Adventures in software development
It's been a while since I felt like writing about anything, which is a shame because I do enjoy writing when I feel in the mood. Mostly this entry is about the long and tortured road to finishing the engine in my Chrysler 300C. A proper post-mortem In the last post, I have a shot of the destroyed piston which was causing most of the problems with the big Hemi. Once the engine was out of the car…
We live in an age where the internal combustion engine is headed for the scrap heap. Electrification of personal transport makes a lot of sense now. Batteries have improved dramatically in the last 30 years and with them both the performance and useful range of electric cars has begun to equal petrol and diesel motors. The major US manufacturers are planning to end-of-life their iconic engines in…
Yeah, so I'm not great at reading documentation I don't think anybody really enjoys reading documentation, most of just want to to "git 'er dun". In that spirit, skipping over paragraphs of florid tech writing and jumping straight to the code snippets is usually enough. Not in this case though TL;DR; Lambdas moved to your VPC must be in a private subnet (i.e. no internet gateway) Lambdas must use…
No matter where you go, there you are If you're like me, you travel occasionally. Access to your office from home, or from an airport lounge, or from a hotel room is paramount to being productive for most of us now. While I had a fairly simple Tailscale setup that got me into my test machines in the office, what I really wanted was to integrate my AWS production VPC into that system. It's…
I have, on and off, tried getting an acceptable Linux distribution on this laptop (Acer Nitro 5, 8th gen i7 and an Nvidia GT1060). While Debian Buster installs and works, I have been tearing my hair out trying to get a 2nd monitor working. I figured a more "user friendly" distro was worth trying to see what would happen. I put it off until today, when Microsoft Word decided to give me some…
Microsoft and Nvidia, stuffing it up for everybody I was quite excited when Microsoft decided to support graphical Linux programs on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, I figured that my laptop was about ready to either be a dual-boot Debian/Windows 10 machine or I was about to ditch Windows altogether. Windows 11 proved somewhat of a reprieve when WSLg was announced, so I duly signed up for the early…
When I first set up the shed network, I was looking forward to having a fixed IP address so that I would at least have the option of not putting everything on AWS. Being able to self-host testing environments isn't critical, but it is a lot more convenient for a small operation like SmartShepherd. I did a post on it a while back but things got wildly out of hand after that. How wildly out of hand?…
I switched to Debian as the primary operating system on my main development machine, but still have the occasional need to access client servers over RDP or do some minor development on Windows Server / Windows 10. Generally I would run up a virtual machine with the client's access software in it (Forticlient seems to be most popular) but for my own VMs, it's good to have a general purpose RDP…
Poor old Chungus the Proliant has lived a long, prosperous life but the entire time it has been in my possession (5 years?) it's never had the original software installed on it. Thanks to a Visual Studio subscription, it ran Windows Server 2016, then 2019 for a while. Windows Server was an OK-ish workstation environment (other than some bluetooth niggles). Then, Docker decided to switch their…
Amazon recently announced that they had support for .NET 6 in their Lambda product , which was all that was holding me back from migrating forward from .NET Core 3.1. The process was fairly simple - there are a few breaking changes in .NET 6 but nowhere near as many as there were moving from .NET core 2 to .NET core 3. Development environment I primarily use Debian Bullseye as my development…
In short: It's useful commercially once you have learned it. It is easy to get started, no IDE required. It is extremely popular and easy to get help with. Python is useful commercially I was asked this week by somebody keen to begin programming where to start. Python was somewhat of a surprising choice for me since my weapon of choice is generally C#, but there you go. When I went to university…
I have one piece of hardware that has stubbornly resisted the permanent move to Debian in my office, an old Texas Instruments CC2540 USB dongle that has Bluetooth Low Energy packet sniffing firmware installed on it. If you're doing anything out of the ordinary with a BLE device, such as fiddling with the advertisement data or trying to troubleshoot a GATT issue, you will eventually end up with a…
