We like dogs too!
Apr 272013
Jan 082013
It’s not often I post up about something about my professional career. I think that most of my readers get their business/professional/industry news from other outlets, and there’s not generally much for me to say on a topic that’s been covered my the mainstream media. Knowing this, I tend to post up those things which appeal to my readers: personal projects, hacks, games, cool software tricks, hardware builds, etc. There are some times, however, where I do think it’s OK to put on my work hat for a while and post up something about how things are going for me in the professional software industry.
Today, things are going rather well. Rhapsody + Ford Sync was launched today to much fanfare at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES). After many months my NDA is lifted and I can finally publicly talk about one of my secret projects! Everyone who has Rhapsody on their Android device can get into a Sync enabled Ford car and use this functionality today, functionality which I implemented myself last fall! If you saw the live announcement today they actually praise Rhapsody’s Android + Ford Sync development team. That’s not to say this work was done in a vacuum, oh no! I’m backed up by a tremendous team of folks from business, QA, design, product development, and marketing (not to mention a terrific iOS developer) who make my job all too easy sometimes. It certainly puts a smile on my face to see another successful product launch.
News reports have been coming in all day:
Bloomberg
Hot Hardware (apparently Bloomberg leaked the news first)
Ford’s official announcement page
The Verge
Pocket-Lint mentions us 1st
Auto News (via Bloomberg)
Automotive World
Slash Gear
The New York Times
Motor Authority
Motor Trend
Cnet
And many, many more!
Dec 242012
As programmers, we’re almost universally guilty of it: Boring Readme.md files that nobody wants to read. Why then, shouldn’t we spice up our Readme.md files with some pizzazz? A source tree visualization is easy to add to a Readme.md using GitHub markup, and there’s an open source project which makes the visualization of the tree itself a breeze. While it never found a market as a product, Source Tree Visualizer (STV) has found a new life since being open sourced last spring. Below, I’ll show you how to add STV to your build process and display the most current version in your README.md file.
Here’s what the Readme.md for “The Grind” looks like:
While you read through the tutorial below, I’ll be working on sloooowly converting my ~90 GitHub projects’ README files over to this method as well.
And here’s a graph of a dinosaur, my favorite QuickGrapher promotional graph:
Nov 262012
This is the second in an article series about Android development, open source software, audio production, and so much more. You can read part 1 here.
Preface – A New Game!
Using the Hardware at Hand
Capture List, Gotta Capt’ em All!
Fun with Audio Capture
Editing your Audio – Audacity
Removing Ambient Noise with Audacity
Recording a Title Theme with Audacity
When I wrote the first article in this series, I never thought It would take me where it has. I’ve been all over town recording audio samples on my little boom mic, learned quite a bit about basic audio and recording techniques, and received a ton of excellent feedback from friends and strangers alike. My original intention was simply to update all of my previous Android apps to use my new audio library, but the sparks of creativity cannot be contained. I am therefore starting work on a new minigame collection titled ’5 seconds’. It will; of course, be fully open source. Expect cameos from all of my previous game characters and a good dose of fun. You can also expect site updates describing the game development process and how ’5 Seconds’ is evolving. You can checkout the GitHub page for it here.
Oct 082012
When I go to start working on a new hack, the issue of how to enclose it is always a tricky one. Building an enclosure from scratch can be extremely time consuming (if done well). Retrofitting an old enclosure can shave hours off of a build, and allow for more rapid prototyping. As I’ve been on a console hacking kick lately, I decided to open up the closet and see what grand old systems I could pull out and improve upon. This time it was the Sega Dreamcast which caught my eye and set my mind wandering about in a myriad of directions.
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You see, there are a number of features of the Dreamcast that make it particularly appealing to a console hacker. It’s power supply is built-in, so there’s no ‘brick’ to deal with. It offers gorgeous VGA-out on most games out of the box, and there are boot disks which force VGA-out on games which didn’t offer this functionality. You could burn programs or Linux to disk to run without a mod chip install. Let’s not forget about the DC homebrew and emulation scene (still going strong all these years later), filled with programs to try out. And it’s tough. You can drop it a few times without much damage. Trust me, I’m clumsy and I drop just about everything I’m working on a few dozen times. Combined with an old 19″ widescreen 1440×900 resultion monitor I had in the closet, I had the beginnings of a cool hack.
Still, that ever-present question arose. What to encase it in? I decided to ride over to the local thrift shop and peruse the aisles. Nothing great came from the furniture section, but something caught my eye in the electronics area. Encased there among the mile-high stack of dead and antiquated printers was an old epson multi-function printer/scan/fix. Something about it called to me, and it’s huge bulky frame almost guaranteed that no-one would purchase it, even for the 4$ price it was being offered at. I purchased it, and began the process of disassembly.
Read on for the full story and more photos. Continue reading »
Oct 042012
As many of you know, I’m something of a gamer. My (sometimes many-years old now) articles on minor gaming hacks remain popular today, and I still respond to comments and questions from other hackers following along. After years of waiting, the English port of La-Mulana was finally released on WiiWare. I rushed out to purchase it, and realized that I hadn’t turned on my Wii in a long, LONG time. Upon testing, it turns out my Wii’s DVD drive finally died (after 5+ years of duty), and I was beginning to notice how much time it took to cart the Wii around to various rooms of the house. Besides all that it just seemed a waste to leave the Wii motherboard in that ugly white shell, strapped to a broken DVD drive for the remainder of its life.
So I decided to make a hack of it. I transferred all of my Wii Disc games onto a WBFS formatted hard drive, soft-modded my Wii using the SD card slot, and began construction on my ‘Wii in a treasure box’. Read on for all the details and a ton of photos.
Mar 202012
A helpful reader (thanks Remo!) suggested I update the sign language fingering Javascript project to display the fingerings on screen without a timeout. It sounded like a good idea, and I thought it would be a synergistic addition as I’ve been wanting to do some dynamically created impress.JS presentations. So, I’ve gone ahead and implemented dynamic impress.JS presentations in asl.JS. As you’ve probably seen from my interactive resume (or its source code), impress.JS is an open source Javascript library that allows you to create 3d presentations and slide shows in HTML5.
You can see it in action live on my website at http://hunterdavis.com/asljs/, or view the source at its github page here. With this update asl.JS is fast becoming a modern, and hopefully useful web tool. Everything still runs on the client in Javascript, and no personal data or strings are ever sent to the server (I don’t even run analytics on the page). I have quite a few useful features and improvements I’d like to get in there eventually, and I hope that others will find the code useful in their own work. Incidentally, this has all grown from a project that was essentially a code doodle from a bored hacker. It just goes to show that even the smallest of contributions to open source can increase in value exponentially over time. You never know what others will find useful, so get out there and share!
Mar 132012
So I was updating my 3d impress.JS resume, and I thought I’d put some QuickGrapher graphs in there. Turns out it’s easy as pie to embed QuickGrapher graphs in an impress.JS presentation, and the results are pretty neat.
A still photo, for those of you just skimming.
Jan 312012
I was relaxing after a hard day at work today, and thought it may be fun to throw up a little reminder of where hunterdavis.com came from and how far it’s come. In glorious GIF format 
*Update! It gets better. My ancient pre-hunterdavis.com website from 2001 is still available on the wayback machine! I’ve posted all my rants from 2001 below the break.
Dec 302011
Apolgoies for the site hiccups everyone, I’ve almost got it all straightened out. I’ve switched from godaddy hosting and domain registration to BlueHost. See my previous post for more on that, and stay tuned for even more site updates!