June 2007 Entries

So I went down to the apple store (it was swamped with people) and tried out the iphone. As always, apple's user interface was nice, very nice. The phone itself is small too. It is longer than my blackjack but thinner. Scratching the screen is damn near impossible. Typing on it isn't that bad also.

BUT the phone isn't perfect. The UI is a bit easy to get sluggish. The edge network is slow. The accelorometer didn't fire correctly all the time when I attempted to shift the position of the phone.

What I do like is I the idea of everything in one. MP3 player plus phone. 1 item in my pocket instead of 2.

It being AT&T I could care less since I'm already using that network.

Long story short, I didn't buy one, I was impressed but eh. Plus they didn't have the 8 gig versions. If they had a 3G network version, i'd buy that almost in a heart beat.

While I hate powerpoint, I have to say PPT 2007 is pretty sweet ... for PowerPoint

I'm about half way done with the PowerPoint and I think I'll be closing in right on the time limit I'm suppose to hit. I have a few secret weapons I'm actually rather proud of.

I still need to create some cheat sheets for the programs, namely the orb. The twitter example is pretty straight forward due to an API wrapper.

But my all time favorite is how I came up with the outline, I seriously did it on the train into work today on a few of my business cards.

I think this weekend I'm going to attempt to grab people to review the entire thing. I'll hook my laptop up to my TV to act as a projector. What is scary when I stop to think about it is, I don't think I've actually ever had to practice or study. Normally I fly by the seat of my pants but this is actually something I want to be rock solid and not have me freezing or having problems during the middle. Hell, I didn't even practice for Maker Faire. I went, fixed the problems as they came, and did pretty well. Then again, I was too busy getting the projects finished to worry about how to talk to people about the projects.

Do ASP.Net example with the ambient orb. This works pretty well too.

I'll keep the twitter example as a WinForm application.


protected void changeOrb(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
SerialPort com = new SerialPort("COM4", 19200, Parity.None, 8, StopBits.One);
com.Open();

writeBuffer("~D", com);
writeBuffer(convertIntToChar(red.Value), com);
writeBuffer(convertIntToChar(green.Value), com);
writeBuffer(convertIntToChar(blue.Value), com);

com.Close();
}

private static char convertIntToChar(string value)
{
return (char) Convert.ToInt16(value);
}

private static void writeBuffer(char buffer, SerialPort com)
{
writeBuffer(buffer.ToString(), com);
}

private static void writeBuffer(string buffer, SerialPort com)
{
com.Write(buffer);
}

I live on the other side of that 4 lane road river

Even with stupidity (driving through a river), people with big cars help.

While I feel bad for those drivers that got stuck, it was funny watching them flood their engine. And then the Chicago police over their loud speaker asking "Are you ok?" followed by "why did you think that was a good idea?"

using 3 sliders and a picture box, super simple. Have to say though I forgot I could cast an int directly into a char and make that an ASCII value.


protected override void OnClosing(CancelEventArgs e)
{
if (serialPort.IsOpen)
serialPort.Close();

base.OnClosing(e);
}

private readonly double multOffset = (255/176);
private void changeColor(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if (!serialPort.IsOpen)
{
serialPort.PortName = "COM4";
serialPort.Open();
}

writeBuffer("~D");
writeBuffer((char)tbRed.Value);
writeBuffer((char)tbGreen.Value);
writeBuffer((char)tbBlue.Value);

int red = Convert.ToInt16(tbRed.Value * multOffset);
int green = Convert.ToInt16(tbGreen.Value * multOffset);
int blue = Convert.ToInt16(tbBlue.Value * multOffset);

pictureBox1.BackColor = Color.FromArgb(red, green, blue);
}

private void writeBuffer(char buffer)
{
writeBuffer(buffer.ToString());
}

private void writeBuffer(string buffer)
{
byte[] bytes = ASCIIEncoding.Default.GetBytes(buffer);
serialPort.Write(bytes, 0, bytes.Length);
}

So looks like I didn't configure outlook right and I'm getting some emails in and none out.

