Kyle Cordes

Today I needed a very long (3 hour) MP3 audio file to use for an experiment; a test file with some music on it. My first thought was to start a MP3 audio recorder, turn on the radio, and leave for 3 hours.
But impatience is among the three great virtues of a programmer, so […]

Here is an idea I picked up at AYE and again at ETech; I mentioned it at the Ruby UG last month, and am writing it up here to encourage its use.
A common problem at growing and changing groups of people (such as user group members, conference attendees who see each other rarely, etc.), is […]

My friend Brian Button is still looking for St. Louis Code Camp speakers; if you’ve thought about giving a user group talk, this is a great way to get your feet wet.  A “code camp” is an informal event, likely with a lot of group discussion.  You don’t need a large topic or a long […]

Last night at XPSTL, John Sextro gave a talk on the “Move Embellishment to Decorator” refactoring as described in Joshua Kerievsky’s Refactoring to Patterns book. I greatly enjoyed and benefitted from the original Design Patterns book (from the Gang of Four) which was already old (published 1994) when I heard about it and bought […]

I’ve been evaluating Intel’s Integrated Performance Primitives, a set of libraries for low-level signal processing and image manipulation. These appear to be very well engineered at the lowest levels, but the packaging is a mess, as I’ll describe below. The point of these libraries is that they use the various enhanced CPU instruction […]

Keith Lea pointed out that he will never deploy with Java Web Start again.
With Web Start in its current form, he’s be deploying with it long before I will use it again.  “Never” is much too soon.. here is why, echoing and expanding on Keith’s experiences. Some of these things are not Web Start’s […]