Finally coming up for air…

Well, contrary to any rumors going around, I’m still alive and well.

My new book from O’Reilly, “Real World Instrumentation with Python,” is just about to hit the presses. It’s in the final review stage now, and after that all that’s left is to hand it to the press operator and warm up the binding machines. At over 575 pages, with 200+ illustrations (all done by yours truly), it’s been a boatload of work, and I really hope that folks find it useful. It should be out in a couple or three weeks, but you can preorder it from either O’Reilly or Amazon.

Writing a book turned out to be a lot more work than I had originally expected, but it’s done now and ready to make its big debut.

Perhaps I’ll find some time to start posting here again on a regular basis.

Something new…

OK, well, I finally did it. I have a blog now. Woohoo.

After years of procrastination and fitfully writing little bits in random Word and text files, I’ve finally decided to put some of it out in the open.

Why “crankycode”? Well, I think that’s just me being honest. I’ve been doing engineering in one form or another for over 30 years. I’ve seen some amazing stuff, both really good, and really bad. I mean really, really bad. Most of my crankiness has to do with software. I think it was the time I’ve spent dealing with the clean logic of digital hardware, the crisp lines of mechanical drawings and the intrinsic beauty of complex PCB layout design that led me to view a lot of the software that I’ve had to look at with with something akin to disdain. Also, knowing that software development really doesn’t have to be a sloppy mess doesn’t make it any easier to bear.

So, I’ll give this blog thingie a spin and see what fun can be had. I would hope that someone might come away with something useful from it, but I’ll make no promises on that score. I tend to be opinionated (with references and footnotes, whenever possible), so I’m sure I’ll piss off a few people along the way as well. So be it.