Every few years I run into someone who knew me in elementary, junior, or senior high school and one of their first questions usually falls into one of two camps: How did you handle all that bullying?Why were you such a little ass-hole sometimes? The answer to the first one is that, well, I didn't … Continue reading A Little Self Reflection
Okay. I've really heard enough in this debate between the pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine people. Personally I have gotten the vaccine but I also don't want the government forcing people to get it either. It's a very dangerous precedent for the government to have that much control over us. History is filled with examples (*cough* American … Continue reading This is Really Getting Stupid – And Scary!
I've been busy in my increasingly rare free time adding some very useful tools to my Rubicon library for Swift. Most all of them came out of direct needs for my XML parsing library but I decided to include them in Rubicon so that they can be used in other projects. 1) RingByteBuffer This is … Continue reading Updates to Rubicon Swift Library
Have you ever had one of those days where you just can't seem to get anything right? Well, when it comes to my professional life (work), I seem to be having one of those days for the last month or so. No matter how hard I try I just can't seem to get it right. … Continue reading Bad Month
I am so very TIRED of seeing stupid posts like the one below. To me it shows one area where public education has completely failed our children by not teaching them important things like basic economics. This leads to our kids having this grossly fairy tale-like, over simplified view of economics. Our kids end up … Continue reading Please Take an Economic Class… or Two.
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Okay, I really do understand the plight. Honestly I do. I mean, I get it! Strings in Swift are not randomly accessible collections of bytes like they are in C or 16-bit words like they are in Objective-C or Java. In Swift a String is a collection of grapheme clusters. So, why not allow you … Continue reading Thoughts on Strings in Swift
By Jim Butterfield Originally published in Compute! July 1983 (page 178) The Serial bus connects VIC or Commodore 64 to its major peripherals, especially disk and tape. The workings of this interface have been a source of bafflement to most of us. We know that it's somehow related to the IEEE-488 bus which is used … Continue reading How the VIC/64 Serial Port Works
So, one of my other hobbies are retro-computers. Specifically the Commodore 128. I had this computer as a kid and it still holds a strong place in my heart. I recently acquired a Commodore 128DCR on eBay and have been playing with it again. But as with all things retro, there is a strong community … Continue reading Pi1541 Pi-Hat