What Are You Doing Right Now

Still thinking about what I did today: Had to glue together two programs from different worlds, one is C++ (linking to native Linux libraries and calling unistd functions), the other is C#. Both programs need to exchange some data (sending commands to the C++ app and returning data to C# and vice versa) and need to run on the same OS. First thought was to P/Invoke, so compiling that C++ app as a lib and call that lib from C#, but I would not be able to debug that on Windows in Visual Studio at all and the C++ app is using an internal API with quite some complicated callbacks.

P/Invoki'ng works, even with mono, but it would not have been fun at all in this case. Because I could not debug that C++ app (closed system with just a text editor and a huge make script), I went for something very simple: Exchanging data using the filesystem (I know, there are streams and sockets etc., but again, no debugger). Went for a simple ramfs ramdisk to speed things up, as there will be like 20k messages with ~1,600 bytes each per second.

Works like a charm, but there's still a lot to do. Kinda fun to work on such things. Frontends for example, like GUIs or web applications, isn't something I would enjoy.

scottalanmiller

Started the day with about 230 PMs in my SW mailbox. Have it down under 100 now.

BRRABill

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Started the day with about 230 PMs in my SW mailbox. Have it down under 100 now.

Only to be back up to 230 tomorrow.

BTW: 95 of those 100 are probably Linux questions from me so you can safely delete them.

scottalanmiller

Boy SW has been slow today and especially this evening. ML is slow, too, but not nearly AS slow. It's a quite IT world today.

tonyshowoff

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Boy SW has been slow today and especially this evening. ML is slow, too, but not nearly AS slow. It's a quite IT world today.

I noticed that too, I figured it was just because they knew I was lurking.

scottalanmiller

@tonyshowoff said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Boy SW has been slow today and especially this evening. ML is slow, too, but not nearly AS slow. It's a quite IT world today.

I noticed that too, I figured it was just because they knew I was lurking.

Maybe I was too... it's OUR fault!

scottalanmiller

I have fully emptied by SW email folder. that's a start. About 90 PMs left to work through.

stacksofplates

Felled two trees this evening. New chainsaw is working pretty well

scottalanmiller

Trying to get an Amazon Fire TV Stick fixed.

scottalanmiller

Playing some Minecraft with my five year old.

dafyre

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Trying to get an Amazon Fire TV Stick fixed.

What was broke? And which would you recommend -- the FireTV or the TV Stick?

scottalanmiller

@dafyre said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Trying to get an Amazon Fire TV Stick fixed.

What was broke?

Networking issues. It could not connect to a wireless network. The radio just went up and down. A replacement is on its way.

scottalanmiller

@dafyre said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

And which would you recommend -- the FireTV or the TV Stick?

I like the stick a lot, it is cheap and it does the trick. No good for games, but it does Amazon Video, Netflix, Hulu and YouTube like a dream. I have the voice activated model with Alexa, that's a neat extra feature. It's tiny and super portable. So for ~$35, it's hard to go wrong.

The Fire TV is neat and the size is great, but it is $100 for the base model (300% the stick) and $140 for the Gaming version with the controller. This version has an Nvidia Tegra K1 which is pretty nice BUT the weird Amazon ecosystem makes gaming on the unit essentially useless. So pretty much, it's no good. It's almost awesome, it's right on the verge of being really cool. But it doesn't quite make it. Storage issues, being too expensive and way too limited gaming just kill it. The stick does all the good parts of the Fire TV for cheap.

If you like the look of the Fire TV, the NVidia Shield TV is just $30 more but has twice the power, exclusive titles, 50% more memory, better controller, 4K video and the only negatives are that it is a little larger (like twice the size, still small) and doesn't have Amazon Video built in.

coliver

I'm not a big fan of the fire stick. It isn't reliable, need to restart almost daily, the sound is general slightly off in all but Netflix and apps crash on a regular basis. My Roku stick, while slower, is much more reliable and usable.