Home on Keith Ott: The Site

New Windows Game: Green Tea Reversi

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0600

Continuing my releases of command-line board games, I’ve released an initial version of Green Tea Reversi. Green Tea Reversi is a command-line reversi program for Windows (or any platform that runs .NET 8) that supports human and AI players.

New Windows Game: Soda Chess

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:15:00 -0600

I’ve released the initial version of Soda Chess. Soda Chess is a command-line chess program for Windows (and any platform that runs .NET) that supports all rules and any combination of human and AI players.

New Web App: External Battery Backup

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 00:11:00 -0600

I’ve released my latest web app, External Battery Backup. It allows you to save passwords and high scores for retro video games.

Space Invaders: A Super Nintendo Game Hidden in a Game Boy Cartridge!

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 00:00:00 -0600

I’ve recently been building up my physical Game Boy library, and I was surprised to learn that the Game Boy game Space Invaders includes a full Super Nintendo game hidden inside that can be unlocked with the Super Game Boy! But how does this work?!

Testing Stable Diffusion

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 16:39:26 -0600

I decided to investigate Stable Diffusion. Stable Diffusion is an AI model that takes text input and turns it into an image. You’ve probably seen it in the news; John Oliver even had an episode about it.

It turns out it’s incredibly easy to install on a Windows PC with this installer: https://stable-diffusion-ui.github.io/ Just run the installer and it’ll download all the dependencies, the model, and launch a web UI for you to work with.

New Game in Progress: Tic-Tac-Toe

Sun, 30 Aug 2020 12:00:00 -0500

It’s been a bit since I updated this blog, so I figured I’d post about my new in-progress project, Tic Tac Toe.

New Web App: Simple Stock Ticker

Sun, 24 May 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Simple Stock Ticker is a React-based web app that calls a .NET Core Web API, which ultimately pulls data from an open API. It allows you to see the latest price of a stock and some basic information about a company. Download the source code or view the demo here.

I Tried Google Stadia

Sun, 12 Apr 2020 10:30:00 -0500

Google Stadia is offering a two month free trial of their Pro service, so I decided to give it a spin. For what’s sold as a hardcode gaming platform, in reality it’s a half baked solution in search of a problem.

How to Move a Window that's Off your Windows Desktop

Tue, 17 Mar 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Microsoft Windows has had a weird bug for years; sometimes, when you remote into a computer or unplug a monitor, one of your windows will get hidden off the screen and you’ll be unable to resize or move it. Here’s a simple trick I’ve been using for years to get those hidden windows back onto my desktop.

New Game: High Low for the Commodore 64

Sat, 28 Dec 2019 11:00:00 -0500

I’ve been reading Ready Player One lately, and it inspired me to dust off some old Commodore 64 programming knowledge. I decided to port High Low to the Commodore 64.

Xbox One Error Messages SUCK! Let's Fix Them!

Sat, 13 Jul 2019 03:45:00 -0500

Recently I went to play a game on my Xbox One, and I was greeted with a rather unfriendly error message. The problem was that the game I was trying to play was part of Microsoft’s Games with Gold program, and my Xbox Live Gold subscription had expired. However, if I didn’t know about the stipulations of the free games available with the Games with Gold program, I would have been thoroughly confused. The archaic error message I received did almost nothing to help me.

Let’s look at everything that’s wrong with this error message, and then let’s redesign it to solve these problems!

NPM Considered Harmless

Sun, 26 May 2019 09:39:26 -0500

Throughout my career, I’ve run into a handful of people that have the opinion that we shouldn’t rely on a package manager, such as NPM or NuGet. The arguments fall into three main categories: concerns over security, concerns over the long-term availability of package manager services, and concerns over it being easier to manage dependencies yourself.

If you have any of these opinions, let me be the first to tell you it’s okay to rely on package managers such as NPM or NuGet. And there’s a variety of reasons why.

Bill Split and Tip Updated

Sun, 19 May 2019 11:54:23 -0500

Google recently informed me that they’re going to be pulling some of my Android apps from the Google Play Store, because they’re built on some really old versions of Cordova that have security flaws. For Bill Split and Tip, I figured this was a great opportunity to not just upgrade, but to re-platform it on Angular 7 and release it as a Progress Web App (PWA).

Blazor: First Look and Impressions

Sat, 11 May 2019 20:17:41 -0500

I keep hearing more and more about Web Assembly, and since I’m primarily a .NET developer, I figured it was time to play around with Blazor. I recently went through Microsoft’s Build your first Blazor app tutorial, and here are my initial thoughts and reflections on it.

Staying Cool When Firefighting Production Outages

Sat, 27 Apr 2019 09:57:24 -0500

I work for a large, international company on one of their main e-commerce websites. This past week, the company had a substantial product launch (one even the CEO was heavily involved in), and the website I work on released some few features along side it. And all the new website features went live without any issue.

…okay, obviously not. There were some serious launch issues, and I took point on fixing most of them. It was a full, non-stop day of updates to nervous managers, researching, fixing code, testing, and releasing, but by the end of the work day we had the issues fixed. I did a lot of things that day, but one thing I didn’t do was panic.

Real Properties With Moq

Fri, 19 Apr 2019 12:04:25 -0500

I was recently using the C# Moq mocking library, and I needed to not only initialize a property to a value, but I needed the property to be updated by the code.

Software Engineer vs. Computer Programmer

Sat, 30 Mar 2019 10:05:30 -0500

People who write software for a living go by many names: computer programmer, software developer, software engineer, heck, even sometimes the (derogatory) term code monkey. But what’s the difference? One might say it’s a difference in education, or its just semantics and it’s all the same. If we’re specifically talking software engineer versus computer programmer, I believe there is a world of difference.

Don't Copy and Paste from Stack Overflow

Sat, 30 Mar 2019 09:19:56 -0500

I recently saw an post online asking “Why should I hire a software engineer if I can just copy and paste from Stack Overflow?” The answer was “Copy pasting: $1. Knowing what code to copy paste: $100,000/year.”

Disclaimers

Sat, 23 Mar 2019 21:33:33 -0500

Google Play and the Google Play logo are trademarks of Google LLC. The views and opinions expressed on this site are solely those of Keith Ott and do not necessarily represent those held by his employer, family, or friends.

Comment Policy

Sat, 23 Mar 2019 21:33:29 -0500

By posting a comment to this site, you agree to these comment policies. If you do not abide by these rules, your account will be banned and your offending comments will be deleted. Be a Decent Human Sexist, racist, homophobic, misogynist, or broad, generally offensive generalizations about groups of people are not allowed. Also, comments primarily meant to provoke (aka trolling) will not be tolerated. No Spam Comments that primarily promote a product or service will be removed.

Privacy Policy

Sat, 23 Mar 2019 21:33:20 -0500

Effective date: April 1, 2019 Keith Ott (“us”, “we”, or “our”) operates the www.keithott.com website (hereinafter referred to as the “Service”). This page informs you of our policies regarding the collection, use, and disclosure of personal data when you use our Service and the choices you have associated with that data. We use your data to provide and improve the Service. By using the Service, you agree to the collection and use of information in accordance with this policy.

About Keith

Sun, 03 Mar 2019 16:07:13 -0600

My name is Keith Ott; I’m a senior-level software engineer from southeast Wisconsin. In my free time I enjoy playing video games, working on programming side projects, drawing, playing chess, and spending time with my family and friends. Want to get in touch? Drop me an email anytime at ducttape12@yahoo.com.

Bill Split and Tip