The Lazy Blogger
Getting your Debian Jessie System Ready for .NET work
2015-9-13
As a followup to my last post I thought I would continue with my 'learnings' on how to go about using Linux. It hasn't been all sunshine and bunny rabbits. I've had multiple crashes and one was so bad I had to re-do the entire OS installation again. I have a nagging feeling it had something to with me trying to install developer dependencies over a dodgy wifi network on the train ;-), I shall not try that one again to confirm. There were a couple of secondary crashes that were pretty bad too. I am close to concluding that's because my laptop's heating system is botched and I really need to take it apart and reapply the cement for better heat dissipation. Second suspect is the Broadcom wireless driver. Also the 'close lid' behaviour is a little odd as it doesn't seem to go into 'deep sleep'. It only shuts the apple logo off but its still working along silently. One day I put the laptop in the bag and took it to office, only to realize that it has somehow 'awakened' in the bag the my laptop bag was as warm as a heating pad. Now, I manually set it off to sleep before I close the lid (a little Windows XP ish, I know). I shall continue my 'investigation' and report back on progress. I am sure it's my setup somehow. Moving on, today we'll see what it takes to setup .NET on Linux (aka Mono). Before that I realized I didn't have wireless drivers. So we'll start with Wireless Driver installation.
Dual Booting LINUX (Debian Jessie) and OSX (Yosemite)
2015-9-10
Back in my college days (aka... once upon a time, very long time ago) Linux installation used to conjure up pictures of geeks sitting amidst a forest of cables, wires and exposed h/w parts, peering into consoles with green text (been there, done that). Well, if you still think the same, you are in for a surprise with any of the contemporary Linux distributions today. They are just as neat, efficient and functional as any of the commercial OS vendors (snicker snicker 
). Today I am going to try and document what I did to get Debian Jessie on my MBP alongside OSX.
Controlling Relays from the web using a Pi, OWIN, Mono and SignalR
2015-4-7
In my previous article I built a C# library to communicate with the GPIO ports of the Raspberry Pi 2 (and Raspberry Pi B+). We also built a small console application to trigger the ports. While the console application was a nice proof of concept, the real fun is when you are able to flip switches from remote locations (when not at home, over phone etc. etc.) As a first attempt at this I built a OWIN based self hosting web site that communicates with the Pi over HTTP using SignalR.
Getting started with Internet of things using a Raspberry Pi 2 and Mono
2015-3-22
Some of you may have spotted my previous experiments with the $35 wonder computer that's the Raspberry Pi. I have since then added two more Raspberry Pies to my collection. One goes into the amazeballs Diddyborg (by @Pi_Borg) and the other one is a the latest and greatest Raspberry Pi 2 bought on the day of launch in early February.
Part 7: Sharing Data in Knockout Components (2/2) - Events and Messages
2015-3-3
In my previous articles I've shown how to build KO components that start off with a data source of their own and are pretty self contained with respect to interactions with the rest of the page. But, in the first part of this article we built a tree control that's I am planning to use as an Index page. So an action like 'Clicking' a link needs to affect another part of the application/web page.
Part 7: Sharing data in Knockout Components (1/2) - Building a Tree Component
2014-12-24
Continuing my account of using KO Components and the building of the Silkthread SPA, today I am going to build another component - a Tree view component.
Part 6: Custom Components - Tabs
2014-9-25
In Part 4 we have seen how to use History.JS along with Crossroads.js to achieve proper client side routing and maintain browser state for proper back button navigation. However, SPAs often have complex page states for example a page with tabbed data or grid data with a particular filter.
Part 4: SPA with KO Components-PushState and History JS
2014-8-19
In the previous three parts we have seen: