Boring Programming Stuff

A few weeks ago I rode my Ninja 250 from San Jose, CA to Spokane, WA and back, averaging just over 500 miles a day. The gallery of photos is here. The trip was a ton of fun, although by the second day each way I was a little sore. I should have stopped more often, because there was a lot more scenery than the pictures suggest. It rained a couple of times so I didn’t get any shots from some parts of the trip. On the bright side the rain cleaned all the bug guts off my gear.

Highlights:

Welcome to Oregon

Eastern Oregon

Danger to manifold!

Bugs really like my visor.

Most of the shots are from the return trip, since I had an onboard camera mounted. The onboard camera is pretty cool, but I need to work some kinks out. The mount and the camera body itself aren’t very stiff, so it shakes while recording video. Here’s a clip to illustrate:

After I got the camera recording in HD and in daylight the quality was better but the shakiness was worse:

For the past couple of months my greatest annoyance about Bloglines was that it stripped out all <object> and <embed> tags for security reasons. This is fine and good, except that most feeds embed videos using these tags instead of as RSS attachments. Google Reader has supported a whitelist of sites for over a year now. I finally got around to fixing the Bloglines security filter so that videos will show up. Below is the current whitelist. Any <embed> or <object> from these domains will not be stripped:

blip.tv
blogtv.com
blowery.org
break.com
brightcove.com
castfire.com
cnet.com
cnn.net
collegehumor.com
dailymotion.com
dotsub.com
ehow.com
google.com
gametrailers.com
gamevideos.com
glumbert.com
grouper.com
ifilm.com
jumpcut.com
kontraband.com
liveleak.com
metacafe.com
mobatalk.com
monstersandcritics.com
motionbox.com
myspace.com
podtech.net
podshow.com
revver.com
reuters.com
sapo.pt
singshot.com
slideshare.net
ustream.tv
verycd.com
videoegg.com
vimeo.com
vsocial.com
youtube.com

I made this list by asking my co-workers for video sites. If I’m missing something, post a comment and I’ll throw it on the TODO list.

Oh, and the obligatory demonstration of this feature:

Last week I ordered some X10 gear off Amazon to play with. Included was a CM17A Firecracker X10 controller. It plugs into a serial port and transmits X10 signals to a receiver hooked up to your power lines. I found a neat little open source program called Heyu that lets you control the CM17A. Of course, controlling your X10 stuff from a command line isn’t cool enough for me, so I started on a Ruby on Rails app that lets me control everything from my iPhone. After adding some iUI styling it works pretty well. The Firecracker can only transmit, not receive data, so I had to store appliance state in the database. Besides that minor annoyance, everything worked out pretty well. I added iUI styling and I’m pretty happy with what I’ve got so far.

Anyone who wants to can check out the source here. It’s nowhere near done. There is no way to add houses or units short of making a migration or modifying the database directly. Also it requires that you have Heyu installed and in your path. Turning stuff on and off works though, as demonstrated by me in this video:

You can download it here if for some reason you want to.

My favorite thing to do so far is to turn off my air conditioner in the morning and then turn it on an hour before I come home in the evening. Since my schedule is so unscheduled, a cron job just doesn’t cut it.

Going to Deer Park and blowing things up has been a tradition for the past couple of years. Last year I built a sparkler bomb and set it off after the public fireworks show. The result was incredible. 1300 sparklers finished burning in less that two seconds, but what a two seconds it was. Since I was the one who lit the fuse and ran away, I got to feel the heat of the fire and watch the audience glow white and “Ooooooh” at the display. This year my friend Paul and I built three smaller ones (around 600 sparklers each) and managed to get some video. The first one was set in a piece of steel pipe to try and direct the flames upward. It worked fine but the pipe was way too hot to use after that. The other two were also fun, but the camera couldn’t autofocus well in the dark.
Pictures of preparation are here. I also made videos of the ignition:

Pipe sparkler
Regular sparkler

Both movies are H.264, so you’ll need a modern player to view them.