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VR is in a Weird Place Right Now

Context

I wrote this a bit ago as part of a conversation with a friend about VR in general. Reading it again, I thought others might be interested.

To be clear, this is my opinion. In particular, there are other players in the high-end PCVR space than Pimax. I just know more about them because I use their product. The story with their competitors (like Varjo, for instance) is similar.

Apple nailed the hardware side of things. The software is a small subset of what it needs to be - but, to be fair, that's the Apple way. The things it does it does very well.

Pimax got the tech side of the hardware right, but the design aspect isn't great. It's unwieldy. The software side is a garbage fire. It works great for what I use it for, but that's powered either by F/OSS utilities, or by Steam (via SteamVR).

Meta missed the mark in both areas IMO. Both their hardware and software are "good enough". The hardware is cheap enough to be accessible, through compromises and subsidization. The OS is adequate but not great. The software ecosystem is thriving, because of the market penetration.

Resetting and Replacing my Apple Vision Pro

I recently had an issue with my Apple Vision Pro; the one that I received from my initial order had a single "hot" pixel on the left screen.

Based on the behavior I saw and iFixit's excellent Apple Vision pro teardown report, I believe that there was a single pixel group where the red element was incapable of emitting anything less than full brightness while the green and blue elements were incapable of emitting light at all. In other words - rgb(0, 0, 0) rendered correctly, with no light being emitted, but if the value for the red channel was anything greater than 0, it rendered at full brightness. rgb(128, 128, 128) should render as 50% gray. On my device, that pixel rendered as rgb(255, 0, 0).

I scheduled an appointment at the Genius Bar at my local Apple Store. Unfortunately, "local" in my case is a two and a half hour drive away, so I wanted to make sure everything was in place to take care of it in a single trip. I called ahead to ensure that they had a Vision Pro with the same specifications in stock.

At the Apple Store, the Genius that I worked with was excellent. He mentioned that this was the first time he'd had a chance to work with the Vision Pro in a support setting, so I went into the experience expecting some hiccups along the way. I wasn't disappointed!

  • in Career
  • 1 min read

Renewal

Yes, it's "one of those posts".

I'm bringing my blog back to life - or at least, that's my intention. I'm subject to procrastination as much as anyone else, so there's a fair chance that I'll get it up and running again, then promptly forget about it. It happens.

  • in Software
  • 3 min read

OpenSCAD Import System: A Proposal

Having recently acquired a 3D printer, I've been diving in to 3D modeling. While Fusion 360 seems to be the leader in that area generally, I've fallen for OpenSCAD. I appreciate its use of code as the primary (read "only") design environment because it mirrors the way I tend to think about problems. This has the added benefits of making parametrized models being a core feature instead of an afterthought, and readable diffs for files under version control with git.

Over the past few days I've been working hard at reaching competency with OpenSCAD and have come to the point where I feel like I'm able to offer an informed perspective on some of its strengths and limitations. The biggest "rough edge" I've run into thus far is dealing with imports.

  • in Software
  • 1 min read

Ruby's Inequality Operators

My annoyance of the day in Ruby: inconsistent usage of the inequality operator in the standard library.

The generic inequality operator in Ruby throws an exception when objects of differing types are compared. This, in my opinion, is a good thing. I don't want to accidentally attempt to compare an integer and a class, for instance.

1 < Class
## ArgumentError: comparison of Fixnum with Class failed

This makes sense!

Today, I discovered that the inequality operators are overridden for classes and modules to allow for checking inheritance:

  • in Software
  • 2 min read

Testing for the existence of a Flask request context

I just finished reviewing a pull request that contained an extraneous statement inside a try block.

Here's the code in question:

try:
    if signature not in g._celery_tasks:
        g._celery_tasks.append(signature)
except RuntimeError:
    signature()

While this code works fine, the RuntimeError being caught is expected to be raised when g._celery_tasks is accessed. Because g is a werkzeug.LocalProxy object, the exception is raised if there is no active request context. My concern was that if the next line raised a RuntimeError, it would also be caught. As this is not the intent of this handler catching such an error would be unexpected behavior.

Reproducible Python Environments

I've spent the last couple of days looking at conda, a Python environment manager built by Continuum. In their own words, conda is "git branching for site-packages, combined with yum for Python packages." As I understand the project, it's actually quite a bit more than that.

  • in Software
  • 1 min read

Git Has Annoyed Me

I love git. Seriously, it's changed my life - before I used git, I was using Microsoft's Visual SourceSafe. Those were dark days indeed.

Git is probably the most well-though-out and consistent tool I've ever used. Innumerable developers around the world use it, from Linus hacking on the Linux kernel to a guy on Github submitting his first pull request. It's mature.

When you reach so close to perfection, the smallest issue seems much larger than it is. I think that's why this bothers me.

  • in Politics
  • 6 min read

The Security of a Free State

The tragedy that occurred at Sandy Hook is still fresh in the minds of parents around the country, and rightfully so. A classroom full of Kindergarteners was gunned down by a deranged, psychopathic killer in the days before Christmas.

Within this great tragedy lies a smaller, more personal one for me. On the day of the massacre, I was busy at work and didn't hear until the afternoon. My first response should have been sadness and sympathy - and indeed, I felt those emotions. Tempering them, though, was an anger at those in the political sphere who I knew would use the deaths of two dozen innocents as an opportunity to lessen my own ability to protect my family.

The Future of Python is in the Past

This post is in response to Calvin Spealman's I Am Worried About the Future of Python.

First, I believe that Calvin's concern is a legitimate one. Python has grown into one of the premier languages in the Open Source communnity - and for good reason. Python is designed from the ground up to support object- oriented development, and the conventions and syntax strongly encourage clean, readable code. It also has an excellent developer community, which is both supportive and uniformly knowledgable.