Categories: weblog | shdh

[link] 2008-10-05T00:38:50 SHDH 27:

I went to SHDH 27 and met with Drew Hess, David Reid, Joel Frasunic, and others.

At first I did some sysadmin maintenance of my personal photo archive and tagging system, which uses python+rdf to make pages like this.

Then I remembered there are only 25 days left on the Boards.ie competition, so I picked that up again. I asked the people around me for more ideas and got several good ones, including:

• Track the popular slang over the years by looking for unusual phrases that get widely used for a short amount of time, and then fade out.
  
• Scan your blog or email inbox and then suggest boards.ie forums that you might be interested in.
• Take your boards.ie friends list and cluster it into groups based on where those people post (e.g. separate your 'gamer' friends vs your 'football' friends).
  

BTW, everyone who saw me demo ubigraph was impressed, so you might like it too.

[link] 2008-09-02T02:01:39 SHDH 26:

Kelsi and I both went to SHDH 26. We only caught the end of the lightning talks and then worked for a while on the upper patio. I ported my Tk/Togl opengl app to Qt so it would work on modern ubuntu setups. It's gotten hard to find a working package for Togl, although maybe it's still getting updates?

Qt is ok, although the python version of the API is long on prefixes (PyQt4.QtGui.QLabel!) and short on error message details ("TypeError: argument 1 of QLabel() has an invalid type"). The integration with twisted has some issue too, where i get qt warnings to stderr at about 20Hz. I couldn't figure out how to lose the enormous space around some of my label widets.

We met Brett there too. He's pictured here.

[link] 2008-05-27T01:08:12 SHDH 25:

I went to SHDH 25, and because I brought blinking lights, a lot of people stopped to talk to me.

My mission was to make python/arduino drivers for the shiftbrite. I brought parts for making cables and assembled four of those. Then I adapted Garrett's fine arduino code into a version that listens on the serial port. There, or maybe later at home, I got a python program sending color commands to the shiftbrites.

Finally, I got my image scanning program talking to shiftbrites. It works like a player piano: any image serves as the paper roll; each light reads a certain row of the image. If you give it some photograph, you'll get a changing set of colors with palettes from the photo. Images like this make the usual color-chase effects.

At the end of the night at SHDH, Eric from Sun had a few more Sun SPOT dev kits to give away, so I took one off his hands. In exchange I have to blog about it, but this paragraph is the only news I have so far. I tried their CD and its installer .jar file, which claimed success except it wrote nothing but a log file of errors. Then I got another version via java web start, and while that one claims to have found the ID of one of my sunspots, it can't actually talk to it due to some port issue. I've only spent two evenings on this so far.

Not that I've been able to program one yet, but the sunspot seems ridiculously overpowered for all the usual things I do with microcontrollers. Hopefully if things work out, I'll be able to try some more ambitious projects, like a drink-fetching robot. Or at least a wireless data logger for my car.

What is with the low numbers of flickr photos from recent SHDH events? Here's a biased sharpshooter's sampling:

Anyway, I'm in these:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidreid/2508366565/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidreid/2509195374/

[link] 2007-07-16T23:35:37 SHDH 18:

For completeness, a photo of me at the last SHDH: http://flickr.com/photos/strategicpause/613746704/

I was working on my photogrammetry project. I made a reference animation of a rotating cube with noise on it and tracked points with http://www.ces.clemson.edu/~stb/klt/

http://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~beber/cv/hw_5/ is interesting too.

[link] 2007-05-06T03:43:35 SHDH 17:

Worked on fantasyfamegame.com reporting/dashboard tools. Met the http://www.staticize.com/ guys and told them about some of their competitors: swivel, manyeyes, gapminder.

The only photo of me so far is this one of my left arm as I'm listening to Brad Templeton talk about how we should simplify system configuration via better organization of files and data:

http://flickr.com/photos/94571993@N00/485971692/

He says the config data will eventually demand a database like the Windows registry. I say it can stay in little files as RDF, which can be easily combined at any time for querying, exporting, etc. Otherwise, I completely agree with him that my system configuration ("program foo version 1.2 is currently installed", or "alter this one line of that config file") should be separate from the actual foo files. I really want to diff the configs of all my home machines and merge some of their pointless diffs away. Meanwhile, I can't even find out how to get ubuntu to tell me what program config files I modified and which ones are still at their defaults.

More photos:

http://flickr.com/photos/94571993@N00/486272683/ http://flickr.com/photos/tomicles/487124728/

[link] 2007-03-31T23:20:13 shdh16 motorized faders driver:

I got a BCF2000 interface with 8 motorized faders ($140 on ebay), and I wrote a simple python driver for it. It just talks midi, so there's no hard way to get the data. I tried pyalsamidi for a minute, and then just fell back on open("/dev/snd/midiC1D0", "r").

My test program reads one slider and drives the other 7 with a sine shape, offset by the position of the first slider.

I was only on site for about 2 hours, so I was very poorly photographed.

http://flickr.com/photos/cirne/433382643/ hands

http://flickr.com/photos/tomicles/434202931/ hands

http://flickr.com/photos/tomicles/434203364/

http://flickr.com/photos/tomicles/434203050/

[link] 2007-02-20T00:21:19 SHDH 15:

I wrote yet another web cam tool. This one takes a "GET /" request and returns one frame grabbed from a usb camera with v4l.

