I have pretty much given up trying to be 'productive' at work. As a team leader I am normally dealing with questions and interruptions the entire time I am in the office.
Fortunately, our team decided on something we call Core Hours. If you are at work you need to be around between 10am and 3pm for collaboration. So you can start early and leave early, start late leave late or do what I do: spend time at work to deal with the team - go home early then do the 'real work' after the kids are in bed.
Now if I can just deal with my wife asking me questions while trying to hack away...
A group of Zoon diehards tried to block access to the Shareholders meeting demanding an offical statement on when Windows 10 will support the device so historical playlists can be updated...
Streams are my new happy place - mostly.
I still use the for loops, but it has helped make some hard to understand for loop logic much clearer to understand.
I have started going through the "Skip Wilson" tutorials and have found the language quite refreshing - borrowing mainly from JS / Java / Python imo. But then again anything more refreshing than my PHP day job.
I am often amazed when I merge my hours / days of work into the main branch once tested and complete. It normally amounts to a few lines. Its not often one gets to romp in the green fields.
This reminds me of the old days when I was going to write the next great game on the ZX Spectrum. You had to first make the coolest intro screen before writing an inch of code, that's normally all you got out the door.
I started with arduino, and I had no microcontroller experience. The community, examples from the absolute ground up, and vendor (sparkfun, adafruit, etc) support is excellent. It all makes for a really enjoyable experience.
Digikey and mouser get you parts fast. Ebay and random asian websites get you parts slow but cheap.
If you want graphics (eg. TV, or monitor) though, best go with the pi. A pi costs less than an arduino graphics shield. Ethernet is doable at least.
Totally agree, Sparkfun and Adafruit are certainly Hobby friendly, I am still tempted to do some AVR work as they had a great tut on Sparkfun...
Which reminds me of another reason I decided to dip my toes with the Launchpad - I do have a Pi and its GPIO voltage is the same as the MSP, so they seam to be a good fit. I haven't actually interfaced them quite yet, so I could still end up releasing the magic blue smoke.
I did attempt to get this going but failed miserably - something to do with a Java binding that wasn't linked properly. I have zero Arduino experience so though I might as well go 'native' anyway
I recently starting wanting to fiddle with Micro controllers for this or that and stumbled across the Texas Instruments Launchpad.
For $4.30 delivered (yes including shipping world wide) you get a complete development board, 2 chips, some headers and the USB cable. TI have a free IDE you can program it with, or if you are on Linux you can use the MSPGCC command line tools, which I use.
Its ultra low power - 3.3V - which means if you want to interface to 5V systems you may have to do a little homework, but other than that, their is no risk in ordering one to try out with the money you would have wasted on Starbucks.
http://www.ti.com/ww/en/launchpad/stellaris_head.html?DCMP=stellaris-launchpad&HQS=stellaris-launchpad
Order directly from Ti - https://estore.ti.com/MSP-EXP430G2-MSP430-LaunchPad-Value-Line-Development-kit-P2031.aspx
Starting of with Drupal is probably good. It should more than handle the load on without too much trouble if you need more horsepower.
You can pretty easily setup up and configure users to add content and its not exceptionally difficult to code extensions or find a developer to hack something together.
I think the fact that power users can make it do 80% of the work means you will save time on all but the most complex stuff.
Ok, I accept it, the writing has been on the wall for some time, but my beloved Ubuntu is sinking fast.
Which Distro is the next best? I want my apt-get install and not have to fiddle with X config ever again - Suggestions?
I am fond on SVN and we use it at my current company - badly.
If you have a choice I recommend git for a number of reason.
1) Git is way faster (on the command line)
2) Git has a single folder '.git' to do its bidding at the top of the project tree ( no.svn folder in every folder)
3) You don't need a central server. Each workspace is interested in itself and you tell it about other repositories. Typically you have an Origin for your code which is kind of like a central server but is just another folder.
4) Git commands and errors are way clearer than SVN - IMO
You probably want to separate the tool out from the deployment plan. SVN or GIT can work equally as well for deployment, but you need a good plan. When it is well thought out golives are fun - not stressful.
Git is cooler, they even wrote a song about it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qchPLaiKocI
Slashdot Mirror
I have pretty much given up trying to be 'productive' at work. As a team leader I am normally dealing with questions and interruptions the entire time I am in the office. Fortunately, our team decided on something we call Core Hours. If you are at work you need to be around between 10am and 3pm for collaboration. So you can start early and leave early, start late leave late or do what I do: spend time at work to deal with the team - go home early then do the 'real work' after the kids are in bed. Now if I can just deal with my wife asking me questions while trying to hack away...
