My name is Andrew Stine. I'm a software developer and freelance philosopher currently based out of Northern Virginia and this is my website. It's partly a blog, and partly a showcase for different projects on which I may be working.
You can get in touch with me through stine.drew@gmail.com
My public key: Public Key
You can peruse more of my projects on Github.
I also have a Twitter Feed that you can follow and I'm on LinkedIn.
Nota bene: If you wish to contact me directly, I strongly prefer email to phone calls, especially during working hours. Thanks.
There is an interesting paper called How Complex Systems Fail. It’s a collection of 18 related observations about complex systems and about when and how they fail. The observations are as follows:
Recently, a fried told me he was having trouble getting a Parallax RFID reader working on a Raspberry Pi for a project he was working on. I wondered how hard it could be so I got one of the readers for myself and hooked it up to a Pi. It turns out that it was harder than I thought it would be, but only because I didn’t know what I was doing.
When the reader is connected to the computer, it is auto-mounted as a serial port at /dev/ttyUSB0
. You might think that because the letters ‘tty’ are in the device name that this is a TTY device, but it turns out that TTY devices are just connected over serial ports. This was not actually a TTY device. Once I understood that, it turns out that connected to a serial port on Linux though Python is actually rather simple. One just needs the pyserial
library.
Here are some instructions and sample code to get this device working with a Raspberry Pi… Read More
So, the other week I was in the store purchasing some toothpaste. Now toothpaste, at least in America, is a great example of that phenomenon of a huge number of indifferentiatable choices you often get when shopping at a typical grocery store. There are maybe a dozen brands of toothpaste and each brand has maybe a dozen products all advertising slightly different advantages in the realm of tooth care. One tube of toothpaste offers defense against cavities while another advertises that it will prevent plaque build up. Now, never mind the fact that the default expectation is that all brands of toothpaste will help prevent cavities, there is really no way for the casual shopper to really evaluate the claims of these different products.(With the exception of anti-sensitivity toothpaste where I imagine a person with sensitive teeth could tell if the toothpaste helped.) If one uses one brand of toothpaste for a year and never gets a cavity, there is generally no way to know if it was that toothpaste which prevented, or if any brand would have done.… Read More
An evening alarm clock for undisciplined insomniacs
sourceA trivial Facebook bot which wishes a users friends happy birthday on their birthdays.
sourceA Common Lisp command line parser.
source downloadAn tool for finding nearby Catholic masses and sacraments.
Some extensions to eh cl-fad pathname library.
sourceA simple command line client for swank. This client is written in Clojure and targets Clojure Swank specifically.
source