I’ve started drawing again. I spent some time on basic shading techniques, many of which I found here. After several days of practice I felt ready to try something more difficult. Faith Te was gracious enough to put this extremely helpful post up. Here’s my first pass:
Not even close to Faith’s work but I’m relatively pleased, none-the-less. I’ll keep practicing until I’m bored and then I’ll try pen and ink.
[Disclaimer] I am an apple fanboy (as if “fanboy” has any real meaning left). I have been since 1995. I love their products, their marketing and their track record of delivering amazing user experiences. As a software developer I tolerate their “closed” eco-system with a guarded eye and see it as a cost necessary to keeping their platform from evolving into the spyware/malware infested world of Windows or the spend-2-hours-evaluating-20-different-open-source-projects-before-settling-on-the-right-solitaire-game-for-you world of GNU/Linux.
Not too long ago I acquired a relatively new tablet pc with a frayed power supply. My last Windows machine had just died so I decided to get a new power supply and keep this machine around for the rare occasions in which I need a Windows box (still hasn’t occurred). I started at Toshiba’s website to get a sense for how much a brand new item from the authoritative source would be. I then checked newegg, amazon and ebay. After balancing price and seller reputation, I settled on a $45.00 item from a reputable ebay seller. Eight days or so I had a new power supply for laptop. The shopping experience took about twenty minutes. It wasn’t particularly enjoyable, nor was it particularly tedious.
About two months later I decided that my daughter was ready for her first computer. I dusted off a G3 PowerBook that had served me well but could not locate the power supply. A quick search on ebay and amazon revealed no items that were significantly cheaper that the Apple store so I decided to buy one at the Apple store in Boston the following day. I worked in Cambridge at the time and took an idyllic stroll over the Harvard Bridge to get to the Apple Store on Boylston Street. I was greeted at the door by a hip, friendly employee who asked if he could help me find anything. I described what i was looking for and he walked me over to a shelf and retrieved said item for me. As I looked around for a cash register he asked me if I’d be paying with a credit card. I nodded and he offered to ring me up right there, using his card-swiping equipped iPhone. I was then asked if I’d prefer a paper receipt or an electronic receipt. I opted for the latter, settled up and left. As I walked out the door, I felt my iPhone buzz as my receipt arrived in my inbox. Got my product home and Apple’s packaging made unpacking the power supply a pleasurable experience.
$45/twenty minutes vs $95/thirty minutes (including travel time to the store). I’m not a typical or average user by most peoples’ standards — Apple wins this experience no contest for me.
I recently bought an Arduino board from Lady Ada and even more recently bought this sensor lab kit which is a pretty cheap way of getting a bunch of cool sensors. Using the excellent AS3Glue Library, I was able to quickly get a pretty, graphical display of various sensor data scrolling through my browser.
The PDE and MXML files are available on my wiki.
A few months ago, I purchase licenses for fourteen Mac applications bundled together by the folks at macheist. The bundle costs $49.95 and 25% of the proceeds are donated to a charity of your choosing (sort of — I was able to choose from a list of ten charities). Out of the fourteen, there were only four apps that I was genuinely interested in: Snapz Pro, Pixelmator, Vector Designer and CSS Edit; however, those four alone would cost well over the $50 I spent on the bundle. I downloaded the other ten apps and even played with a few (Tiki Magic Mini Golf could be downright addictive had I not spent my early twenties physically dependent on EA PGA Tour). One of the apps that I didn’t play with immediately but knew that I’d eventually use is iStopMotion. It’s a tool that makes it easy to create stop-motion films (soon, I will be the Martin Scorsese of Playdough-based claymation) and to animate shots of time-lapse photography. My proof of concept was a sunset Sunday night, taken from the third floor of my house. I put my camera on a tripod, pointed it at the John Hancock Tower, attached the camera to my MacBook, selected a 15 second interval and left the room. A couple of hours later I had a 47 second sunset movie.
Someday, when I have a backyard, I’ll shoot fluffy flowers blooming and maples losing their leaves and ponds freezing and thawing. But until then, I’ll cut my teeth on urban scenes. Up next, a little diddy I call “Watching the pothole grow”.
I have two scrolling LED signs. One provides us with a daily forecast every morning and provides us with record high and low temperatures to help each day’s weather in perspective. The sign also lets us know the artist and title of the song that is currently playing in our bedroom. It’s driven by a perl script writing to a serial port to which the sign is connected.
The other sign is in our fitness room. It helps my wife keep track of what resistance she should have on the elliptical based on what song is currently playing in iTunes. This sign is driven by a dot net built binary written in C#.
The first sign is no longer available. The second one is this one. The interesting C# file is here.
You may or may not remember the transparent screens pool. It may seem kind of passé but I’ve never been one to jump on the bandwagon until it’s been thoroughly tested by others for me. And so, several years after the first artifact appeared on flickr, here are my variations on this theme.
We recently ordered and received an XO laptop for our 21 month old daughter, Chloe.
