Our living room as bike parking lot. Notice that we have 6 bikes in the photo and only 4 family members (and that’s not even counting the 3 more at my house). That little purple bike in the foreground needs to go, and I have one of the bikes at my place up on Craigslist now.
The coming days should bring some updates to the blog. Bicycles are big in our house at the moment, so I’m going to start posting the related household news.
Both kids received bicycles for their birthdays this year. Much happiness and a bunch of riding ensued. This has naturally led to more riding for Kim and me. in an effort to avoid paying for a campus parking permit, Kim has already been riding to work most days. So, I just needed to hop on my bike to make it a family affair.
After a few evening rides in the College Park area, we took a longish (10 mile) ride in Rock Creek Park — from Peirce Mill to Grubb Road, and back. At the mid-point of our ride, we enjoyed a nice Sunday brunch at the Daily Dish. The ride was a relative success, and we plan on trying to enjoy a couple more such outings while the weather holds.
Just updated my BasicTeX-2008 install to the 2011 edition. Pretty simple really.
I deleted the old installation using:
tlmgr uninstall
then downloaded the latest incarnation from http://www.tug.org/mactex/2011/morepackages.html, then installed it.
I had to update the path in my .tcshrc to point to the new bin directory, and voila! Latest and greatest TeX install.
I then went ahead and ran the post installation steps from my previous post.
We’ve been having problems with our Toyota Highlander temperature controls. The system would blow hot/cold air randomly. Messing with the controls would get the correct temperature for a few minutes or seconds and then back to random temps.
Luckly, the Internet has lots of documentation on this problem:
http://www.devalcourt.com/2010/03/fixing-2004-toyota-highlander-ac-and-heat-issue/
http://www.tundrasolutions.com/forums/highlander/32217-heater-quit-sort-of/
I followed the directions online and the repair was pretty straight-forward; anyone who can use a screwdriver and has basic soldering skills could have tackled this repair. The whole thing took less than 30 minutes. We ended up saving close to $1000-$1500.
Tools required:
I’m grateful that the information is out there and that I have at least enough basic skills to perform this type of repair. We had all the tools and skills in the house and frankly, our 10-year-old has the skills required to complete this repair with some guidance. This was a great example of where some basic DIY saved a lot of time and money.
It’s amazing to me that Toyota hasn’t done a recall on the part, since this seems to be a pretty common problem and a simple fix to a relatively expensive part.
Tonight I find myself putting together good old DB-9 connectors, and I realized that it’s been a long time since I have had need (or even seen) these connectors. They were once pretty ubiquitous, first on my Atari 2600 joysticks, and then as RS-232 cable connections. These cables are actually for connecting stepper motors to the driver board.
As I sit here soldering, shrink-wrapping, and enclosing the connectors, I realized that this task was part of my first paying job in computing. I was a employed as a trainee technician at ComputerPro of Kensington, MD when I was 13 or 14 years old. They mostly sold Kaypro and Leading Edge PC-compatible machines. I remember the first 286 systems arriving while I worked there — that must have been around 1985. That job was my first exposure to CP/M and DOS, the first time I saw a hard drive, and the first time I tried “business software” (Wordstar 2000 & Wordperfect 4.1).
Thinking back, those days were pretty exciting in the personal computer field. Hardware was expensive and the software was pretty rudimentary. Most PC users were still just hobbyists or gadget freaks,; there wasn’t really all that much you could use a computer for back then. But, it was the beginning of something big, and eventually it led to the whole world changing. Tonight, I working on a small desktop CNC mill. Most people who own one today are just hobbyists or DIY freaks; there isn’t really all that much you can use it for at the moment. But, I wonder if this isn’t the beginning of something else big?
This last semester, for the first time in years, I built a new Windows computer. For most things I prefer to use my Macintosh, but there are a couple of devices that Kim and I want to use that only have Windows drivers. Also having a Windows system also made my grading tasks easier for the operating systems class I was covering.
Not having had much experience with it, I chose to install Windows 7 (64-bit). In general, the experience has been really nice. The machine is snappy, and the operating system seems well designed and pretty simple to use. I do get annoyed from sometimes that Microsoft has changed long-standing Windows UI features/placement on a whim.
But one problem has plagued this system since I finished it: after going to sleep, it can take up to five minutes for the UI to become responsive. The screen would activate, the mouse would move the cursor, but attempting to use any part of the UI would just fail until the system decided to unfreeze a few minutes later. At which point all the pent up interface actions would suddenly start executing. I’ve been searching Google for a couple months for a solution to no avail — until yesterday. In a discussion of a sleep problem someone suggested turning off “taskbar auto-hide”. I couldn’t believe that would cause this particular problem, but after months with no progress I’m just desperate enough to try anything. Of course, the problem has vanished.