Or how I came to own a HP 8760w 17" laptop I am reading a lot of retro-computing articles lately, I grew up in the 8 bit era and I have strong nostalgia for it. It does help to be realistic though, for all the love that things like the Amiga get, they were a dead end in terms of computing. What really ate the world was the boring old IBM-PC: flickery, interlaced multi-sync monitors, beige boxes…
Success! The trick to having this part not get stuck to the bottom of the resin bath on the AnyCubic was to print it sideways! Not sure I really needed the island on it but it made me feel better. Lychee Slicer doing the job The printed part is functional - kind of. It fits the plastic injected moulded parts, a long way from perfect but certainly good enough to get changes to the CAD roughed out…
Bluetooth on Android: it sucks When we first started working on SmartShepherd, Bluetooth LE seemed like a logical choice for tracking interactions between animals. It's shortcomings were major advantages when you don't need an absolute location: it can't transmit far and it can only transmit limited data in an advertisement. Once it was determined that BLE was going to do what was required for the…
I am definitely a casual gamer. I buy perhaps one or two games a year, fire them up, never finish them and move back on to working for a living. Owning an older Acer Nitro does make getting new games a little more attractive though. My favourite game of all time is the same one many people my age have: Deus Ex Deus Ex was something of an obsession for a while. I loved the game play. If you're not…
Older Cisco and HPE gear provides web interfaces that just don't work any more with modern versions of Firefox or Chrome. This isn't a massive deal: the preferred way to set up an old Cisco 3560 switch is to use the command line via a serial cable anyway. The Integrated Lights Out stuff on older HPE gear is a little more problematic. Enter the Chrome Internet Explorer extension: IETab To get…
In part 1, I set up the Anycubic Mono and printed out the demo model which went OK. Not perfect, but good enough as a learning experience. Now I want to move on to reproducing the existing SmartShepherd parts before modifying them. Step one: Turn a step file into something the Anycubic understands The overall process sounds simple enough: take your CAD file (generally a STEP file), export that as…
Some months back I asked other HAX alumni what their recommendations would be for a 3D printer. When based out of Shenzhen, we would send our models out for prototyping to a local 3D printing service that had a high quality resin based printer and the models used to come back almost useable. I didn't want to invest too much into this process - I am not a product designer and barely know my way…
I know, we're all doing vinyl and there has probably been no better time to be a vinyl junkie, given the number of places selling it and the resurgent and vibrant second hand market. I still have a soft spot for compact disks, they were a revolution when I bought my first hi-fi and their current state of being unfashionable is making them awesome. Spending a lot of time working from home has been…
SmartShepherd is preparing to head into a new office. Sort of. We are shifting back out of my house and moving into a shed. I'm excited about getting the unholy mess upstairs into a decent workshop environment, it's cramped upstairs with two people working and the workbenches are just too small to be productive when doing any kind of assembly or repair work. The shed itself already has fibre to…
Who cares what they spend their money on The advent of digital music reproduction seemed to make the established Hi-Fi journalists collectively lose their minds. Back in the pre-digital times it was perfectly plausible for untrained journalists to wax lyrical about the differences between turntable cartridges (because you can measure the differences) or debate the merits of amplifier design. By…
Attempt two at getting it working The SmartShepherd devices are based around a Texas Instruments bluetooth low energy chip: the CC2640R2F. I have been using Ti's "Code Composer Studio" to build the firmware for the device. It is not my favourite tool but it does get the job done (eventually). Previously I have upgraded my main Windows build to Code Composer Studio 10 so I know (in theory) it…
Setup: QEMU sparc VM running Solaris 2.6. HotJava doesn't do much with SSL so it's proxied through WebOne Yeah a total waste of time but it amused me after I had set up a bridge on the host so that the VM has to dhcp an address and now looks like it's sitting on the network like a big boy. QEMU might be the greatest fun, hobby, timewaster ever invented.
Installing wget First I needed a better way of transferring files into the VM than using HTTP. A suggestion from Hacker News was that tftp is simple, well supported and would probably work with a tftp server installed on Debian. I installed tftpd-hpa Once that is installed, it makes a default directory in a slightly odd spot (/srv/tftp) but no matter. Start dumping your files into that directory.…