JJinuxLand

My dad sent me the following:Today I received a call from a Mark Atkison. He claims to be with Windows Technical Services, located in (or on) Brainbridge Island, Washington. Phone number 206-201-2413Mark claims for the last two weeks my computer has been downloading online infections, junk files and miscellaneous viruses. I asked him about my “online ID number” Mark said my “customer license Security Identification number is: 888DCA60-FC0A-11CF-8F0F-[deleted]“. Mark said I could verify this by pressing the Windows key and r at the same time.... That would open a “run box” When the run box opens I was to type ASSOC. When I hit the Windows key + r, I saw a box open with “cmd”... which I figured stands for “command”. If I remember correctly, I erased the “cmd”. I was to type ASSOC. When I did, I saw something come up with “exe”. By the way, when I typed in ASSOC, I would not hit enter. I thought this might be some kink of scam or bull shit. I told Mark I was going to…

I was talking to someone the other day. He said that given two Turing Complete programming languages, A and B, if you can write a program in A, you can write a similar program in B. Is that true? I suspect not.I never took a class on computability theory, but I suspect it only works for a limited subset of programs--ones that only require the features provided by a Turing machine. Let me provide a counterexample. Let's suppose that language A has networking APIs and language B doesn't. Nor does language B have any way to access networking APIs. It's entirely possible for language B to be Turing Complete without actually providing such APIs. In such a case, you can write a program in language A that you can't write in language B.Of course, I could be completely wrong because I don't even understand the definitions fully. Like I said, I've never studied computability theory.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I really enjoyed reading Programming Raspberry Pi: Getting Started with Python. One of the chapters in the book teaches you how to build an LED digital clock. It took some futzing around, but I finally got it done :)The first problem I had was that I didn't know how to solder. My buddy Chris Dudte gave me a kit to learn. I watched a bunch of YouTube videos with the kids in my Raspberry Pi class, and then we put the circuit board together. Problem solved.The next two problems I encountered were with the author's library for talking to the smbus for controlling the LEDs, i2c7segment. One of the problems resulted in my saying quite a few less than charitable words under my breath. The Python code kept giving me the error message "IOError: [Errno 5] Input/output error".I finally figured it out. On line 42 of i2c7segment.py, the code is hardcoded to use smbus.SMBus(0). However, sometimes you need to use smbus.SMBus(1). You can run "…

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I'm going to be giving my "Best Practices for Software Engineers" talk at both the East Bay Ruby Meetup and at BayPIGgies (the Bay Area Python Interest Group). We're planning on broadcasting the BayPIGgies meeting using a Google+ Hangout on Air. If you're interested, here's the event, and here's the direct YouTube link.Thanks to @nicholsonjf for setting this up!

I'm going to be giving my talk "Best Practices for Software Engineers" at two different user groups in May:East Bay Ruby MeetupBayPIGgiesHere's the abstract:Being a software engineer requires a lot more than knowing how to write good code.This class covers a wide variety of topics such as making code reviews useful and effective, how to deal with team conflicts, networking in real life, and planning for your career. The goal is to help you not only be a solid asset for your team, but also to be the type of software engineer that others really enjoy working with.I hope to see some of you there!