Author: Dave Shevett

A wandering geek. Toys, shiny things, pursuits and distractions.

Oh, the weather outside is frightful…




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Originally uploaded by eidolon

This past week, as previously noted, I was down in NJ visiting my client. As such, I managed to miss the first snowstorm that came through on Thursday night.

Hahahhaha. I was not to escape so easily!

It’s still snowing out. The cleared driveway and path are nowhere to be seen. I’d call it another 11″ of snow has fallen, and it’s still going. Forecasts are saying it’ll turn to rain this afternoon, but it’s awfully chilly right now.

The kids next door are trying valiantly to bounce on their backyard trampoline, while it’s covered with a foot and a half of snow.

Zach’s curled up on the couch reading Harry Potter.

I miss my snowblower.

I CAN HAZ COFFEE MAKER!

A few times in the past year I’ve commented to my lovely wife regarding coffeemakers, and gosh-wouldn’t-it-be-nice if we had one that had a timer on it. I generally make a pot of coffee each morning, which involves the standard wash out the pot and gold filter, grind a new set of beans, fill up the tank, and hit start cycle. I’ve almost got my morning routine timed perfectly – I know how long the pot will take to brew, and I know when I need to be back downstairs.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if I could set a timer and have the pot ready the next morning?”
Well, it being Channukah and all, Cat got me a new coffeemaker, but went far beyond the pale and got a SUPER GEEKY coffeemaker.
The machine is a Keurig B-60 ‘single cup brewer’. Now, don’t let the ‘single cup’ thingy scare you. This isn’t some weeny little device that makes weak tan colored coffee and requires a half hour with the kitchen drudges to get clean.
The Keurig uses the little puncture-cups that have pre-measured coffee (apprently known as ‘K-Cups’). I’ve been skeptical of these puppies for a while, but I have to admit the first cup or two has come out just fine. The machine avoids a lot of the pitfalls I’ve seen in other automated machines. It has a ‘time on’ and ‘time off’ setting that changes when the reservoir is kept heated (I set mine to start at 7am, and turn off by 1pm – avoiding the machine keeping the heating element on all day). A full cups’ worth of water is kept inside the machine when idle, so you can change out the big tank without affecting the next cup of coffee. If the tank is empty, the machine lets you know on it’s little LCD screen.
The K-Cup approach to prepackaged coffee is fascinating, and allows the machine to make dozens of different types of coffee, or tea, or hot chocolate, without requiring a change of hardware between uses. For shared machines (like in our house), this is wonderful.
My only mild complaint about it is the noise. It uses a water pump to cycle water out of the tank into the internal heater, and that can be pretty rattly. I tend to make coffee after everyone has left the house, but my roomies may use it at early hours. I suppose it’s really no noisier than a coffee grinder, but it was a little alarming when it first started.
And. It has a cool blue glowing effect on it. I can have my cup of nuclear waste!
All in all, a vast improvement over the old Krups standard filter / pot. It served me well, and will most likely be used for social gatherings still, but my daily 2-3 cups are now coming from this puppy. Thanks Cat!

XO Laptop environment – Try it yourself!

I can’t help it, I’m too impatient. While waiting for my Zach’s XO laptop to arrive, I wanted to get a feel for what the environment was going to be like.
The XO uses a modified version of Redhat’s Fedora operating system, with a custom written ‘desktop’ called Sugar. Coupled with Sugar are several tools, including a music editor, video application, several programming tools, a web browser, etc etc. The environment had to be built in a way that non-english-speaking children could pick it up easily, and if the early reports are true, the team has done a great job at this.
But I wanted a chance to work with the environment before the laptop arrived. Fortunately, there’s a great series of pages on the OLPC Laptop wiki that describes how to set up an emulator, and run the laptop OS on your desktop machine.
After a little fiddling, I got it up and running, and was able to play around with the environment for a while.
First note – the emulator runs things -slower- than the laptop itself does, so I had to take into account I was seeing things at about half the speed a typical user would. But even with that, I was able to get a good feel for what the user experience was like.
I recommend anyone interested in this system to follow the emulator steps and take a look at it. I’m of the opinion that with several million of these going out to kids all over the world, the environment and tools are going have a major impact on the net at large. Opensource code (all written in Python, very good visual programming tools (like the Logo environment pictured here) – all will contribute to a new digital landscape over the next few years.

Our home.




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Originally uploaded by eidolon

Yesterday I went over to the site for our once-a-month allowable visit onto the property while construction is going on. It was a nippy 18 degrees out, and the sky had that slate gray of “I’m a-gonna snow on you!” look (and in fact, did drop about 2″ of snow later)

The changes that have gone on there are quite amazing. Foundations are complete on about 70% of the buildings, and in Camelot’s case, they even have some of the framing in progresss on two of their units.

This particular picture is actually of the unit Cat, Zach and I will be living in. It’s a “large 3 bedroom + 2 1 bedroom flats” configuration, in this shot, our ‘side’ is on the right. If you’d like to see what it’ll look like when done, we have floor plans and exterior elevations available.

But there’s other wonders. The common house basement is in place, foundation poured and all the forms removed.

Seeing most of the foundations in place is really giving me a sense of what the space will be like. Our narrow walkways are… well, narrow! And the ‘upper lobe’ of buildings is going to feel more like a courtyard than anything else, an unexpected pleasure, to me!

After almost 8 years of working on this project, seeing it finally coming to life is a wonder. Walking down the north path toward the common house… pacing the actual walk from where the workshop (eventually) will be to my front door… it was stirring.

