From blogger to Telescope?

Lately I've been keeping track of the best readings I come across using Telescope on Sandstorm Oasis and it's great.

You can check out my last 6 months of really interesting reads,  Please come join me there.
https://oasis.sandstorm.io/shared/90ZyBO_xbDLG6wZ_vQBrfaGckEkwVovPs2SOR8XRGMM

I used to use this blog to collect interesting readings, not much original or longform "blog" entries. I was surprised that I had about 15 visitors a month.

Then I realized I was leaking more meta-information that I expected and thought it would be better if I just used google-bookmarks for private links.

But then I got in the habit of privately bookmarking everything and not sharing anything at all.

I really like the idea of a HackerNews kind of site, but more focused on the things I find interesting and with comments from people I know and work with.

Lenovo has truly jumped the shark

I had lots of complaints about my Thinkpad W530, and I swore that it was a sign Lenovo had started to go they way of every other crappy PC maker out there.  In fact, I've been holding off buying a new primary development machine for at least a year now because I don't want to go through the pains of finding something new or being disappointed further by Lenovo.



However, this Superfish security nightmare proves that they've really jumped the shark and this will officially be my last Lenovo machine.

What Every C Programmer Should Know About Undefined Behavior #1/3

And I always thought this was a clever trick:

It is undefined behavior to cast an int* to a float* and dereference itLLVM Project Blog: What Every C Programmer Should Know About Undefined Behavior #1/3: 

I guess the little extra effort to create a union is worth it.

The Four Hundred Sixty Five Million Dollar Software Bug

I love the story of a really good bug, and this one is a $465M whopper:

"While processing 212 small retail orders that Knight had received from its customers,
SMARS routed millions of orders into the market over a 45-minute period, and obtained over 4
million executions in 154 stocks for more than 397 million shares. By the time that Knight
stopped sending the orders, Knight had assumed a net long position in 80 stocks of approximately
$3.5 billion and a net short position in 74 stocks of approximately $3.15 billion"

http://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/2013/34-70694.pdf 

Leveraging Existing Sensor Drivers in Embedded Linux

Here are the slides from my talk "Leveraging Existing Sensor Drivers in Embedded Linux" at Design West.

speaking at Design West 2013

I'll be speaking at Design West next week with a talk entitled


"Leveraging Existing Sensor Drivers in Embedded Linux"

The proliferation of sensors in Android devices has greatly increased the availability of sensor drivers available for Linux. This is a boon to embedded systems developers who want to take advantage of sensors, but the lack of sensor driver interface standards and documentation can make them daunting to use.

The good news is that most sensor drivers utilize the Linux Input Event framework or the Linux IIO framework user mode APIs. Once you become familiar with the APIs for these frameworks you will be able to integrate many sensors into your system.

Through demos and code examples this session will walk you through the command line utilities and user mode APIs to debug if sensors are working, connect them directly to user mode code, or bridge into higher level frameworks such as Android.

http://www.ubmdesign.com/sanjose/2013/speaker-list/?speaker=rian-sanderson

"Sent from my windows phone"

So I've been using a Nokia Lumina 920 since Christmas as my primary mobile phone.  That's a lot to say.  Like Woz, I think it's got a beautiful user interface - but more than that, it's a *useful* interface.

One my biggest complaints is that they made the "Sent from my windows phone" signature difficult to turn off.  This helpful blog post explains how you can only turn it off through the email app's mail settings and not through the global settings for mail where I had been looking.

My other predictable complaint: lack of quality apps. I didn't use or download many apps.  But I didn't realize how much I relied on the few I used: Flight Tracker Pro and the NPR News topping the list.