In doing research for my podcast every week, I come across a few interesting things. Many of them will affect me in some way, but most I will not use in any appreciable manner (either not being able to, or not interested). I like the stuff that I can use and actually can apply it to something I already do and has a measurable effect. Every so often, I find something like that.

After talking about them for weeks on end on my podcast, I finally decided to bite the bullet and order a Raspberry Pi. After all, one only costs $35 and everyone's talking about it like it's the latest thing from Apple (including myself), so what could be the downside?

So in case you didn't hear my podcast, I open sourced this blog on GitHub. I have taken my own advice to heart, and did not (or at least, tried not) to name my classes SomethingManager, and I hash my passwords without using MD5 or SHA-whatever. I had a few small libraries that I eventually merged into one (libWebsiteTools), and one other which I'm still sorta working on (libOdyssey) which is a sort of web analytics thing.

I had a desire a long time ago: I wanted to back up playlists from my Winamp music library. So I wrote a small Python script to back things up. It seems like that's the only remotely popular 'hit' on my blog, if I'm reading my analytics right.

Soon after I learned how to program back in 2003 or so, I wanted to program 3D stuff, just because I thought it was cool. Unfortunately, the Python wrapper to OpenGL sucked. Majorly. I could manage, but I had to do without whizzbang features like shaders, framebuffers, and HDR. At least I was happy texturing things and using shadow mapping. I even wrote the article on it.

I have been playing around with my design lately, and want to share some of the cool things that I've done.

NOTE: This has been updated. Please see here. This post remains for historical and reference purposes only.