Further searching reveals many people with the same problem and that it’s been around since Windows 7 public beta. That means that Microsoft has had the opportunity to address this bug for almost 2 years. It’s somewhat appalling that they haven’t issued a fix considering there appears to many people who aren’t aware of the work around. Reports indicate that service pack 1, due later this year, will finally resolve the issue, but really Microsoft doesn’t earn anyone’s love or trust with this sort of lack of response to known issues.
What’s wrong with Windows? These days it is quite simply Microsoft’s treatment of it’s customers.
The annual Consumer Electronics Show is over. Sadly it was not the latest and greatest technological innovation that caught my eye amongst all of the product announcements. It was an April Fool’s Joke. Specifically, it was yet another joke product from the minds of the screaming monkeys at thinkgeek.com. Every year for April Fool’s day they come up with a series of fake products to advertise and sell on their site, and inevitably they rook a few hundred people into trying to order them. Past fake products included: caffeinated meatloaf, USB Desktop Tanning Center, Wireless Extension Cords, and the ZapCam – YouTube Tazer. You can experience the joy/frustration of thinkgeek’s April Fool’s page directly be clicking here.
But the irony is that several of their joke products have gone on to become actual products sold through their site, and rather successfully at that. Here’s at least a few:
Well, the latest product to make the jump from joke to sale aisle has just been announced at CES, the iCade (iPad arcade Cabinet). The iCade is a Bluetooth enabled arcade joystick with buttons, as well as iPad stand. It’s being built by ION Audio in conjunction with Thinkgeek, and they are working with Atari (and possibly unnamed others) to bring classic arcade games to the platform. So far, Atari has shown Asteroids as already working and ready for use with the device. The iCade is expected to ship for $99 ($50 less than the fake version), and will be available in two styles, the April Fool’s version available exclusively from Thinkgeek (pictured above) and a more generic one sold through various retailers (shown below).
And yes, I’m looking forward to owning one of these.
I’ve been using a Macbook Air as my main computer for a couple of years now, and I’ve generally been happy with the setup. The only real shortcoming of the Air was attempting to program while on away from my home office (and the external monitor). There just isn’t enough screen real estate on a Macbook Air for source code editor, test applications, and documentation simultaneously. While using Spaces can ameliorate the problem, it’s not a solution that works well for me.
The real “aha!” moment came with the introduction of Air Display for the iPad. For the low cost of $10, my iPad becomes a second (or third) monitor for my Mac and PC. I had a chance to test out the viability of mobile programming while at DevHouseDC-1. I did a little iPhone programming using the combination of the Macbook Air and iPad. Most of the main action stayed on the Air, but Apple iOS docs and a iPhone test instance both ran wirelessly on the iPad as external monitor. The results were fantastic, since the iPad support portrait and landscape use (dynamically), it was the perfect screen for documentation pages. Weird side effect, Air Display supports touchscreen input on the iPad, so I was testing my app in the emulator using touch input. I didn’t even notice what I was doing at the time, until someone pointed it out. Pretty surreal moment realizing you’re running touchscreen emulation on a touchscreen.
The combination of my Macbook Air (2010), iPad, and Air Display gets me more resolution than a 15″ Macbook Pro (even with the high resolution screen), and reasonably close to the pixel count of a 17″ Macbook pro (2.08M pixels vs. 2.30M pixels). The additional benefits of choosing the orientation of the screen and touch input probably even make up for most of the difference there. The whole package even comes in lighter than a 15″ Macbook pro, and I have the flexibility to leave either part at home if I don’t plan on doing any coding. Overall, I can highly recommend this setup to anyone who wants to do Mac/iOS development on the road, and it’s worth considering for any mobile coder.
Since byte.com is being revived soon, and in spite of the fact that the new incarnation sounds lame, I’ve had a good time going back and revisiting some of the publications of the day. You can find archives of Creative Computing here and here, as well as Compute! located here.
But the initial review of the Macintosh in Byte is great, partially because I didn’t see it at the time, and partially because it reminds me of how new the concepts that the Mac made popular were at the time. The author describes WYSIWYG, menus, the mouse, and the entire desktop metaphor. Finally, there are the quaint touches of a bygone era — using Sieve of Eratosthenes as a Benchmark, defining RAM and ROM, noting the high-resolution (512×342) display. The article gave me a chance to at once look back at the Mac as it was born, and Byte at it’s best.
Now that the orgy of torn wrapping paper and discarded cardboard is over. The gifts I gave seem to have been mostly duds. Kim doesn’t like the sheets for the bed, and the girls don’t seem interested in building any of their projects. I had planned on spending the afternoon busily assembling the minor DIY type projects with them, but instead I’m posting a blog update.
At the moment all the ladies of the house are working on a puzzle from the Nancy Drew game that the older munchkin got for her hackbook. At least it’s good to seem them puzzle solving and getting some entertainment out of the computers. I’m mostly messing with the fire since we apparently bought very expensive, but not totally seasoned, firewood.
I did make out like a bandit though. I got an Xbox Kinect, three Xbox games, a Micro CNC kit, a Lego Midi-scale Star Destroyer, and a lovely gray heather henley shirt from the girls.