Git gud - Talk write up

I recently gave a talk at the TTU geeky weekly on Git SCM[1]. It gave a general overview of SCM, basic features of git as a SCM tool and a little about the git internals. Thanks in part to the IEEE and special thanks to the event organizers. The

Is Kanye Zipfy?

I came across an interesting tool over the weekend. Kanye rest is a quick hack that a couple of students over in Manchester put together over a long weekend[1]. It's a fully Restful API that has some pretty interesting endpoints[1:1]. For example, the album endpoint

Quick tip: Quickly parse and filter data with regex find and replace

Dealing with data is sometimes a pain in the rear end. It typically comes full of unwanted extras that can be a pain to filter out by hand. One of the most common ways of dealing with this is to write some kind of script which is time consuming or

Trying out BASIC

A little while ago, Usborne released some of their classic 80s programming books for free[1]. While it may not a have been a complete collection, it's still pretty cool to be able to experience such an elegant piece of computer science history. The books were aimed at

Automate programming the MSP430 Launchpad on Linux using Expect

Programming and debugging the MSP430 on Windows is a bit of a straight forward affair. You simply install the Code Composer Studio (CCS) integrated development environment (IDE) and in a few minutes you are ready to go. On Linux systems however, there is a little bit of work involved[1]

Hands on with Tales from the Borderlands

Let me just get this out of the way: I'm a huge fan of the Borderlands series and it's not hard to see why. Borderlands is a huge open world role playing game (RPG) with lots to do, plenty of psychos to shoot and, all the

Setting up for Android NDK development

Android allows you to compile and execute native code written in C/C++ for increased computational performance. Getting the NDK up and running on the other hand can be a pain. This tutorial was put together using Android Studio 1.4.1 with the most recent API version 23. I&

Hands on with Braid

So i've recently been trying to scratch things off my bucket list. Running through my remarkably small steam library I happened across Braid. I purchased the game at a friends recommendation after being told it would "literally change your life"[1]. At first glance, Braid looks

Low power interactions with the MSP430 Launchpad push button

So lately i've been doing a lot of programming on the Texas Instrument (TI) MSP430 and launchpad development board[1]. It's been quite interesting programming so close to the hardware. There is a lot of power in being able directly manipulate the behavior of the CPU,

Writing better comments

We are all familiar with some kind of concept of writing good code[1] and how extremely difficult it is to write in situations where deadlines exist (you don't have time to think things out. So naturally you cut corners and make compromises). Things get a bit more