This Old Blog

My 2012 Nexus 7, which is barely a year old, updated over-the-air to Android 4.4 yesterday. This occurred after a long home commute across Orlando through some fairly heavy (and welcome) rain. When I finally plopped down in my La-Z-Boy and reached for my tablet, I was greeted with a notification that the full upgrade had downloaded to the tablet and the tablet was ready to reboot and install Android 4.4. It took around 30 minutes for the installation to finish, but when it was done the Nexus 7 actually looked a bit better and was better behaved than it had been when I first bought it back in October of last year. My tablet, which has been discontinued and replaced by the 2013 version of the Nexus 7, has been faithfully upgraded by Google over the past year. The 2012 Nexus 7 first shipped with Jelly Bean, Android 4.1. Since that time my Nexus 7 has been upgraded with every successive release of Jelly Bean. Over the year I've owned it my 7 has been the best value for a tablet I...

Fedora 19 virtualized on my Windows 8 desktop It's been a while since I commented about Linux. I've been very busy with my career changes as well as learning a new set of skills associated with that career change, including some travel. My use of Linux has settled down as a super-application that runs on top of my Windows 8 system (running on the Samsung Series 7 Chronos). I have four distributions installed these days; Fedora 19, Linux Mint 15, CentOS 5 and CentOS 6. The CentOS installations are there primarily as my final testing sandboxes for RHEL 5 and 6, respectively. Otherwise I do my leading testing and development on Mint and Fedora, usually in that order. Here's a quick rundown of my experiences and observations to date running Linux in this way. Linux Mint 15 . By far and away the cleanest and easiest to work with. Its gcc and clang/llvm installations aren't up-to-date with the latest and greatest as the versions installed on Fedora, so if I really ...

I have carried this with me since I created it, starting in 1980, through my dating with my future wife, our marriage, and on down to my current home in Orlando. It's been sitting in its case in the garage until I went out today, pulled it out, and took these photos of it. It is a single board computer (SBC) designed and built around a 6502 processor, the same processor that wound up in the Apple ][ and the Commodore computers of the era (PET, VIC-20, and C-64). And believe it or not, I can still power it up and it still works. More or less... This top-level view gives a better idea of the components and the density of the components. Again, keep in mind that this was built on a proto-board from the company I worked for at the time, Digital Communications Associates (DCA) of Atlanta. I was an engineer working for them (first a customer engineer, then a software engineer, then a field engineer; that last position is how I got to Orlando). It was interesting building this boar...

Sample Go language inside Notepad++ editor, using Java syntax highlighting My experience with computer languages extends all the way back to APL ( A Programming Language ). I was exposed to it at the Fernbank Science Center in Atlanta in 1971. I got into APL for two reasons; the cool symbols across the top of the keyboard (a mechanical teletype) and the fact that I could play moon lander, one of the computer games written in APL that I later started to hack. For a high school junior who was growing up through Star Trek, 2001, and the Apollo program, learning APL on an IBM 360 mainframe was a dream come true. Since then I have continuously been programming in some language, from assembly on up, on some platform, from microprocessors on up, until today, and I don't see myself changing until I can no longer see a monitor, sometime in the unknowable future. For someone with such a very long period of software engineering in their lives, staying with any language or even a group...