Who are you?
I’m Bob Somers, a Computer Engineering undergraduate student Computer Science graduate student at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, CA. In my spare time, I enjoy thinking through crazy ideas and working on bizarre side projects that involve code and electronics. I love living in that thin layer of interfacing between bits and logic levels. I also enjoy making pretty pictures with code, which is why I’m doing my Masters thesis and lots of personal work in computer graphics.
What do you blog about?
I like writing about my pet projects, both from a code and electronics perspective, as well as anything interesting and tech-related that grabs my attention.
Why do you do this?
I used to blog more regularly a few years ago. It was mainly a combination of my projects, work, and personal life, which sometimes made for an awfully strange mix. Then, through my own inattention to security updates, my blog was compromised and Google yanked me from their index. Ever since then I’ve wanted to have a place to dump my thoughts and notes, mainly so that they can be recorded in the everlasting index of the web and hopefully turn out to be useful to someone trying to solve a similar problem. If you’re that person, congratulations! I hope it helps! If you’re not… well… thanks for reading anyway. Maybe someday I’ll post something useful for you.
What is a SIGTTOU?
In POSIX-compliant operating systems (not Windows), SIGTTOU is the signal that the operating system sends to a process if it tries to write to the terminal when it’s running in the background. A process is only supposed to write to the terminal if it’s in the foreground. I like to think of my pet projects as my background processes, and this blog is the place where they get to write to the terminal.
What does your avatar stand for?
It’s actually the logo of an upcoming Half-Life 2 multiplayer mod I’m working on in my spare time. It’s relatively hush-hush at the moment, but I’ll be sharing plenty of details in the future.
Where else can I find you?
I’m on all the usual locations on the intertubes. I have a Facebook account, but I generally use that as a catalog of my friends and face-to-face acquaintances, so don’t take it personally if I deny your friend request. You can follow me on Twitter, visit my personal website, or check out what I’m digging. I’m also an avid PC gamer, so you can check out my Steam profile if you’re interested.
Finally, you can send me email to [my first name] at [my full name] dot com. If my name was Joe Smith, you could send it to joe@joesmith.com, but my name is Bob Somers. I write it like that so that those nasty spam bots won’t pester me with all the money I could make from those Nigerian wire-transfer transactions. Hopefully you’re smarter than a spam bot and you can figure out where to send me email.