Contributing to the Community

I recently had the privilege of getting my name added to the list of contributors of Cygwin packages. I use a program called watch to run a script that pings a group of servers and reports them as being up or down. Watch runs a program at a specified interval and prints the output to the screen.
The version that was in Cygwin was 3.2.8 and was quite old. On my Debian system, version 3.3.9 was the stable version and it supported color output. To see the server status easier, I wanted to display the text in green if the server was up and red if it was down. Such a simple thing ended up being a very rewarding and satisfying journey.
Compiling linux source code in Cygwin is quite simple and many packages already exist to make this process easier. There are packages such as cygport that automate the packaging process so you eliminate the human element as much as possible. I'm curious if this is how many other packaging systems such as Debian's or RedHat's make the process easier for their developers. I'll probably look into this next.
I built a page with bootstrap to host the files and give as much info about Procps-ng as I could to make sharing the code with the community easier.
Procps-ng
This has been a great learning experience and my fear to putting my code out into the world has been relieved quite a bit now. I hope to post some in-depth info about this process, but I'm currently working to publish my Blogger-sublime-plugin package to the package control system and that's what I'm focusing on at the moment.

Sharing code with the world

The main reason I started writing this blog was to share snippets of things I find interesting or as a way to document any solutions I come up with that I would like to share. The problem with the web though, is formatting. When you copy and paste code from your code editor into a web form, things don't go as expected. Some pages will try to interpret the code blocks and in some cases can even cause the page to break. Most of the time, indentation is ignored and sometimes line breaks too.

Posting blog entries from Sublime Text 3

This is a proof of concept post that means the Sublime Text 3 Blogger plugin is working.

More Floating Point Goodness

Continuing my look into floating point arithmetic, I decided to see how things work in different languages. If you didn't see my first foray into this, you can check that out here.

Floating Point Math

In most cases, I tend to write my own code to do simple tasks. In some cases it's not a simple task but I need more control. Recently I've realized that when it comes to math, specifically floating point operations, I will always rely on someone else's code to do the math for me.