Hacking
Codebits 2014 - 3 days of fun
Wherein I spend three days demo’ing the Oculus Rift, hacking on a portable VR rig with a Raspberry Pi, riding RiftCycles, and mobilizing the entire medical emergency and firemen staff on call due to an extremely nuclear chili experience (rumours of my demise were greatly exagerated).
This year our usual group occupied the usual couple of tables at Codebits and split up into three projects - Pew Pew Pew!, an attempt at building a portable VR experience of a First Person Shooter with an Oculus Rift, a Kinect and a Raspberry Pi; Wolf of Codebits, a stock exchange built on top of the Meo Wallet infrastructure using the “money” that was distributed for testing to everyone at Codebits; and Nelo, the winner of the event’s top prize, a Knee Lock for Polio patients to replace the metal harness that they traditionally have to use, using free and open technology like Arduino, Bitalino sensors and 3D printing and based on the idea of a chinese finger trap.
Gnome Developer Experience Hackfest 2013
After finally getting rid of a really bad cold, here I am reporting about the DevX hackfest that took place right before FOSDEM, at the Betagroup Coworking Space, a very nice coworking place in Brussels with excellent access and great facilities.Boston, a hackfest
The Mono & Gnome Festival of Love 2012 is in full swing here in Boston, thanks to the wonderfully stubborn David Nielsen, which got everyone together, got us a great room to work in at the Microsoft NERD Center, and sponsorship by Fluendo, Xamarin, GNOME and PluralSight.
Day 2 of the hackfest has just finished, and it was quite an eventful day. After a slow start yesterday (particularly for me, as I managed to completely kill OSX so thoroughly that it wouldn’t boot and required a full restore (all hail up to date Time Machine backups)), today was a pretty interesting day.
OSX, the Air and Recovery Mode, or how to make amazing software
This morning I decided I needed a case-sensitive partition on my MacBook Air. It comes with a nice juicy 250GB SSD and I still have about 140GB left, so, having woken up in an adventurous mood, I open up Disk Utility, peer at the partition, note it doesn’t complain at me if I shrink it a bit, so I go ahead and resize it. I do this, of course, without killing any of the 30 tabs open on Chrome, or closing down the 3 server connections and about 30 channels on LimeChat, not to mention the 10 terminal sessions running various scripts and remote shells, or any of the ton of widgets and apps happily fidgeting in the background. Life is good.
Solving the gcc 4.4 strict aliasing problems
A couple of days ago Jeff Stedfast ran into some problems with gcc 4.4, strict aliasing and optimizations. Being a geeky sort of person, I found the problem really interesting, not only because it shows just how hard it is to write a good, clear standard, even when you’re dealing with highly technical (and supposedly unambiguous) language, but also because I never did “get” the aliasing rules, so it was a nice excuse to read up on the subject.