Programming – Software n' stuff

Getting the most out of 16KB ROM!

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work on the rosco_m68k hardware, specifically on integrating the new Yamaha V9958 video board. As part of this, I wanted to extend the firmware to support basic “virtual consoles”, so that if a V9958 is detected it will use that for text output, or fall back to theContinue reading “Getting the most out of 16KB ROM!”

Advent of Code 2018

This year I’m taking part in the awesome Advent of Code, and because I haven’t done a lot of Ruby over the past couple of years I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to refresh my skills. In case you’re unfamiliar, AoC is a series of twenty-five coding challenges. Each day leading up toContinue reading “Advent of Code 2018”

Generate less bytecode with default methods

Java’s default methods (introduced back in Java 8) are one of those features that solve the intended problem reasonably well, while at the same time allowing all kinds of nasty code and weird inheritance stuff when used in a general-purpose kind of way. Indeed, they’ve been the subject of a ton of posts and theContinue reading “Generate less bytecode with default methods”

Mocking v2.0

We all love to use mocks in our Java tests, right? Add the usual mock framework to your test dependencies, sprinkle a few mock, when and thenWhatever calls in to your code, and happy days. You’re able to test things in isolation, and as an added bonus ensure your code is actually calling the stuffContinue reading “Mocking v2.0”

The “Scoring Predictions” kata

While idly surfing around earlier, I caught this post on coderbits, announcing that some of the Practicing Ruby archives are available under a free documentation license. When I saw that one of the released articles was written by James Edward Gray II, I just had to take a look. In case you don’t know, JEGIIContinue reading “The “Scoring Predictions” kata”

Scratch: Teaching kids to think in blocks

Over the weekend I spent a few very rewarding hours with my ten-year-old son playing with Scratch, MIT’s drag-and-drop educational programming system. I’ve often wanted to “get him into” programming (I was a little younger than he is now when I started, and at ten I was beginning to get really interested in writing codeContinue reading “Scratch: Teaching kids to think in blocks”

Biting the bullet – time for a rewrite

In response to a feature request from some of the guys here, my current work on Deelang focusses on implementing proper equality and comparison operators as part of the language. The current release has no support for operators beyond basic arithmetic – equality and comparison have traditionally been implemented as methods hacked on top of the standardContinue reading “Biting the bullet – time for a rewrite”