Sometimes you have to hit reset
Either software that I wrote, or something about software that someone else wrote.
This little device uses the GPS satellite’s atomic clock to provide a highly accurate stratum-1 time source to your network. Wouldn’t it be great if you can pull metrics from it so you can monitor performance? Then you might want to checkout the monitoring shizzle I built. It runs in a docker container and feeds time series data to InfluxDB.
https://github.com/sean-foley/leo-ntp-monitor
I built this about a year ago. I prototyped a circuit that used an ATTiny85 microcontroller to drive a p-channel (high side) mosfet. The idea was to use the microcontroller to strobe the Clearwater Darla LED accessory lights.
The circuit worked as expected, but that click-click-click-click noise is bad. I thought the functionality of the led “instant-on” was via a 12v signal to the dc-dc circuit in the led light, but it is actually a mechanical relay. Strobing anything mechanical is no bueno.
I completely changed my strategy after this test. A little experimenting and I discovered that the accessory lights are controlled by a PWM signal which controls the light intensity (low to full power).
I met up with one of my peeps for lunch the other week. We’re chatting about stuff, then we started talking about coding. We have a nice rivalry – I’m very much about the “art and craft” of software engineering, and he’s all about using the latest/greatest to build stuff. I call B.S. on his shinny new, and he calls B.S. on my old and crusty.
Me: “Dependency Injection used to be your jammy jam. You told me that my code sucked because I called a constructor directly. So what’s your newest hotness?” Continue reading “Wizbangadry”
Welcoming Progressive Web Apps to Microsoft Edge and Windows 10
Microsoft announced that Progressive Web Apps (PWA) will be added to the Microsoft Store (the “Store”). This means just like a native app (or Universal App in Microsoft Store parlance), you can build a PWA app and have that added to the Store. From a developer perspective, this is great. A PWA app in theory should be much more cross-platform than a native app. But what I find more interesting is thinking about the “why’s” a company would do something.
The big tech companies have been battling for years. When you are building your business, trying to navigate the cesspool of technologies is a challenge. You have to be careful of betting on a technology that could get dropped when it isn’t a strategic fit anymore. Remember a thing called Silverlight? As developers, we know its possible to have standards and the Web has been that shinning light. But Apple, Google, and Microsoft all have different objectives. Unfortunately, rather than evaluating a technology on its technical merits, it’s actually more important to evaluate it on the viability of its long term success. Continue reading “Progressive Web Apps and The Microsoft Store”