Posts

Showing posts from April, 2016

Followup: Ubuntu persistent USB console boot, or why won't my car read this USB stick?

I finished my project using Ubuntu, and went to recycle one of those 32Gb USB stick for playing music in my car. The 2011 Honda Accord and 2014 Honda Odyssey both said nope "device incompatible" or "device unreadable" or something similar. Reformatting didn't help. I discovered that the live-USB stick formatting program I used had increased the default offset of the partition from 1K to 4K, I think. I actually had to use " diskpart " to delete the partition and create a new one to reset the offset to the default value. I didn't see how to do that in Disk Manager's GUI. Now I have my 32 Gb of music.

Review: Javascript, The Good Parts, by Douglas Crockford

I'm convinced  " JavaScript, The Good Parts " is one of the best JavaScript books for JavaScript doubters, especially those coming from a traditional object-oriented language like me. It really addresses whether JavaScript is just a mess (it definitely has messy parts) or whether there is something good in there. I'm convinced that by avoiding some problematic parts of the language, there is a very useful, functional language core that can express some interesting use-patterns. One of the cool concepts emphasized is that JavaScript has object-inheritance, not class-inheritance. There are no classes. Instead, you can inherit from an object. Something that looks like a class is actually just an object that you essentially make copies of and use in a consistent way. One of the implications is there are mixin/inheritance patterns that can't be expressed in Java/C++ that you can do in JavaScript. I haven't gotten my head around when they might be the best way t