At my killer new apartment, I started to notice dust on the floor. Now, I could have gotten a broom but the engineer in me wouldn't let that slide. So with the new iRobot roomba's, I decided I should buy one. Its due in next week. Then it is time to start hacking.

So Andy Konkol was going on about an idea he had and it interested me. After having a few beers, I think we may have come up with a neat Maker Faire project. It involves some pretty neat stuff and I think I may attempt to trump him.

It involves color reductions (which I found over at MSDN), and LED signs.

He already has the LED sign code for his sign. I'm attempting to get some off Ebay and I'll create a generic wrapper that will work for whatever the current sign is.

So I did something wrong that I'm not going to talk about really. Directly due to me being stupid (this is a reoccuring theme if you haven't noticed), I'm now running Vista 64-bit Edition on my laptop.

I've jumped in the deep-end even if I didn't want to. I know Scott Hanselman also has and has helped me out greatly by figuring out how to install problematic applications such as iTunes.

Over at Coding4Fun, they hooked into the Coding4Fun API and used the bluetooth module to have your computer lock when you're not there.

How freaking cool is that? Requires .Net 3.5 or Visual Studio 2008 Express (which installs .Net 3.5)

The guys over at Robotics Connection helped me out and custom designed some sweet relay boards for me. Hopefully they'll start selling them pretty soon.

Each board is optically isolated (no feed back), can be either a master or slave (5 of mine are build as slaves), have 8 relays, and as master, can be connected via USB, Bluetooth, XBee, or Serial.

With version 2, I'm actually going to shift dramatically how the bartender works. The overall theme for this release is cost reduction and better parts.

The relay boards are the first step. Now lets rewind slightly and ask, what do the relay boards do? They turn on and off electronic devices, much like a switch. I'm using them to turn on and off my valves.

All 6 of my brand spanking new relay boards

Close up of the master relay board

You can see that you can detach the communication device. Bluetooth could be added on if needed.

I learned a ton from GameFest. I attended the majority of the XNA track and found out a bunch of cool things. Here is just a few of the options

• Since I'm betting you'll be CPU bound, Send anything you humanly can to the GPU.
• Multithread your application.
• You can either multi-thread by distributing all tasks or say "Thread 4 will do physics"
• Think about what types of calls you're doing. Inlines are the fast but not practical all the time.
• There are tons of examples on the creator's club over at http://creators.xna.com

I'll be creating my own game to learn about XNA and i'll post more about it later on.

I'm at XNA Gamefest Monday and Tuesday. You should be too if you like video games.

And I'll be in Chicago for all my peeps there that want to hang on the 20th to 26th.

I'm a FTE or Blue Badge!

Here is what my old job did as a sending away present.

Here is my desk at my new apartment in St. Louis

Here is my apartment with only part of my crap moved in

I need more toys

I, Clint Rutkas, has finally aquired enough skills and knowledge to sell-out. I mean, ummm, ... the fanboy becomes an employee? Yeah, that works, yes ... exactly.

I've accepted a position at Microsoft in the DPE (Developer Platform Evangelism) group as an ADE (Academic Developer Evangelism) and I started today. I'll be stationed out of St. Louis and will be helping our the heartland of America.

So how this happened? No I didn't sell my soul or body (but my body is for sale, any takers ladies?), I just got lucky. I was chatting with some of the ADE's at Maker Faire when I was showing off Drunktender and they found out who my c# teacher was over at DePaul University. It was their boss who is my boss also. They informed me about an open spot and I tried to get it. After something like 7 phone interviews, 3 in-person interviews, and 1 presentation, I got the job. I'll miss some of the guys over at SpringCM but I do believe this is the right move for me. They all took it great and understood my reasoning. Got a great going away party and one of the best cards ever since it said "Starting Saturday, anything wrong will be blamed on you".

So how does this effect Better Than Everyone? Hopefully it won't. I'll still post under the "Will I get fired if I say that?" mentality and keep it heavy tech, what projects I'm working on, and being sarcastic / making crappy jokes. Drunktender v2 is coming along and Project Hoverboard is forming nicely too. I'll continue to post source code over at Peace Love Code but chances are some of the source code may shift to CodePlex.

I'll post some pictures later on when I get settled in ssince I don't have a USB Mini cord with me to grab the pictures from my camera.

So I'm being relocated for a thing I'll talk about August 6th-ish and everything has been packed up / shipped out.

Chicago, it was a good time but I needed something a bit more hardcore and dangerous, like St. Louis.

At my parents, I was wondering why their wireless router wasn't broadcasting properly so I took it upon myself to be a good son and improve the network. I'm bored and was sick of helping out doing yardwork. I grabbed my brother and went to the store and picked up a few things.

My brother, Mike, being the genius he is, decided to provide total house coverage we needed not 2 but 5 wireless access points due to the current poor performing dsl wireless router.

Now I'm not saying I'm a network guru but I thought this was overkill but that is my middle name so I went with it. After letting my brother set up 3 of the routers (I had to watch 300), I finally stepped in since he literally spent 3 hours doing it wrong.

This brings me to the first point, Know thy Network. The IP structure was 192.168.1.X for the DSL router and the AP's are belkins so they defaulted to 192.168.2.X. Attempting to hardcode IP's was a total cluster-F too since no one knew the dsl router's admin page. Turns out the actual DSL router's IP was .254 and we attempted to set one of the AP's IPs to 254. After a few quick adjustments, I got one of the AP's upstairs working and surprise, it covered the entire house PLUS a large chunk of the back yard.

This made me wonder, why did the first router suck so badly besides being the stock router that was given to my parents? The answer was the router was in a steel cabinet. This could only be worse if the router was in a Faraday cage. This is my second point, Would a dumbass do that? Areas with high voltage, microwaves, or steel cages will disrupt your data transmissions. So I've come to the conclusion my brother is a dumbass.

4 routers when 1 is doing the entire job. Maybe 2 if they want another section of the yard covered with a booster anntenna.

So I've gained an interest again in improving my laptop's battery life. I started using Tamir's version over at CodePlex since his version does a bit more. Using reflector, huge chunks of it seems oddly simular to mine. The nice thing about his is it shifts the power mode. However, the one thing I'd like to see added is an auto-brightness adjustment. So I'm going to do that.

I found an MSDN article on how to query your backlight and set it. That code however is unmanaged and will need a wrapper for it.

I have a week before I start my new job, time to smack IOCTL_VIDEO around a few times and show it who's in charge (chances are not me).