PPSStudios

Tag: programming

  • The Zone

    Have I ever been here? Probably. I cannot recall a specific time I have been fully “In the Zone” as it were, but I know that I was close a week or two ago while working on finalizing a project for work. https://dopeboy.github.io/in-the-zone/ Based on Manish Sinha’s definition of this state of mind, I cannot […]

  • DMX for actual Electrical Engineers

    So it’s been coming up recently that our church media department has been buying “OpenDMX USB Dongles” for upwards of $80. I was mortified, especially after seeing this USB device, opening up the sheet metal project box and finding it to be a simple 2-stage USB to RS-485 protocol bridge with no programmable intelligence whatsoever.

  • Typecasting struct to char* for Idiots Like Me

    Want to cast from a struct to a character string? Seen all those posts out there suggesting that reinterpret_cast will work, but is unsafe? Yeah, I tried it. Yeah, it’s unsafe.

  • Embarcadero TThread Works Just Fine

    I’ve been annoyed for a large amount of time (years in fact) over some of our software we use and sell. In essence, what we have is a TCP GUI that communicates on a 250ms timer with a microcontroller that’s serving up a two-way communications protocol over ModBus FC23 – we send commands either to […]

  • My New C++ Endeavors

    Awesome news! I’ve been asked at work to start doing a bit of GUI development for our NASA projects. They’ve said that all of their stuff is developed using Borland C++. Now with my PennMUSH development experience, I’ve taught myself a bit of C++ (though my PennMUSH development experience has been mostly debugging and making […]

  • Ruby on Rails for Windows

    It was only recently that I FINALLY figured out just what Ruby on Rails is. From most of the posts I saw all I could make of it was “it’s the thing that runs Twitter.” Okay..so what’s it DO? Well as it turns out, from what I can make of it, Rails is a new […]

  • Ubuntu Server – Changing Screen Resolution with GRUB2

    Recently I drug out my old Dell dinosaur (Dimension) from the closet and decided to try installing Ubuntu server onto it. Well, all went well until I also attempted to add the Xubuntu-Desktop package, so I could better run around and do things in there. A quick update for an nVidia graphics driver froze the […]

  • Garfield!!

    A long time ago, I discovered that Jim Davis, the author of Garfield comics, syndicates his stuff with uComics. An interesting, and probably well-known, fact is that uComics actually stores the images from a particular cartoon in a fairly friendly directory structure! At least, they do with Garfield comics. So I was able to do some back-door hacks […]

  • Preventing Constant Reboots on a Network

    For some weird reason, I found that my router (Netgear WNR3500L) (or my connection) was giving me problems…every so often it my LAN connection would completely reset and require me to reboot the computer, just to get the webserver back online (it would become completely unreachable via No-IP DNS -and- the external IP address..some 5xx […]

  • Faster Internet is (at least for now) better

    We’ve just gone live with our newly activated ADSL connection. As of 5:00 this evening, I was able to plug in the aforementioned modem that we bought on Friday and successfully connect to first Qwest’s initial login page, then, well, everywhere else! Of course, everybody’s test to see if they’re connected is Google. Well, not […]