I’ve been working on a project where I wanted to embed an SFML drawing context in a wxWidgets window. I wanted to be able to write a GUI application, but didn’t want to have all of the UI be embedded within the SFML window using something like imgui. I thought it could be useful to others to have a simple example of how to do the same thing. Simple Example version I took the code from the SFML 1.

I’ve been away from blogging for a few months and haven’t had much time for personal projects either. I recently moved from Vienna back to the US, now living in Denver. So far I’m loving it; it’s nice to come back after a number of years abroad, even if I will miss many parts of life in Europe. Getting into Electronics I’ve recently gotten into electronics more deeply than I’ve had a chance to do before.

I love learning languages and I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Japanese. I didn’t start out being good at learning languages. In fact I was pretty terrible. I’m not a polyglot or anything, but you tend to hear that same sentiment from most people online that have learned a second langage later in life. For instance, I took four years of Spanish in high-school but could still barely order a taco and a drink when push came to shove.

I finally got around to setting up HTTPS with a free TLS certificate for the blog. As I’ve mentioned before I mostly use Windows as my daily driver and love using WSL for a native bash/linux experience. Of course this isn’t flawless and sometimes this rears its ugly head. In particular Let’s Encrypts’ tool letsencrypt-auto won’t work under WSL. It seems to be due to a python package trying to execute code on the stack, which is a security vulnerability that WSL disallows, according to this github issue.

While working on a Xamarin.Forms based project I ran into the issue of wanting to have multiple builds of my android app differentiated by the build configuration. For instance, I want my normal build to point to the production server, but when I’m developing locally I want a different app that points to my local dev backend. I still want to be able to use the current production app and have a development version installed at the same time.

Just a quick note this time. While working on my Phoenix 1.3 based project, I had a route that was failing and gave me an error about the fallback controller not having a matching clause. Similar to (formatted excerpt): ** (exit) an exception was raised: ** (FunctionClauseError) no function clause matching in MyProj.Web.FallbackController.call/2 My route looked to be setup correctly and I couldn’t figure out why I was hitting the fallback controller at all.

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of elixir and phoenix programming while working on some hobby projects. I’m using a phoenix app as my backend server, serving up an API that is consumed by Xamarin.Forms based apps on Android and iOS. On Windows I’ve been using Git Bash (based on MinGW) for a bash shell for a long time and there the interactive elixir shell has had some downsides. In particular, I wasn’t able to get command history with iex working and color output was missing as well.

A few years ago I was inspired to hack around on some of my old favorite NES games after watching the video from Double Fine where the developer Brandon Dillon hacks around on the original Legend of Zelda. You can watch the video here. I decided I wanted to hack Final Fantasy 1, one of my favorite games growing up, that I put in more than 100 hours playing. I used fceux as my NES emulator, same as in the video and followed mostly the same patterns.

This was my first time setting up a blog on GitLab and it was a very easy process. I’m using Hugo and there are some straight-forward instructions for creating a bare-bones site and deploying it to a project: Hosting Hugo on GitLab I did run into one problem though that I wanted to share with the inter-tubes. When I first pushed my one-post-blog project to test, I wasn’t able to see anything and I just got back the GitLab 404 page.

Welcome to my tech blog. My name is Jeff DeWall and I’m a software engineer who grew up in California and then moved out to Vienna, Austria for fun and adventure with my wife. I’ve mostly worked as an embedded software engineer on custom platforms and lately on Android and iOS devices. Professionally I’ve worked mostly with C# and C++ with a handful of Python, Java and Objective-C thrown in for good measure.