Looks like it was just a simple config issues. I still think the spam box is too agressive. I sent myself a link from work to post on C4F and never got it. Disabled that mofo and BAM, I'm back in business. Email was as simple as saying "Use Authorization" but still wish I would have gotten a bounced email.

I'm going to make the ASP.Net application be the twitter application. While the application is so simple it seems pointless to have a webapp do what twitter already does, I think it is a bit nicer. Maybe I'll make it into Vista Gadget.

Not sure what I'm going to make the WinForm application. The Orb app will be a WinForm app so I guess that does count.

I'll figure something out, I'm smart, right? Anyone? Guys?

So I got my new computer 95% up and running.

95% since 1 of the sticks of RAM is bad and needs to be RMA'ed.

With that said, I am the proud father of a 2.4 Core 2 Quad, 4 Gig of Ram (currently 2 Gig), 150 Gig 10,000 RPM primary, 500 Gig 7,200 secondary all running Windows Vista. The graphic card is a GeForce 8600GTS.

I have an Antec P182 Gun Metal Black case and it is SWEET! It took a bit to get everything correctly put in but it went from crap to perfect. I thought a long time ago when I did my 1st computer I did a good job wiring but with modular PSU's, SATA hard drives, and finally having room behind the case to run wires, there is actually very little to see.

I finally think my laptops (T42 and now my MacBook Pro) have been pushed aside for development. I'll post a pic of it sprawled out and finalized shortly.

So I have to give a 30 minute presentation with powerpoint in a bit all about the wonders of .Net and Visual Studio. So I decided, instead of talking about it, show it.

I'm going to do in real time a WinForm application showing off Twitter, an example with my Ambient Orb, and an example of ASP.Net. I'm thinking maybe I'll do a webservice call with the ASP.Net example.

Other hit points I should do are

So I just had to prep my new computer and get vista and other applications installed. And the first attempt at installing pretty much failed. Expanding files was slow as hell and it eventually bluescreen'ed.

Why did this happen? Took me a long while to figure it out. I thought it was a configuration issue with the motherboard. Nope. Something was installed wrong. Nope. Bad DVD Drive? Nope.

It actually was the USB mouse I was using. A super old school Microsoft intellimouse explorer 3.0 was causing it to install super slow.

How did I figure this out? I attempted to install Vista 64-bit edition and it installed fast but I noticed the mouse wasn't working on it. The mouse didn't have the red LED on. I yanked the mouse out rebooted in Vista 32-bit edition and bam, installed correctly.

Due to helping out coding 4 fun, I've found some really awesome blogs out there.

Two of which I think any programmer should read. Jeff Atwood and Scott Hanselman talk about some very interesting and often complex subjects. Scott currently has an article about the "right" number of assemblies in your project. Working at SpringCM and our solution, I know exactly what he is talking about. Jeff talks about 36 mistakes in a rapid development environment.

I actually spec'ed my new computer off the design Jeff came up with for Scott too.

Resharper just released version 3.0.

If you're a .Net developer and you haven't used this tool, you should hate yourself. It does precompiling, syntax look ups, and tons more.

Core 2 Quad, 4 gigs of ram, 10,000 RPM primary HD, Vista Ultimate, mmmmm.

I got in 95% of the parts for my new computer but am lacking a major part, the case. So do I just build it in my old case, built it with no case as a temp measure, OR wait. Waiting until monday is painful.

So I just switched from POP3 to IMAP for fetching my email. IMAP and POP3 are ways to fetch your email, google / wikipedia for more information. I used POP3 semi like IMAP since I never deleted my messages off the server unless I deleted them from my inbox. The dead hard drive is the primary reason why I did this.

However, I wasn't aware what IMAP was until a coworkered clued me in that IMAP is treats your inbox like an Exchange Server minus the rules. If you look what I did with POP3, it was very much like this but without folder management.

However, I didn't know how to handle the deleted files since outlook just had a line through them. That is wonderful but I want them deleted and out of my inbox, not remaining in my inbox.

Google comes to the rescue and I found this link on where the command is in outlook to delete messages from outlook.

