Buck Up Chinny

Maker Faire in Fort Wayne

2011-08-28T20:24:00.002-04:00

Nice!! Last night we were wandering around downtown and stumbled upon the Taste of Arts festival. It was ok, lots of food, some decent live bands, and pop-up tents with pottery, paintings, and knick-knacks. But I was a little bored. Bored until we came to the Maker tent! It looks like we finally have made the big time. We will have a Make Faire at Headwaters Park pavilion this 01-02 October.

Format JSON for JQuery Grids

2011-06-30T23:28:00.003-04:00

Yet another wasted evening. I can just be zooming along, writing code and making major progress on my squirrel of the moment project. And then Screech! All progress halts while I struggle with something stupid. Here's the story. My service returns JSON. Nicely formatted JSON, courtesy of Google's GSON. [{"id":"eda84f836c71","name":"Will","city":"Fuji","age":"23","sex":"M"}, {"id":"

Apache ActiveMQ Startup Exception

2011-01-30T22:01:00.000-05:00

I don't use ActiveMQ a lot but when I get back to a project where I was using it, I seem to get startup exceptions pretty often. The stack trace is really long and ugly. java.io.EOFException: Chunk stream does not exist at page: 0 At first I wasn't sure what was going on, just deleted the activemq folder, unzipped the distro, and back running in minutes. The next time it happened, I spent a

Android SMS XML Parsing

2011-01-30T17:56:00.002-05:00

Using XML with SMS sounds kinda dumb. After all an SMS text is only 140 characters (or less ...) and XML is horribly bloated. But if the originating application is using XML and SMS is the convenient transport, then nothing's too stupid. There's plenty of articles that describe the various Android options for parsing XML. SAX, DOM, and XML Pull. Actually, I'd prefer to use XStream for quick

HTC G1 adb "No Permissions"

2011-01-28T22:38:00.004-05:00

Update: After I wrote this post, I had the No permissions and a device name of ???????? all over again. After spending yet more time on this, I found that the key is to kill and restart the server as root (sudo). See commands at end of this post. -------------------------------------------------------- I bought a used HTC G1 from eBay so I could prototype a droid interface to a custom sensor.

Can't SSH to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Instance

2010-12-18T22:37:00.001-05:00

I've decided that I'm going to learn about Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) over this Holiday break. I've read a few articles, listened to a few podcasts so I have an idea what it's about, just haven't actually gone thru the motions myself. What am I going to do with a virtual machine (VM) in the cloud? Not much quite yet. I have some ideas but first need to figure out how things work. So

Working with the 90 Character Limit of Twitter

2010-11-29T00:12:00.001-05:00

What? Twitter has a 90 character limit? No, it's 140. Everyone knows that. Mr Wikipedia says this about SMS length: "... resources in the system could be used to transport messages at minimal cost. However, it was necessary to limit the length of the messages to 128 bytes (later improved to 140 bytes, or 160 seven-bit characters) so that the messages could fit into the existing signaling

Send SMS Text Message from Java/Groovy - via Twitter

2010-11-27T21:33:00.001-05:00

Writing code to send an SMS text message is fairly easy on a smart phone like an Android. But from a desktop, sending texts is still a mess, not always free, and/or requires a phone connected to your server. I simply want to send a message to my phone when my app receives some data. I don't need a complex library with lots of setup nor do I want to sign up for a pay service. Now this isn't

Send a Direct Message Tweet with Groovy

2010-11-27T19:43:00.000-05:00

Alright. Using the Twitter4J library and Groovy, I've beaten down the OAuth beast and have a simple example app to send a "update status" tweet. Now instead of sending a message to my own account, let's do a real easy mod to send a Direct Message to a specific user Using the same app as before, the only changes needed are: import DirectMessage change from twitter.updateStatus(message) to

Sending a Simple Tweet with OAuth and Java/Groovy

2010-11-27T15:55:00.005-05:00

Come on, man! What used to a be a simple task to send a tweet is now a OAuth nightmare. A year or so ago, I built that tweet-a-w/e thing that sniffed XBee chirps and sent them to a twitter account that kindly routed them to my cell phone. I have a need now to receive an XML stream, parse out a few tidbits and then send the results out as a SMS text message. Remembering that tweet-a-w/e app, I

Sad Day for the Great White Boxster

2010-08-13T17:45:00.002-04:00

After a little more than a year of ownership and the main reason that I haven't been updating my blog, I sold my Boxster (the Great White). She was a good car but after buying a 911 in early Spring, I just wasn't driving her much. My family is much sadder than me though cause they liked the Boxster better than the 911. I really love the mid-engine Boxster and will probably buy a Cayman S in

Sanyo DP26648 White Screen of Death

2010-08-09T21:56:00.001-04:00

Santa brought my game player son a Sanyo SP2664 26-inch Widescreen LCD HD Television last Christmas. A few months into the year, the TV started getting occasional white lines diagonally across the screen, the greens looked weird, and then the audio went in/out. I could've/should've hauled it back to Wally Mart but grumbled about it and did nothing. We came home from our July 4th vacation and

LG Washer LE Error

2009-12-25T15:29:00.049-05:00

UPDATE: I've had quite a few hits on this posting and received lots of great comments - thanks very much. This post explains how to replace the hall sensor on your LG washer. Before you decide that you have to replace your hall sensor, please try unplugging your washer for 5-10 minutes and see if it will reset all on its own. Also, even after replacing the sensor, sometimes these washers will

