Chillin… Listening to Martin Mickos speak at the Sun auditorium in Second Life.
Archive for April, 2008
Me and Batman…
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008Back from CO
Friday, April 18th, 2008Flew out to Denver for a team meeting in Broomfield this week. Was nice to see everyone again. We seemed to get a lot of planning done, and there was much team bonding via imbibing in the evenings.
Travel home yesterday sucked, though. I changed my return flight from an afternoon to a morning flight, which was canceled. The whole point of leaving earlier was that I wanted to get home before midnight, and the new itinerary would have had me home at 22:30. D’oh. I put on my best “poor me” routine and managed to get standby on a flight to Boston (without having to pay the difference in fare), and then took the train home.
Got home early enough to do bedtime for L, so it worked out as well as it could have, I guess.
I can’t think of a more worthwhile $26.50
Friday, April 11th, 2008I was chatting with Makia the other night, who told me that he was flying his helicopter around his hotel room. Well, of course I was curious, so when he told me the make/model, I looked it up on amazon. Their price is $26.50 (free shipping for Prime), and I’m not sure I’ve ever managed a faster impulse buy.
Fortunately, when it arrived two days later, the Air Hogs Mini Havoc that I ordered lived up to its reputation. As D commented (while I was buzzing the pets in the TV room), “It’s worth $26 just to watch the cats go bonkers.”
Downsides:
- 20-30 minutes charge time for ~6 minutes of flight time
- have to play with the nose weighting to get stable forward flight
- no cyclical control (just yaw and throttle/collective)
Upsides:
- $26.50!!!!
- 9.5g == virtually no inertia, so crashes result in minimal damage
- chasing a 90lb dog with a dragonfly-sized helicopter
France == Xanadu?
Thursday, April 10th, 2008Came across this while reading about the Torch froofralah (look at what the cops have on their feet):
(From LA Times)
Streamium Owners Unite!
Wednesday, April 9th, 2008I have a Philips Streamium MC-i200… And I’m one of like, 5 people, apparently.
So, for those 5 of you out there, I wrote a new backend for this piece of crap. I got sick of pclinkscan and pclink, so I used Ruby and Rails to create a nice backend server. The MP3 metadata is stored in a SQLite DB, and I wrote a custom controller to translate the DB data into the crazy PCLink format (a bazillion XML nodes). Took me a weekend, but now it works, and adding new music to my library isn’t such a PITA.
Bonus: I’m using ActiveScaffold for the models (Artist, Album, Track) to easily browse and edit the metadata. Sexy AJAX and CSS FTW! Woo!
Leave a comment if you want a copy of the server. It’s about 165 lines of ruby, added into the standard skeleton generated by rails.
P.S. The Ruby Spawn plugin is really cool. When my Mongrel starts, I’ve got an initializer kicking off the UDP broadcast listener.
Update: I’ve uploaded the code to github. Have at it: http://github.com/mjmac/pcrink/tree/master
