drewp

[link] 2008-07-03T23:13:21 Freeway data:

I got an account with the site that distributes the sensor data from the loops in the freeways (pictured here). Here's the first hack, a boring map of the sensors with 10% of the speeds labeled. Code is in darcs.

This screenshot shows my map on the right; a comparable sigalert screenshot on the left.

[link] 2008-06-12T19:48:18 Garage door power usage:

Kelsi and I wondered how much power the garage door opener uses, since we often use it on days when we ride our bikes. I plugged it into a little power meter.

The surprise is that the motor runs at 650W and the lights afterwards use 120W. A full garage-open-close event uses a lot more power to shine the light than to open the door.

I hope the solution will be to remove the light, run some home automation network to the garage, and computer-control all the garage lights and door. E.g. "when you know I biked to work, and it's now the evening, and the bluetooth sensor sees my cell phone nearby: open the door and turn on the light exactly long enough for me to get inside, as measured by the sensor on the door inside the house".

Our garage door opener also uses 3W when it's idle :(

[link] (1) 2008-06-05T21:00:51 I think I hate the rememberthemilk.com UI:

This is not the first time I've been completely lost in the RTM UI. On this page, I have no idea what's going on.

What is that orange box at the top? Did I start an action but not finish it, and what was that action? What happens if I press neither 'share' nor 'cancel'?
How do I get back to my todo lists (i.e. the primary document I'm here to edit)?
Why should I create some groups? Stop yelling at me about what I should do! I understand that a group would be a container of contacts, but if I haven't thought of the use case for that yet, I'm not going to create some groups just because I "have no groups" yet.
On the right, in the biggest cluster of text on the whole page, they're telling me how to name my groups. Is this really the right time for that? How about after I click 'add group'?
"1 contact selected"?! Who is it, and is he or she going to matter on this screen?
Why is 'Delete' rendered as a form button but 'Add group' rendered as an image-plus-link? Are those different? Will one of them make another crazy orange box header? What is the rule with small blue circles with a symbol in them? The add group one seems clickable, but the other three aren't.
The main box on the page is on a groups tab, and there's another single-tab box on the right labeled "Group". What is the meaning of the right-hand one? Isn't the main one going to list my groups? (See below for the answer)
What is the 'Key' box doing here? I suspect that my contact groups will not have priorities or due dates. The stack of boxes on the right is somewhat dependent on what I'm doing, since the top "tab" box and the instructions box have both adjusted for this view. It's really better to keep the Key box bouncing around below the other ones even when I have no use for it? I would critique the need for a key/legend in the first place, but that's for another time.
The relationship between contacts and groups suggests that tabs are not used correctly here. That right-hand-side box devoted to telling me how many objects I have selected on the other tab, that's a pretty huge clue that I don't want to flip between contacts and groups. And the contents of the 'invite' tab are not even close to parallel to the types of things in the other two tabs. The first two tabs at least each show a type of object in my account; the invite tab is a form for sending a single invitation.

Dying of curiosity, I made some groups:

I now learn that the top box on the right displays some info about the group that I'm hovering over in the main list. I still don't know how to add members to a group that I've made. I have "1 contact and 2 groups selected", but there seems to be nothing to click that would affect the membership of any groups. Dare I suggest that the behavior of groups (they contain users) be reflected in the visual layout of the page (the depiction of a group contains depictions of users)?

Finally, we're out of laundry soap, so please get some if you go to a store before I do and you're Kelsi.

[link] 2008-05-30T23:38:37 Communicating with sunspots:

I finally found that my SunSPOT manager wouldn't find its devices correctly because a shell script (!) that's supposed to gather the device names wasn't working on linux. Neither were two other alternative shell scripts I found in the forums, so I ported the best-looking one to python. Now it doesn't error, and it actually got a few lines shorter during the port. There's really no reason to write 75-line shell scripts when the target machine is a modern OS with the usual stuff (e.g. python) working.

My prize for getting the device communication working was that I was able to run netbeans, open the AirText project, and deploy it to a sunspot. BTW, the demo code is over at https://spots-sdk-demos.dev.java.net/servlets/ProjectDocumentList, which was surprisingly hard to find.

I really thought that when I was at Maker Faire, one of the Sun guys was saying "all the sunspot stuff is free and open, all the code, firmware, schematics, etc." But apparently that's not the case-- even the device manager code is still closed-source, which made it all the harder to figure out that a "StringIndexException: -1" was the tool's way of saying that it was choking on some extra stdout verbosity from my spotfinder python port, even though the comments in other spotfinder versions suggest that only the output on stderr matters.

I pasted my earlier notes about broken setups here.

[link] 2008-05-27T22:22:06 emacs scroll keys:

I like making the keypad plus/minus keys scroll my emacs window without moving the cursor. For ~/.emacs:

(defun scroll-down-keep-cursor ()
   ;; Scroll the text one line down while keeping the cursor
   (interactive)
   (scroll-down 1))

(defun scroll-up-keep-cursor ()
   ;; Scroll the text one line up while keeping the cursor
   (interactive)
   (scroll-up 1))

(global-set-key [kp-subtract] 'scroll-down-keep-cursor)
(global-set-key [kp-add] 'scroll-up-keep-cursor)