Dav3xor

Crap, I want to use this in my web game, but my users are already used to using esc for other stuff.

Three.js is awesome, I just wish it had better documentation.

I threw this together in a couple hours:

http://www.davesgalaxy.com/site_media/test.html

Yes, exactly. I have a little web game that renders in SVG, and it puts up ~8000 shapes on the screen, updates at about 5hz on most desktop machines. This is ok, since it's basically a panning map that doesn't get panned much. If I switched to Canvas, it'd run quite quickly, but I'd lose all the wins from using the DOM.

Haha, this is extremely funny, since that email was written by Derek Sivers; then owner of CD Baby, and an incredibly popular contributer around here.

Mine has a single click demo -- http://www.davesgalaxy.com

Oh, and it requires some form of sign in since it has a persistent world.

Forth, in a way, out of left field.

The Amiga speech device had a nice phoneme grammar you could use to make it say all sorts of odd things.

You do have to be careful, it can be annoying on ARM chips certainly. If you're using GCC, __attribute__ ((packed)) fixes alignment issues.

This method is so much less error prone than pulling stuff out a byte at a time. Plus you can use unions for network addresses, etc.

It's a simplified example to show what you can do.

pointers to structs for things like network protocols...

struct packet_header { uint from_addr; uint to_addr; ushort flags; ... }

packet *p;

read(socket, somebuf, sizeof(packet));

p = &somebuf;

printf("from = %u to = %u flags = %u\n",p->from_addr, p->to_addr, p->flags);

I've reverse engineered some protocols -- haven't done a USB one yet, but I'm sure the principals are similar. Grab some data, look at it (usually with a good hex editor -- last time I used ghex2), look for patterns. Usually there's some sort of packet structure, or maybe some data that looks like something in ascii -- ghex2 shows you what every 2 bytes or 4 bytes are if they were signed/unsigned ints, floats etc. Usually something will jump out at you.

It's a fun game usually.

Or with Schmitt Triggers -- I built a little synth around a schematic from Music From Outer Space -- makes awesome Forbidden Planet type noises.

I do occasionally make my own bread, and I grew up on a farm. So? I'm not an expert in either, but I can dabble. Why keep yourself from learning something new?

I'm an embedded programmer, and I had to write an XML parser for work. I've also written operating system code, 3d graphics, whatever. And ECMAScript too. Having such a narrow view limits were you can go, and what you can do. I specialize in a few things, but there's no programming task I'm truly afraid of, with at least being given a little time to read some documentation. "Specialization is for Insects."

I know so many people who've just done basic CRUD business programming. Smart people, really smart people, but they limit themselves; don't try to do anything deep and interesting, and it's sad.

You're mostly paying for labor, and they generally charge for an hour -- so get as much done at once as you can.

You can also use either process with Aluminum sheet. both have their advantages.

Also, the requisite mention of the PIPE ORGAN he built.

http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/organ/organ.html

So is Scaled, and who wouldn't want to work with Burt Rutan?

Another nice thing about the X20x, and Thinkpads in general, is the keyboard. It's well laid out, the key action is decent, it has a handy light that actually illuminates the keys in the dark. Also, there's no optical drive, so you get a fast machine that's also seriously small -- you can pick it up by pinching the top of the screen.

Also, We had a Tandy Coco when I was a kid, I've had enough of chiclet keyboards. I'll be happy when Apple moves away from that.

this is what I came here to say. Exactly this.

Could be a magnetometer too -- they are very touchy. Although you'd think it would be far away from the passengers.

Pilots love using them for mapping. There are a couple of very nice apps for it too. I'd bet you could make really good money if you can ferret out more niche markets that it's perfect for.

"And then there's this thing! ... but I don't want to talk about that today..."

Mmmmm, Hopworks Urban Brewery...

Their brew master is my neighbour, super nice guy.

Yeah, the duplicate key business came in because of other code hanging off the side of the search (a rather hairy algorithm that was searching for the next key with a different letter in a position -- given KLXX, increment the 2nd position until there's a key matching that criteria -- KLXX --> KMAA, or if there are no KM's, KN, KO, etc....

I've written one. It was for an embedded system.

A good, well tested binary search is a pain in the ass to write...

1. Your sorted array MUST use exactly the same ordering as the search is expecting. We built and sorted the array on a PC, and ran the search on the device, so this was not guaranteed.

2. There can be NO DUPLICATE KEYS.. Duplicate keys will eventually send the search down a blind alley and off into hyperspace. Also devilishly difficult to find if the array has a lot of items, and you don't know what the problem is.

3. The above 2 problems can sneak in during production with new data.

Contact info? I've been working in embedded mapping software for years, and Amsterdam sounds like fun.

Depends on what you want to do. Getting a beagleboard would be a no brainer to start out.

http://www.amazon.com/ARM-System-Developers-Guide-Architectu... is a good book, you might want to buy a copy.

Some handy things to know about ARM.. logical operations can be added on to ALU instructions for free -- lots of speed gains there...

If you have never done any embedded programming; expect things to take longer to write, and frustration levels can be pretty ugly.

If you get an ARM chip that doesn't have floating point, and you need to do something mathematically intensive, look into fixed point math. Make everything you can into a table (most ARM chips have enough memory so that you can trade space for speed)

Don't give up -- embedded requires tenacity.

Oh, and Codesourcery provides good pre-compiled toolchains, but you have to dig around on their website a bit to find them.

Most ARM's will be significantly slower on non-aligned data.

Un^H^Hfortunately I'm not at work to test. :)

Shamelessly copying that warehouse idea is very tempting.

Fair enough, but I don't mind making lemonade with my low bandwidth graphics and mapping engine that doesn't require tile reloads on zoom. And it will work on the iPhone/iPad. IE support in a couple years is just icing on the cake.