Not really a post about programming but an annoying thing from my own Windows machine.
I was getting an error about a missing Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime. It happened every time I launched a game and was also preventing me from installing different versions of the runtime. Said version appeared in the installed programs list but the installer wasn’t there and it couldn’t be uninstalled or repaired either.
Here’s the error message:
Today’s article is all about the importance of writing and its usefulness in advancing your career. Clear writing in a work context is even more important now for those who are working remotely.
It might be time for me to start making updates to this blog again - out of self-interest if for no other reason. I have been collecting topics and ideas to write about, I’ve just lacked motivation to put hands to keyboard.
My hosting provider decided to migrate my account to a new machine. Something got mucked up in the migration causing this blog to no longer work properly. I guess the lesson here is to always test your deployments, even if it’s someone else making the deployment on your behalf.
Interviewing for a software engineering role is more onerous than interviewing for any other profession. Interviewing for most non-software professional jobs typically consists of a phone screen and one to two interviews on site, where you talk about what you did in previous jobs. At no point during are you asked to demonstrate any skills, you’re trusted as an adult that you’re telling the truth about your experience and qualifications.
Here’s a talk that I watched recently and found deeply troubling and thought provoking: Haunted by Data - Maciej Ceglowski (text/image version). The speaker raises the ethical dilemmas with user data collection, retention, governance and overuse that is prevalent throughout the computing industry. The challenge is to end our addiction to collecting and storing user data.
Here’s another post on the related topic of the web being “subsidized” by advertising. It’s related because internet advertising relies on the user data harvested when we do anything online.
I saw the following puzzle the other day. Given a set of rings, can you place the numbers 1 through 9 inside each closed area so that the sum of the numbers in each circle is the same?
The 1 was already placed for you.
Because I’m trying to learn Scala, I thought writing a program to solve this would be good practice for me. I assume that the numbers in each closed area are stored in an Array with elements in the array corresponding to the closed areas from left to right.
Long time, no post. I’ve had plenty of ideas for topics to write about, but for one reason or another I’ve always put off actually sitting down and writing the post. Call it procrastination, call it finding better things to do with my spare time - whatever the excuse I’ve made them all.
Seeing as I’m paying for the domain name and hosting, I might as well post occasionally. Will this be a one off or will I get into a regular cadence of updates?
I got out my Arduino board for the first time in a while for a Christmas themed project. More on that in another post. This post is about loading strings from the Arduino’s flash memory, aka program memory, aka PROGMEM.
There is an example in the PROGMEM link above, but it’s kinda ugly. Here’s the main points from their example code:
// set up strings prog_char string_0[] PROGMEM = "String 0"; // "String 0" etc are strings to store - change to suit.
Today’s article I’d like to share with you is: Semantic Compression.
The title doesn’t say much about the content of the article to someone who hasn’t read it, so I’ll give a brief overview.
The author demonstrates his approach to object-oriented design through a very detailed programming example. Instead of starting with a design based on real world entities, he argues that you should start by adding the features you need in procedural style code.
