Edit–

Oops this post got stuck in “drafts” and was supposed to go out some time ago…I’ll work some magic to the dates 😉

Hey All,

So I guess it’s been a month since my last post, shame shame I know, things are starting to wind down for me. ResNet is coming to an end for me and I get a much needed 1.5 week vacation before school. On the upside, development work has been kicking up in the last few weeks so I’ve been keeping busy with some really cool projects.

I forgot exactly how I found this, probably some link in a link in a link from the Programming subreddit, but I thought it was very comical and some of it fairly true. Unfortunately I see myself as the “The Code Cowboy”, this is something I really want to change in the next few months. I have explored Unit Testing and TDD in the past and realize how powerful it can be when putting all the pieces together, but I have yet to successfully grasp it’s usage in any real application larger than doing simple arithmatic.

Hey All,

So it’s about that time of the school year. Where dead week is once again looming and finals are but a breath away. My last ASAM lecture was today, I was very impressed with the entire lecture series the whole quarter, Jim is a fantastic professor. This was my first year with a roommate that actually was quite awesome…..no laptop stealage…..no clothes left all over the floor….all was good. Fortunately, while everyone else contemplates when/how they are going to move, Jared and I can sleep well knowing that arduous task is not looming for at least another year.

On a side note, I haven’t really been taking too many photos as of late, nor have I gone on any epic motorcycle rides…..things are somewhat in a lull right now, but summer is around the corner and we’ll see what that brings! I’m hoping to line up some more freelance programming work like I did last summer, those odd jobs are always fun and great references for the future.

Lately I’ve been following Carlos Oliveira and his tutorials on how to become a better programmer. The first two articles were good reads, but I’m not so sure about the third. I mean it sounds like sound advice, but probably not something that I would take up any day soon. A recap of all his blog posts can be found here.

And this just in….as I was typing up this blog post my primary Samsung SyncMaster 204b just decided to die. It looks like there seem to be some issues with the capacitors in the thing from basic google searching, but I’ll have to take a deeper look at that.

Grearing up to go to Can-Jam this weekend with Jared and another friend that lives in the complex. While I’m certainly no where near the audiophile of Jared and our friend Fungi….I can still easily appreciate the intricacies of creating and designing amplifiers given my EE background.

Until next time…..laterz

Hey All,

So yesterday I got all the parts I needed to complete my Bantam USB-DAC I’m still not entirely sure how I was able to successfully mount the SMC DAC onto the board…..but nevertheless I got it done. Took about 5h total from unboxing to plugging into my laptop for testing. I was a happy camper to learn that I had gotten it right on the first try! Holy crap! No magic smoke, no pops, no clicks…just magic! Just lots of love from dmesg:

[   21.170469] usbcore: registered new interface driver snd-usb-audio
[   21.178119] input: Burr-Brown from TI               USB Audio DAC    as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/usb2/2-1/2-1:1.2/input/input3
[   21.204635] generic-usb 0003:08BB:2707.0001: input,hidraw0: USB HID v1.00 Device [Burr-Brown from TI USB Audio DAC   ] on usb-0000:00:02.0-1/input2

Here is a link to ALL the photos for those who care.

And below are a few of the highlights:

Hopefully next week I get the rest of the parts to build my mini^3 then I’ll be cool like my roommate with a dac/amp….minus the $450 price tag 😉

Until next time…..Robert

Hey All,

Well I was going to include this post with my last one, but I figured I’d separate the two being as they are two completely different content types (for the most part). So I’ve officially jumped ship from SVN to the Git SCM and man….I’ve been missing out on a lot! Branching, distributed-ness, forking….all wonders of the modern day developer!

With that I’ve also decided to move away from a perpetual trial of ZDE =X to a more legitimate, purchased copy of the Aptana Studio Professional Plugin. The guys over at Aptana were kind enough to bless me with an educational license of their eclipse addon at half price! Thanks again guys!

Another thing that I’ve been trying to get myself into is TDD (Test Driven Development) to better standardize my coding methodologies and to reap some of the benefits that TDD offers! It’s definitely a monumental shift in my programming paradigm and thinking, but in the end I think it will be well worth it! I’m still trying to get my head around the actual testing and implementation of TDD (the concepts behind it are relatively easy to understand), if anyone that reads this knows what I’m talking about feel free to comment so we can discuss!

That’s all for now! L8rz

Hey All,

So lately I’ve been trying to get up to speed on all the new age web coding coolness (using Git, using CakePHP, Aptana IDE, etc.) and in my travels of the vast Internet I’ve been reading a great deal of blogs, to name a few:

• http://cakebaker.42dh.com/
• http://debuggable.com/
• http://www.pseudocoder.com/

After reading through those the layouts caught my eye amongst other things. Granted this my blog is also here to serve as a personal MySQL backed memory tool for life in general (not only coding), but I’ve been considering a refactor of sorts. Should I ditch the whole tag cloud in favor of more categories? Should I leave it as is and delete the categories?

I know that no one follows this, but I may get lucky and get a response =D