Every now and again, I come back to looking at device drivers and driver-writing, and I wonder why there is not some common interface for device drivers. What would the world be like if we could write a device driver for Linux, and be able to use it on FreeBSD without modification? There was a [...]

AllTray is a rather small project—for the moment, there is a single developer working on it (myself), and there aren’t a terribly great number of users, though the users that it does have are most excellent.  For a long time, the users didn’t have the ability to observe the development processes for AllTray, nor did [...]

Yeah, alright.  Those are words I would never have thought I’d see in a title in a blog post, “thanks to Microsoft.”  But, it is true.  Microsoft is adding C# and the CLI to the list of technologies that it promises it will not sue for.  This is Microsoft’s “Community Promise”, which means that to [...]

Recently, I came upon Vala, the new programming language that has been created which is similar in nature to C#, but compiles to C (and thus to an efficient native executable). This is the kind of interesting thing that can come from research with managed code systems—and like any new technology that someone gets the [...]

Hrm. Not sure what I should do about this one. GUI systems programming is a concept that is new to me, at least in all of its low-level glory. Traditionally, I write things in C# because I really like that language. Eventually, I’d love to see the majority of the software out there using something [...]

So, I am back in GA (got back yesterday late afternoon) and am finding that I have to force myself to do anything that isn’t strictly relaxing. That having been said, I did get the movement of AllTray to Launchpad done while I was in Toledo—you can now go to its project page on Launchpad [...]

This post is a bit of a “brain dump” of sorts for some thoughts that I have as to replacing AllTray with a more versatile, powerful, and robust tool to handle various needs of users when it comes to taking applications and docking them to the system tray. Why? I’ve used AllTray for a long [...]

Alrighty, so I wanted to play with Mono 2.0. I thought about packaging it up, but the packaging for Mono in Debian and Ubuntu is extremely complex, and would have taken me a lot of time that I simply don’t have. So, instead, I wrote a BASH script that pulls Mono 2.0 and friends from [...]

So, I was dinking around in Google Reader yesterday and reading my Daily WTF, when I came across this wonderful post. Of course, upon seeing the code listed in that post, I nearly excremented bricks, the code listed there being obviously stupid (I would so fire anyone that used 14 levels of nested if statements [...]

I just read an interesting article on how lines of code are a poor measure of a programmer’s productivity. Of course, it makes sense to me: some of the projects I have worked on have been cut in half in my work on them, and many in at least 3/4, because of the way that [...]