Suprise suprise, my desktop finally died. My new desktop's parts should be here Friday or Monday. So how am I going to get the data from my IDE drives now that my new desktop will be SATA?

Same trick I used with my laptop ... use a hard drive enclosure. With that said, asking for an enclosure at Best Buy is just painful. Instead of pointing me to the single IDE enclosure they had, he kept telling me to get a 750gig external HD. While I still nabbed an external HD on top of the enclosure, still, lets chill out on the upselling and tell me where I want is.

I knew this day was coming. First the computer was slower, now it is down right unusable.

On the upside, I just ordered all my computer parts for my new rig today. Thanks Jeff Atwood for the help on parts.

More and more in life I've been trying to find easier ways of doing stuff.

When I launched peace love code, I did the styling myself and suprise, suprise, it failed to render correctly in the one browser I failed to check.

So Ian showed me the cool tool that Yahoo has. Their YUI Grid builder is rather one of the best things ever. It seriously ranks up there with fine things like wireless controllers. The tool itself doesn't work too well with IE 6 but seriously, easiest way to do DIV based tables.

With a quick update to the PLC code, I was quickly running the new grid layout.

stayed up and watched it and didn't make the cut. Unless it will be on during one of those 5 second clips right before they go to commercial (doubtful), I'm going to sleep, where most of america is.

a monorail for dogs? seriously, I can't beat that.

God help us, I'll be on national television.

Looks like I'll be on it tomorrow Wednesday June 13th, 2007 showing off the bartender at Maker Faire.

So I finally got around to launching Peace Love Code.

What is Peace Love Code? It is my personal code section. Better Than Everyone is a blog, not a code area. Code on this site tends to get lost with my constant blathering about the random thing I found on the internet or what random thing I'm doing at that current point in time. With that said, right now there are 3 items on there. There are a few more applications that I will launch on it including Drunktender.

One of thos applications is new. It is a solution cleanup application. It allows me to strip out the SVN, resharper, and other files that shouldn't be given.

Why hasn't Drunktender's source been released yet? This is Peace love code is one of the reasons, source cleanup is another (I do more work to do less, love it? I do). Another reason is it had a few bugs in it that made it unreleasable in my opinion.

Ok, I'm not talking about the business style of synergy, actually I'm talking about one of the neatest utilitiarian app's I've seen in a while. Ian Hall has this going for his work computer and the MacBook Pro he has.

Synergy is an app that lets you share 1 mouse and keyboard between multiple computers. It is like a KVM but software based and doesn't require a keystroke to do switching. Best way I can discribe it is having multiple monitor setup. The mouse just enters the other screen. It doesn't care about OS.

First thing when I get home this puppy is getting installed.

Was reading over at MacRumors that a new bootcamp version is released.

Maybe I'll finally be able to have my laptop screen's brightness reduce without crashing.

Vista on a Macbook Pro = awesome if you were wondering.

After a some downtime to think about it, this is what I've come up with for the 2nd version.

New Features

  1. Voice recognition (complete with R2D2 beeping)
  2. Smarter Search (handle misspellings, I call it the C3PO feature)
  3. Put it in a refrigerator (with a darth vader sticker on it)
  4. Touch screen (with jaba ooze)

System improvements

  1. Redo the user interface. It is too light, it needs more contrast (Needs more darkside)
  2. Replace the relay boards (maybe vader's chest?)
  3. Remove the air pumps
  4. Make the system DC instead of AC
  5. Better administration tools
  6. Better drink auditing
  7. Better user auditing
  8. A wiring harness
  9. A terminal block for power
  10. Set up line clearing in areas where it only needs to be
  11. Make clearing the lines a bit easier. This is after I had a stream of rum shoot at me at Maker's Faire.
  12. Dedicated Computer
  13. Make the system waterproof. (don't want the force to shock me )

I think I did 4 hours of personal email then last night. That is scary. Like, really scary. I think I may start writing down where all my time goes. I get home from work and next thing I know it is 12:30am. I think I did 4 hours since I couldn't track down what else I did. I didn't go out, I didn't code anything, I watched TV and I think I just did email. Lots and lots of email.