This evening, I noticed that an application running in a cluster of machines I look after was behaving oddly. It was using huge amounts of RAM and then crashing. What made this even more unusual was the fact that the code was written in Elixir and had been in production use for several years without …
Author Archives: daniel
ESP32 Nabaztag
My poor little Nabaztag rabbit is feeling the heavy weight of years. Modern WiFi means it is having trouble connecting to newer access points so I need another solution. With that in mind I decided to have a go at replacing the guts with something a little more modern and the ESP32 sounded perfect. I’ve …
Roomba running on a Makita 18v cordless drill battery
I just got myself a nice new Makita 18v drill. It’s really nice 🙂 On thing about my battery operated tools I’ve noticed is that I tend to have one battery in the device and another charging. Since I don’t used them very often they batteries tend to degrade after a while, so I was …
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Windows
I’ve been running Macintosh machines for quite some time as my primary development environment. Recently I’ve been having to spend a lot of my time running Windows for my work and I’m finding it a lot less painful than I thought I would. Windows 10 has vastly improved over Windows 8 (although the bar was …
Common Lisp, ASDF, Quicklisp and Windows
Today I spent quite a bit of time trying to get ASDF to find my local packages on my Windows development machine. It turns out that since ASDF 3.1.5 the place to put the config files has moved. Now the config file needs to be placed in $HOME/AppData/Local/config/common-lisp/source-registry.conf.d/ There’s a couple of hours of my …
Common Lisp, OpenGL and CEPL
Yesterday I spent a couple of hours playing with Common Lisp and OpenGL. It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to play like this and I had a good time. I really need to do it more often 😉 I’ve been watching the CEPL videos on youtube for a while and wanted to …
Data rescue
As with most “computer” guys (and gals), I often get asked to look at computer problems. This latest one has been interesting. A friend overseas had their USB hard disk (WD My Passport Ultra) fail so she shipped it to me to take a look at. When I plugged it into a Mac I got …
JTAG is fun :)
It’s amazing what you can find inside the RAM on embedded devices using a JTAG! I’m currently dumping the RAM image of an energy usage monitor. So far I’ve seen OpenVPN keys and a few other interesting files still in memory. With any luck I’ll get a copy of /etc/passwd 😉
I’ve been a bit quiet of late
It’s been quite a while since my last post. I’ve been really busy with my work and haven’t had much time for my many hobbies of late. Over the last weekend I managed to dig out my 3D printer that I’d been working on for a while and finally managed to get it going. There …
Apps
I’ve been making some apps recently. Â One for the new Windows 8 modern UI and one for iOS using swift. Â One was a joy to code, the other was not 😉 Swift is an interesting language and I look forward to writing more code in it. Â C# is also a nice language, however writing code …