Programming

Posts about my profession, software development. I also discuss my hobby projects involving code.

VR

Entering the "Metaverse"

When you open this post in your web browser, you should see a WebXr scene that I generated. I used a panorama photograph that my drone took over a semi-urban neighborhood in the USA.

Music Featured

Anatomy of a Song: Using Scripture as a Song Grammar

I have designed a simple context-free grammar using Psalm 71:22 to drive the creation of a song.

Architecture

My First Architecture Diagram

Back around 1992-1993, I worked at a company that created Form Filling software in the Real Estate space. I was phone tech support for one of their software packages. It was my first introduction to how a technical company worked. While working there, I had grand visions for how I

Music

Not Giving Up...

I recently sold my mac, so I am not longer maintaining my Intentional Music program in Swift. However, I am a .NET developer, so using C# to write a new Intentional Music program was a no-brainer. I started the program on my PC over the weekend and got it caught

Music

Adding Scales to Intentional Music

I spent last few days adding another algorithm to my Intentional Music (algorithmic composition) arsenal. This time, I chose to focus on adding the ability to choose notes from musical scales.

Programming

Major Improvements to Intentional Music Program

I spent the morning refactoring my Intentional Music Program to move away from Swift Playgrounds and make it a full-on console application.

Music Featured

What makes an Intentional Music Program?

I began considering the idea of intentional music back in the early 90's. I was into the Chaos theory and I loved exploring Fractal generation software. I spent a lot of time pondering the beauty of self similarity. One thing that always stood out to me about the Mandelbrot set

Music

Programming Intentional Music

I am a programmer at heart. It's what I do for a living and I enjoy it immensely. I also enjoy creating music in my spare time. However, I'm not a classically trained musician, so I struggle with the composition of my music. That's why I've started to work on

Programming

asp-page not working with RazorPages in .NET Core

I had a problem where my Razor Pages were rendering the "asp-page" Helper to the output HTML. It was happening with pages in an Area.

Programming

Customizing ASP.NET Core Identity using Existing User Database

It is sometimes necessary to use the built-in .NET security to manage logins on an existing database. This post illustrates how to do that.

Programming

25th Anniversary of cerkit.com

2020 marks the 25th anniversary of my website cerkit.com [https://cerkit.com/]. It's been a great asset and a personal liability (there were a few weeks where I posted inappropriate things to my blog that got me into a lot of trouble). It has slowed down lately because I'm

Programming

Dynamic database driven authorization policies in .NET Core 3.0 (Blazor)

Assume we had a requirement to dynamically load our authorization policies from a database. To make things easy, let's make the policies specific to a given resource, or page. Different pages can share policies. Suppose we have a matrix of policies that drive access to pages that we'll store in

Programming

Baremetal programming, Assembly Language, and FPGAs

I've been exploring how to program in assembly language lately. It's been a fun experience. I just ordered a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB of RAM from Adafruit. It should be here by the weekend. One of the things I've recently discovered is called "baremetal programming". It refers to programming

Programming

As a programmer, I tend to see the world as broken, and I don't like how that makes me feel

I've been trying to be more positive lately. I can sometimes be a real downer with my wife and I'm recognizing that. In trying to narrow down why my brain sees everything in a negative light, I came to the realization that my day job may be the cause. As

Programming

Create a simple IRC Bot with .NET Core

I had an urge to write a simple IRC chat bot with .NET core. Why? Just because I could. I wanted a quick project for the night, so I figured out how to make it happen. This book [https://amzn.to/2V4d3B8] covers the basics of TCP/IP Sockets. Before

3D Printing

Simple 3D printed vase code for OpenSCAD

I goofed around with OpenSCAD tonight and came up with a little module that I'm using to create models to be printed in vase mode on my 3D printer. You can find the STL files on Thingiverse - cerkit Vase #1 [https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3317913]. My first vase

3D Printing

Programming + 3D printing = bliss

I just wrote my first program using OpenSCAD. It's a free tool for writing code that generates 3D models. It's very powerful and I wanted to give it a try. I decided to create a "maker coin" (something that Angus on Maker's Muse [https://www.youtube.com/user/TheMakersMuse] does

Electronics

Tutoring Day 2 - Python

Today was day 2 of the tutoring session for a coworker's daughter. She's into 3D printing, coding, and electronics, so I volunteered to help her learn the topics. Today, she wanted to start learning how to program, so we wired up some LEDs to her Raspberry Pi and opened the

Programming

Why we decided to stop using Entity Framework and go back to ADO.NET

While our newest solution is far from architecturally cool, we think it will be easier for the lesser experienced (and new) developers to work with. We are in a market that doesn't have much IT talent.

Programming

How to fix "Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2017 is already installed. Please uninstall and try again."

I recently uninstalled Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio to try and pinpoint the source of another issue I was having. However, the uninstall failed with the following log (apparently, there was still a Visual Studio process running): 10/18/2018 2:52:09 PM - Microsoft VSIX Installer 10/

Programming

Is it Intelligent? The Braitenberg Vehicle

Back in 2010, I started reading a book titled Vehicles - Experiments in Synthetic Psychology written by Valentino Braitenberg in 1984. Braitenberg was a cyberneticist and wrote this book as a series of thought experiments about simple vehicles that exhibit complex "personality" traits. I got into this book because it

Programming

GitHub is not necessarily the best judge of developer skill

I recently read where someone said that GitHub was the place to go to determine a developer's skill level. I have to say that I totally disagree with this statement. It might be true for some developers, but not me. I write a lot of code every day. Some days

Programming

How to add Prism Syntax Highlighting to your Ghost blog

I have been using Ghost pro [https://ghost.org/] for a few years now as my blogging platform and I love it. However, its lack of code formatting (syntax highlighting) has made it difficult to use the default theme (Casper) to display source code. I love the Casper theme, so

Programming

Staring at a blank canvas

I recently bought painting supplies. The whole works; Brushes, Canvases, Paints. I even bought a new easel. I managed to paint one painting using the intuitive painting technique. However, I keep finding myself staring at a blank canvas, not knowing what to put on it. I have no idea what

Programming

Driving the Max 7219 7-Segment Display Module from ASP.NET Core on the Raspberry Pi

In a previous blog post [https://cerkit.com/2017/11/23/running-a-net-core-2-0-webapi-app-on-the-raspberry-pi-raspbian/] , I discussed how to create a dotnet core 2.0 WebApi application to run on the Raspberry Pi [https://amzn.to/2DM8kxV] and trigger an LED. This post will build upon that by outlining the steps I took