Tuesday, September 21, 2010

New Hobby

One of my favorite classes in college was the Digital Logic class where we had to design basic computer circuitry. Then this year I read Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software and again, was just engrossed in all of the gates, adders and multiplexers. I really am clueless when it comes to a lot of this stuff but always wanted to get some hands-on experience.

I first found about the Arduino project from the July 2010 issue of PragPub. Then a couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine mentioned that he bought an Arduino and was fooling around with it so I decided to take the plunge too.

Like my friend, I ended up purchasing the SparkFun Inventor's Kit for Arduino, which comes with some basic parts and project schema to get you started.

Here is a video of my son and I with our first project to light up some LEDs:

Sunday, September 19, 2010

New Home Page

I've been doing a lot of work on Google App Engine lately and finally registered a domain name for myself at ryan-brubaker.com. It's probably a little bit of overkill to use GAE for a personal site but I just find it easier. I'm going to use that page to start putting up code samples, keep track of books I've read and anything else that strikes my fancy.

I'll still be using blogger to host my blog, which after a year of silence, I hope to get back on track again. This past year has been a busy year for me and I have a lot of things I'd like to write about.

And for a little vanity note, I'm now listed on the Developer Testimonials page on the Art & Logic website: Art & Logic Careers (click the Developer Testimonials tab).