Author Archives: Ross

Digital Ocean has been an excellent way for me to spin up test Ubuntu VMs for testing my expanding collection of PPAs, build scripts, and various other bits and pieces. While I do stack testing with kitchen, chef, vagrant, and frequently AWS, it is really nifty to be able to boot a fresh VM on […]

I was going over journal notes from last year, and spotted my scribbles for working out MIDI notes from corresponding standard musical notation (C1, C#, etc). Maybe my Google-fu was weak, but I couldn’t find anything that described, in algorithmic terms, how to convert between these two systems at the time. Beyond some brief flirtations […]

The response to my post last week was amazing. As I write this, there are nine items left processing out of what ended up being more than 200,000 – a mixture of groups of threads and forum pages. For some perspective, when I posted that there were only eight days left, about 5,000 items had […]

I wonder how many programmers realize just how weird shell scripting is compared to pretty much every other programming activity one might engage in. I hadn’t really thought on it too deeply before, but I started digging into shell more deeply several months ago. Previously, I had been reasoning about it as just sort of […]

My motivation for learning to code was that I wanted to build things; not just anything, either, stuff that solved a problem I or someone else had. I don’t necessarily enjoy programming for the sake of programming, which seems to be unusual amongst a lot of developers I talk to. Which is not to say […]