Chloe’s watched me use my MacBook Pro long enough to develop a healthy digital curiosity that can only be satisfied by pounding on a keyboard. The XO’s keyboard is certainly built for pounding–and drooling and spilling and stepping on too. The minimal instructions that accompany the little green machine clearly state that this device was not for infants; a 21 month old is no longer an infant, right? She’s almost a toddler and the documentation has no toddler exclusion listed. Regardless, Chloe does not use this machine unsupervised. We don’t want her spending all day on facebook, after all.
The machine runs a Fedora Core 7 base with a Python-based Sugar GUI and the Matchbox Window Manager. This is what the landing page looks like:
As you can see, the familiar desktop metaphor has not been adopted for the XO; given that the target customer is a child in a developing nation, that metaphor would probably not have much meaning. Instead, the Sugar environment provides a community like theme with a hierarchy that moves from the individual to the group to the neighborhood. The machine comes pre-installed with a surprisingly rich set of applications all of which are nicely described and showcased here.
Warning: The following paragraph contains geeky subject matter that may bore, annoy or otherwise miff some readers.
Once I had the laptop networked I opened a terminal to it and set it up to allow VNC connections. The XO wiki mentions the availability of remote-desktop functionality and links to some python code that can be compiled into an activity. However, when using this activity I was not able to connect to the machine in any consistent or reliable fashion. Instead of wrestling with the activity, I chose the faster path of configuring vino-server to run as an .xinitrc command. I also installed Adobe’s Flash player because the XO’s included player (gnash) does not currently have the same abilities as Flash Player 9 (including the ability to play Flex 2 apps). I’ve otherwise left the XO in its original factory condition.
So how does Chloe like her laptop? She loves it but, like everything else that she loves (except ice cream), the love lasts only for a couple of minutes at a time. Her favorite feature this week is the built in camera; she loves to crouch down and try and sneak up on herself. Admittedly, this camera is currently being used as nothing more than a digital mirror but I’m certain that Chloe will be producing film-festival-quality clips within twelve months.
She’s quite enthusiastic about TamTam, a suite of audio activities which includes close to 100 voices and drag-and-drop interface for making music.
She and I also play with this flex app that’s intended to help her learn the alphabet while sharpening her mouse and keyboard skills.
Overall, we’re very happy with our XO laptop. I hope the OLPC project succeeds despite the many powers out there that are rooting against it.
Last fall I installed Vista Business Edition on my MacBook Pro via Boot Camp. I was doing some Dot NET development and needed a machine on which to run Visual Studio. I (naively) expected that 20 GB would be more than enough disk space for Vista, VS2005 and Office 2007. Wrong! Actually, not completely wrong. 20 GB was enough for those three but left Vista with almost no free space. I could get away with 1 GB of free space by being very frugal but knowing that I’m on a machine that’s got 95% of its diskspace full makes me a little nervous and causes me to twitch periodically, spilling lukewarm coffee on my lap.I used Parallels Desktop to run Vista from OS X when I didn’t need the best performance. On at least 4 separate occasions Vista decided that I was running an unlicensed copy and would force me to reactivate. On one those occasions I was forced to do this over the phone. The process over the phone was less unpleasant than I expected but it was still unpleasant. The activation/reactivation issues made me unwilling to solve my partition issue by reinstalling on a larger partition. Instead, I wanted to grow the existing partition. There is no shortage of opinions on the best way to grow an existing Boot Camp installation without trashing it. After much reading I decided on the process of archiving my entire Vista installation, delete and recreating my Boot Camp partition and unarchiving my archived Vista installation to the new partition. I chose WinClone, a very impressive piece of freeware, for this task. (The software is well maintained and well documented and I felt compelled to make a donation to the author). Others facing the same conundrum suggested that I should take the following steps:
However, after reading this very helpful guide, I was not convinced that all of those steps were necessary. Instead, I tried the following:
I’m very pleased to report that this worked. I booted to Vista, let chkdsk run and confirmed that I had a new 30 GB partition. Now if I could only remember why I wanted to run Vista now that the Dot NET class is over…
…as if it matters.Last week I got an email “from” someone I trust but hadn’t heard from recently. The email turned out to be an invitation to join a social networking site called Spock. Spock’s goal, apparently, is to be Google but for people. Spock has a lot of its people data generated by users and that’s ruffling some feathers out there. I don’t have the time or energy to formulate an opinion on Spocks goals or prospects for success. I do, however, have an opinion on there methods of getting new users. My opinion is that they walk a fine line between disingenuous and deceptive. Here’s why: when I clicked on the link to accept my invitation I completed a pretty standard registration process. I than let Spock scan my gmail address book for potential candidates. Spock selected a surprisingly large number of people from my address book as people I should add to my trust network. The process/wording implied to me that the people I was asked to add were already members which is why I was surprised by the large number of hits. And suddenly I realized that Spock was about to invite a bunch of my contacts on my behalf. This prompted me to search del.icio.us for sites tagged as obnoxious. Surprisingly, Spock was not among the top hits.Needless to say, I invited no-one. Nor will I.And I must admit that their search capabilities are incredible.
Whenever I’m learning a new language there are several facets that I like to grasp as early as possible:
To that end, I’ve added a wiki page for showing elementary error handling mechanisms for various languages. Feel free to add any you think are missing.