Nathan's Notepad


Field notes from a software developer

Icon Themes

One of the most confusing aspects of packaging applications on Linux continues to be icon themes. Despite the simplicity of the original concept, getting your application’s icon to display correctly in a broad range of desktop environments continues to challenge even the best of programmers.


Building Packages in Raspbian with sbuild

Getting sbuild up and running in Raspbian can be a tricky process. This article will describe the process from start to finish.


Benchmarking Brotli

Brotli is a new compression algorithm being introduced by Google. It’s gaining traction very quickly - there’s an IETF draft proposal for the data format. There are even plans to include Brotli as an accepted Content-Encoding in Firefox 44:


Non-blocking Channels in Go

One of the latest projects I’ve been working on is a simple SMTP client written in Go. I’ve really enjoyed developing applications in Go since it provides concurrency primitives out-of-the-box. In this article, I’m going to describe a technique for sending any number of values on a channel without having the send block.


BuildBot in Docker on a Raspberry Pi 2

In a previous article, I took a look at setting up a BuildBot slave on Windows. Today, I’m going to describe the process of creating a BuildBot slave for a Raspberry Pi 2. The easiest way to do this is by setting up the BuildBot slave as a Docker container.