I’m not picking on any specific language throughout this post, I’m mostly just ordering my thoughts about these things. I should probably just use generic names like Brand X, or Language Y, but I’m not going to do that because this will probably be more flow of consciousness that well constructed writing. Keep in mind that I do very little embedded or systems programming where I currently am. I recognize that not everything is web development, however that’s the world I live in currently, and so much of this will probably sound like I’m ignoring anything beyond web (because I am for the time being).

So I just finished moving everything out of GoDaddy and into AWS - main reason being it’s significantly cheaper hosting sites and doing DNS through AWS, esp. because there is no significant traffic to any of my sites. However, amazon offers a number of nice things in addition to just lower cost, better performance hosting. I now have everything under https, which wasn’t a high priority, but AWS offers free SSL certs that you can use with CloudFront and ELBs.

I’m the past few years, most mobile devices have switched from the proprietary charging connectors to micro USB. While it has it’s issues, such as a crappy connector that will fail, it was a great change in my mind. For the certification board, the goal was to build a USB device charger. That turned out to be more complicated than I had originally anticipated. You cannot just plug a device in and provide power.

I think it might be interesting to make a 2d space exploration/fighting hand using libgdx and box2d. I’m going to attempt to do it, but I may or may not finish it, we shall see. I’ve been playing around with libgdx for a while, it’s quite a neat little platform/framework/whatever they want it to be called. I don’t have much experience with physics engines though. I’d like the game to be exploring a procedurally generated solar system/galaxy where you FTL jump between planetary systems/nebulas and can encounter enemies, allies, and neutrals, and your interactions with them effect the game in some way.

I love LEDs. They are the best invention since sliced bread. I mean think about it - you have this tiny little device that costs pennies, consumes next to no current and can display 8 bit color. Naturally, I have always been envious of NYC’s giant color display. Last winter break, I had the idea of a panel which would be a small LED display. The interesting thing about this display is that you would be able to connect multiple together into a larger, arbitrarily sized and shaped display matrix.

It’s been a while… So I just competed in HackDFW - which was pretty awesome. My team worked really well together, and we did really well (placed second overall). We designed a cell phone controlled TENS device over 24 hours. Half of the team worked on the hardware portions of it, the other half (the half I was on) worked on the Android side of things. This’ll be short because I’m still tired.