Naming things is hard. It's often called one of the two hardest problems in Computer Science, because it can be difficult to find a name for something (a variable, a function, or even a full project) that concisely conveys the meaning of the thing while not being ambiguous or open to misinterpretation.
In fact, when it comes to projects and products, a good name is critical: if the name is yawn-worthy, the product could be doomed from the start.
Occasionally at work I'm presented with a bug that's a bit of a stumper. The kind of bug that defies rational explanation, that you can only solve by exploring far more deeply into the guts of your tech stack than you would like to.
This is the story of one such bug.
Fiverr® is a service that connects people who can do things to people who need things done, usually cheaply. After toying with the idea of outsourcing some parts of my hobby projects, I found Fiverr®'s US$5 starting point just low enough for me to want to try it out.
I've had a Raspberry Pi for some time, and I'm still wondering what I should do with it. Occasionally I have an idea and I go to start it up and ... realize I've forgotten the password.
Oops.
Well, this blog post isn't about that, but I'll mention a fix at the end just for my own reference, along with some links to a Raspberry Pi starter kit & camera modules.
What I need is for a freshly-booted, headless, keyboardless Raspberry Pi to somehow tell me its IP address.
This microproject took me about an hour to complete, including recovering the password. The idea stems from the fact that when I connect the Pi to a network that dispenses IP addresses using DHCP, I can't guess what address it'll get. Sure, on networks I control, I can pin the MAC Address of the Pi to a specific IP - but I don't always control the network.
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