Porsche Boxster Cabriolet

2009-05-15T00:49:00.004-04:00

Sometimes you just have to give in. I tried to be strong but night after night. Day after day. All I heard was "buy me, buy me". How much is a man expected to take? We can only be so strong before we all break down. It was hard, but I relented and came home with a Boxster. It's my combo birthday present and mid-life crisis consolation prize. As my old age time bomb has been approaching over

Greasemonkey Index of /images

2009-05-02T23:39:00.020-04:00

After I posted the Yahoo Baseball Greasemonkey script, I remembered another script that I have that's worth sharing. Not my Yahoo Football Greasemonkey script which does the same as the baseball (shows in-game stats on tab title) but another more useless useful script.Have you ever been searching for an image or been Stumbling around and came across a page like the one to the left?I see them

Baseball Better - Yahoo Greasemonkey Script

2009-05-02T21:31:00.021-04:00

I love baseball. But you gotta admit that it can be boring "watching" a game on the web. If not watching it in person or on tv, it's kinda slow. I'm sorta ADD when cruising the web. I usually have 6 or more Firefox tabs open at once. I'm reading something, writing something, searching for something all at the same time. It's a wonder that I get anything done at all, but amazingly it works

XBee Series 2 - Reading Data in API Mode

2009-04-08T23:25:00.017-04:00

After I finally got a ZNET 2.5 Coordinator AT associated with a ZNET 2.5 ROUTER / END DEVICE by figuring out that the default JV Channel Verification parameter was key, I stumbled again.I can send character data from end device to coordinator and see it come out of the UART.But when I have an end device with the ADC enabled (ATD1=2) and the IO Sampling Rate (ATIR=4E20) set to 20 seconds, I see

XBee Series 2 - JV Channel Verification

2009-04-08T00:22:00.014-04:00

Damn it. Why do the simplest things always take hours to complete? I'm using XBee Series 2 cause I really didn't know what I was buying. Series 1 or Series 2? To a newb, sounds like 2 is the shiny. Why buy an out-dated series 1? Nobody wants last year's model.If I would've done my homework, the series 1 (also called 802.15.4) are the most reliable, easiest to use. So of course, I'm using

XBee Adapter Kit PDQ

2009-03-28T15:05:00.024-04:00

Just got done building an XBee Adapter and tested it in 34 minutes. That's right, 2040 seconds. Or 0.566666667 hours. Either way, it's PDQ.I'm a soldering novice. I've been burning my finger tips for some years now but in limited batches so I'm in no way claiming any skill. (Actually, I'm claiming a lack of skill) And I wasn't speeding, I was in no rush to build this thing.I opened the

tweet-a-whatever (tweet-a-w/e) foundation

2009-03-22T23:26:00.023-04:00

My explanation of the tweet-a-w/e ran pretty long in my last post. I took an Asus wl-520gu wireless router, installed OpenWrt, Python, and an Xbee to build the foundation of a tweet-a-whatever (tweet-a-w/e). My 13 year-old texting obsessed daughter choose that name BTW. The last post ran so long that I cut it off after I talked about how to read the serial port with pySerial. This time, I'll

tweet-a-w/e using Asus wl-520gu and Xbee

2009-03-21T18:58:00.011-04:00

A few of the geeks that I stalk follow on twitter have done some interesting things with the Asus wl-520gu wireless router. Jeff Keyzer of mightyOhm has a real nice series on using the router where he builds an open source wireless streaming internet radio receiver. He walks you step-by-step on why he chose the wl-520gu, how to load OpenWrt, adding a serial port header, and even interfacing it

Format USB Flash Drive with ext3

2009-03-21T12:50:00.005-04:00

Using Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron, I figured it would be easy to format a thumb drive to ext3. Seems for me that nutin is easy. My plans for the USB stick is to use it with an embedded Linux box that could expectantly shutdown.Wikipedia says this about ext3: The ext3 or third extended filesystem is a journaled file system that is commonly used by the Linux kernel. It is the default file system for

No module named _md5 - Missing OpenSSL?

2009-03-21T00:21:00.013-04:00

I'm working a Python project on an embedded Linux device. As usual, I've had my struggles but yesterday I ran into one a tough one. I was afraid that I was going to have to dump Python and go to another language, ruining a week+ of effort.I'm using OpenWrt kamikaze 8.09 and have been making excellent progress until I slammed into the wall when attempting to import md5. This spins off an odd

2009 Running Goal - 12 Races

2009-02-14T16:42:00.034-05:00

Years back, I was a decent runner. Then we had kids and life got busy. I also got old. Last year on vacation in Orlando, the whole family ran the Winter Park Watermelon 5K which re-started the racing bug again.Especially with my wife. Years back, she wanted nothing to do with running. Now she's very competitive and pushes me to train with her.My Stats:All time 5k PR : 20:06 1995, Some

Grid Computing with GridGain

2009-01-31T15:22:00.018-05:00

Similar to the famous "one word - Plastics" scene in "The Graduate", a senior engineer took me aside on the weekend of the Columbia explosion and said "Grid Computing". We were working long hours for a proposal that was insane at best. At the time, I had heard of SETI@home but never really had spent any time on the subject. Tim was pretty excited about the topic. He had just read an article