I have a thing against Mini DisplayPort. Ah, the cause of so many of my problems. I’ve been through broken mDP (Mini DisplayPort) cables, broken mDP ports, and “non-working” mDP to HDMI adaptors causing havoc. It’s things like having to drive to a shop just to buy a working adaptor when you really need it, or figuring out what angle to bend the cable to get a projector working for a 21st party (yep).

Stumbled across Philip Guo’s blog, as I was (initially) searching for programming interview tips. Worth visiting for any software / computer science-y people out there, with insights into Phd and academia life. Hard work! http://pgbovine.net/programming-interview-tips.htm https://www.youtube.com/user/pgbovine/

Summary: Get a really good computer for ProPresenter. A dual core laptop with integrated graphics does NOT work very well with ProPresenter 5 / 6 Windows. Whilst the Mac version is proven but not perfect, the Windows version is generally “slow” as my volunteers tell me. Test things out before going live!! Editorial note: If you’re thinking about buying ProPresenter 6 Windows, I recommend you take a look at the official forums beforehand to get a feel for the kind of problems others have/are facing with the software.

Early into this semester I bought a HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8. A few months after, everything seems to running well! 🙂 This is a huge upgrade from the Noontec N5… oh, _exFAT_ as a 24⁄7 single disk NAS filesystem? NEVER AGAIN. Especially as it definitely wasn’t running any of Microsoft’s OSes! I purchased the most basic option, with a Celeron G1610T processor at ~$310 AUD (incl. shipping), and thanks to ozbargain for an eBay discount coupon, the deal included 8GB RAM (up from the 4GB base).

Xilinx’s tools seems to always come with their fair share of problems. I installed the latest version, Xilinx Vivado 2016.4, hoping that I could avoid hacky fixes to get it running (and playing nice with Windows 10, too!) I was wrong. (Turns out that this is normal, just look at the sample projects in “Zynq SoC Training” from EmbeddedCentric.com!) Current grievances: Bad workflow when developing a custom IP. Plenty of “Vivado Internal Exception” messages popping up every now and then.