A group of Zoon diehards tried to block access to the Shareholders meeting demanding an offical statement on when Windows 10 will support the device so historical playlists can be updated...
So they are finally ported it to a Linux based VM
I use my headphones all day while coding, I don't want to have to recharge them every hour or so.
Streams are my new happy place - mostly. I still use the for loops, but it has helped make some hard to understand for loop logic much clearer to understand.
The quotes should have been around 'Nearby' as well as 'Earth-Like'. Throw me a freckn bone.
So... they have renamed Windows Media Player - Edge?
Most of the developers in my team would pay money not to get distracted. This would be annoying to me.
I have started going through the "Skip Wilson" tutorials and have found the language quite refreshing - borrowing mainly from JS / Java / Python imo. But then again anything more refreshing than my PHP day job.
One byte at a time
I am often amazed when I merge my hours / days of work into the main branch once tested and complete. It normally amounts to a few lines. Its not often one gets to romp in the green fields.
This reminds me of the old days when I was going to write the next great game on the ZX Spectrum. You had to first make the coolest intro screen before writing an inch of code, that's normally all you got out the door.
I started with arduino, and I had no microcontroller experience. The community, examples from the absolute ground up, and vendor (sparkfun, adafruit, etc) support is excellent. It all makes for a really enjoyable experience. Digikey and mouser get you parts fast. Ebay and random asian websites get you parts slow but cheap. If you want graphics (eg. TV, or monitor) though, best go with the pi. A pi costs less than an arduino graphics shield. Ethernet is doable at least.
Totally agree, Sparkfun and Adafruit are certainly Hobby friendly, I am still tempted to do some AVR work as they had a great tut on Sparkfun... Which reminds me of another reason I decided to dip my toes with the Launchpad - I do have a Pi and its GPIO voltage is the same as the MSP, so they seam to be a good fit. I haven't actually interfaced them quite yet, so I could still end up releasing the magic blue smoke.
There is also an arduino style IDE for it. http://energia.nu/
I did attempt to get this going but failed miserably - something to do with a Java binding that wasn't linked properly. I have zero Arduino experience so though I might as well go 'native' anyway
I recently starting wanting to fiddle with Micro controllers for this or that and stumbled across the Texas Instruments Launchpad. For $4.30 delivered (yes including shipping world wide) you get a complete development board, 2 chips, some headers and the USB cable. TI have a free IDE you can program it with, or if you are on Linux you can use the MSPGCC command line tools, which I use. Its ultra low power - 3.3V - which means if you want to interface to 5V systems you may have to do a little homework, but other than that, their is no risk in ordering one to try out with the money you would have wasted on Starbucks. http://www.ti.com/ww/en/launchpad/stellaris_head.html?DCMP=stellaris-launchpad&HQS=stellaris-launchpad Order directly from Ti - https://estore.ti.com/MSP-EXP430G2-MSP430-LaunchPad-Value-Line-Development-kit-P2031.aspx
Starting of with Drupal is probably good. It should more than handle the load on without too much trouble if you need more horsepower. You can pretty easily setup up and configure users to add content and its not exceptionally difficult to code extensions or find a developer to hack something together. I think the fact that power users can make it do 80% of the work means you will save time on all but the most complex stuff.
Ok, I accept it, the writing has been on the wall for some time, but my beloved Ubuntu is sinking fast. Which Distro is the next best? I want my apt-get install and not have to fiddle with X config ever again - Suggestions?
I am fond on SVN and we use it at my current company - badly. If you have a choice I recommend git for a number of reason. 1) Git is way faster (on the command line) 2) Git has a single folder '.git' to do its bidding at the top of the project tree ( no .svn folder in every folder)
3) You don't need a central server. Each workspace is interested in itself and you tell it about other repositories. Typically you have an Origin for your code which is kind of like a central server but is just another folder.
4) Git commands and errors are way clearer than SVN - IMO
You probably want to separate the tool out from the deployment plan. SVN or GIT can work equally as well for deployment, but you need a good plan. When it is well thought out golives are fun - not stressful.
Git is cooler, they even wrote a song about it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qchPLaiKocI
Freakn' Skynet again.
Ok, but scale this up some, won't it increase global warming? More energy that wasn't hitting the earth now comes into earth and is converted to heat.