I worked a little on my dotcom project, mostly organizing databases.

Then I got distracted on my python profile result viewers, and worked with dreid on making them cooler. I presented the results of that at google the next week.

I am somewhat visible in these photos:

http://flickr.com/photos/tantek/385377087/

http://flickr.com/photos/tantek/385355430/

http://flickr.com/photos/strategicpause/379709742/

[link] 2006-12-17T23:01:14 SHDH 14:

I worked on maps.bigasterisk.com (which is probably still broken as you read this). My plan was to add estimated arrival times to the map, but without ever specifying my destination. There would just be arrival times all over the map (but maybe not behind me, where it's clear I'm not going). I was going to attempt SVG-over-gmaps for the time display.

Then I remembered I also wanted a lightweight live chat for concurrent viewers of my web page, so I wrote that. Then I installed it to maps.bigasterisk.com, and the live chat didn't work. I narrowed this down to a problem with apache, since the same server and client would work without apache in the middle. Debugging the issue started taking forever, so I'm now considering replacing my apache proxy server with something else.

I also heard some praise for google reader and konqueror and offered some praise for mochikit.

Depictions: http://flickr.com/photos/progrium/324628287/ http://flickr.com/photos/strategicpause/325410145/ http://flickr.com/photos/strategicpause/325410533/ http://flickr.com/photos/strategicpause/325409537/

[link] 2006-07-23T00:41:47 shdh 11:

Worked a tiny bit on RDF view maintenance for http://picreferer.bigasterisk.com, checked out the new sparql parsing in rdflib. Chatted about my plan to track programmer time spent per line of code: hook into the editor to learn what lines are getting visited, try to adjust historical line numbers as lines are added/removed. The result will be reports like "this function has required the more bug fixes than anything else in the code" or "programmers often come to read these lines before they work on anything in these files".

http://flickr.com/photos/alienvenom/195918903/

[link] (1) 2006-05-15T23:17:27 SHDH 9:

I just barely made it to this one. For the short time I was there, I tried to configure the impossible polypaudio. It's harder than sendmail!

Pictured here: http://flickr.com/photos/elea/137670654/

http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/polypaudio/

[link] 2006-03-12T17:43:38 SHDH8 report:

My semfile project is not especially active, but when Jim said he wanted to write some UI for storing local tags on local files, I decided to clean up semfile. My hope is that instead of starting over (which is tempting, since this type of project is very easy to start), he'll build on my semfile design. (That design so far consists mostly of "use rdf".) Anyway, I did some cleanup and wrote test cases for the cmdline tools. I also revised the file URIs to include hostnames, which is going to be an ongoing issue. Home users have various networked and non-networked files that they will want to tag.

Someone told me in passing that beagle uses extended file attributes on certain file systems for some of its tracking. In particular, it may leave an id in the attrs to rediscover files that are moved. semfile has that concern, and I haven't even started to think about what solution I want.

Suchi (no home page?) is interested in analyzing human behavior from passively-collected events, and I have years of logs from my various home automation projects.

Kragen's cool PWM encoding demo on an atmel microcontroller reminds me that I should try my pixel project with atmel, since that project is largely stalled due to issues with programming PICs from linux (both the getting-my-code-written-in-non-asm and the install-code-into-the-chip types of programming).

I have other projects that do boring queries on RDF stores, and they want to give really fast results. Kragen pointed me to some truth maintenance research. We also talked about how to optimize cases like mine, although I'm really interested in general-case optimizations that don't have to change when I adjust my queries.

While SHDH7 was low on food I liked, this one was quite well-stocked.

Pictures of me at SHDH8:

http://flickr.com/photos/cirne/111286521/ http://flickr.com/photos/cirne/111286276/ http://flickr.com/photos/elea/111462897/

[link] 2006-01-29T17:04:41 SHDH 7 :

Super Happy Dev House 7 report:

I got started on gasuse and rearranged some things. Donovan helped me with a nested sequence in nevow. Nevow is hard because of all the things you can't see, but isn't omitting things you don't need to see the point of programming languages?

Then I got distracted with Jesse's request for some demo tiles to ship with his scrolling map widget in dojo. I had recently made some renderings of the TIGER streetmap data, so I hacked that code some more to output tiles at multiple zooms. Then, to make our demo tiles somehow better than the tiles you get with gmaps, I added rendering of address numbers on the streets. My renderings still had various embarrassing artifacts, so I spent the rest of the night cleaning some of them up. I'm especially pleased with the results of the street name repeater code, which tries to write a street name label every 200 pixels. Text alignment still needs work; and we didn't get to try any street-smoothing algorithms.

Meanwhile, David Weekly was jacking into ODB-II ports on people's cars to see what they would output, and I didn't even notice! I'd love to get that going on my Accord. Logs with accurate speed and timestamps would make great plots on my street maps.

Pictures of me at SHDH:

http://flickr.com/photos/kadavy/92456814/ http://flickr.com/photos/cirne/92489223/ http://flickr.com/photos/cirne/92555832/ http://flickr.com/photos/laughingsquid/92721073/in/set-72057594055844028/

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