow, I’m just not sure what yet. However, Linux was somewhat of a disaster for me.

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.

Getting 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.

Bye 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.

Elementary 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.

RSpec 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.

C++ 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.

C++ 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.

OpenGLBook.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.