Dear Intarweb…

Somewhere, back in the mists of UI design, some bright light came up with the idea of making options in an application or desktop environment selectable by using a mouse to point at a menu along the top of a work area, clicking on the menu, and having it present more options.
This was called a ‘Pull down menu’
Handy! Picks were readily available when needed, and stayed out of the way until requested.
I’m fairly sure the original designers of menuing systems never said to themselves, “Hey guys, I think it would be a good idea to SHOW A PULLDOWN MENU JUST BECAUSE YOUR MOUSE HAPPENED TO ROLL ACROSS IT ON ITS WAY TO PAUSE YOUR MUSIC!
I’m flabbergasted that the ‘popup menu’ has become de rigeur in web pages. It’s a terrible UI design, and consistently gets in the way when trying to do other things. There’s no other menuing system on the planet that does this. Menus should show up when you ASK for them, not because you happen to TOUCH it. That’s what the little button the mouse is for. See? Clicky clicky. Now you try it.
Not that I expect this to change anytime in the near future. There’s a revolution going on in UI design now, with AJAX services redefining what it means to write a UI. Unfortunately, I have yet to see any AJAX application that comes near the functionality of existing systems. It appears programmers are going back to 1985 and starting over, thus jettisoning all the lessons learned in the last 20 years.

Facebook. Am I missing something?

Dave Belfer-Shevett's Facebook profileSo I have a profile on Facebook. It’s been enjoyable fiddling around with the apps and linking up with other folks, and all that has been peachy keen. In particular, I rather like the Twitter-esque ‘Status Updates’ that folks can use to say “I’m home, and eating sushi” or whatever else strikes their fancy.

The problem is, I frequently see a Status update where someone says “I’m feeling down” and what I really want to do is go “Oh? What’s up?”

But it appears the only way I can do that is to:

  1. Click on the users name to go to their profile
  2. Click on ‘Send [user] a message’
  3. Type a subject “So you’re down?”
  4. type a message
  5. hit send

This doesn’t seem like the interactive social structure I was looking for, where I could simply follow up on something I see with a “hey, what’s up?”. A message sent as above has no context, is not attached to the status update, etc etc.

In fact, Facebook seems structured in a way to NOT encourage that sort of spontaneous communication. It’s more geared to “Lets funnel people toward shared functions or applications” as opposed to “Lets make it easier for people to communicate.”

What am I missing? The initial funness of the site is starting to wear off a little bit. There’s zillions of people on Facebook. What keeps them there?

Google Sketchup – Okay, this is cool

I’ve been having fun playing with Sketchup, Google’s 3d modelling system. At first I avoided it because there was no native Linux version, even going as far as to get it to run under Wine (a process that… well, didn’t fail completely, but did result in a tool that’s unuseable – invisible menus, etc).
After biting the bullet and installing it on clipper, I set about learning what it could do. The project I had in mind was to model Mosaic’s building site in Berlin, MA, so folks could have a feeling for what it would be like walking
There was certainly a period of mental adjustment. After all, it’s not easy trying to model a 3d object using a 2 dimensional input and display method. But after a while, the keyboard shortcuts began to come naturally, and I found myself enjoying manipulating objects in this non-existent space.
I’m probably halfway through things so far. I’m regularly updating the drawing in 3dWarehouse, Google’s sharing service for Sketchup. If you have the tool, feel free to download the drawing so far…

I’ll let folks know when I’m done. But Google. Please? Make a Linux native version. You’ve already got Windows and Mac. This can’t be that hard.

Linksys router upgrade

Nothing like a nice quiet thanksgiving weekend to take it easy around the house, enjoy some quiet time with the family, and… UPGRADE YOUR ROUTER!
Our Linksys WRT54g has been happily managing our net connection for about 2 years now. I’ve been noticing some twitchy problems with it off and on (about once a month it stops handing out DHCP addresses, we have to reboot it), and it has shown other small problems. The final straw came about 6 months ago when I realized I had lost the administration password. This meant I couldn’t even log INTO the router to find out what was wrong with it. Something had to be done!
(6 months later)
Okay, time to fix it! I reset the router (holding in the reset button for 10 seconds does this) which resets it to factory defaults. The default password on Linksys routers is just ‘admin’ in the password field (surfing the neighborhood? See an SSID of ‘linksys’? Hit 192.168.1.1, and try ‘admin’ in the password field. Welcome to someone’s router! – some versions of the linksys may require admin in the username field as well).
The first thing I did was confirm that I could log into the router and that default configurations worked with our Comcast cable modem (they did). After resetting the password and the SSID, I took the opportunity to upgrade the firmware in the router. And I’m super-happy I did.
The firmware I was using was v 1.00.02. The current version is 1.02.2. The number of ‘fixes’ between those versions? somewhere around a bazillion. On the one hand, I do appreciate that Linksys is actively updating their firmware. On the other hand, that’s a lot of bugfixes for a router that’s only 18 months old.
I’m seriously considering checking out DD-WRT, the opensource firmware for the WRT54G. It has a truly impressive feature list, including native OpenVPN client and server support. Unfortunately, my router is a Version 6, which only has 2mb of flash in it. That means I can’t run fit a larger firmware image onto the device. Alas. Maybe I’ll eBay an older revision that has 16meg in it.
For now, I’m back up and running, and hopefully won’t have my roomies having to fight with constant connection drops and router resets.

OLPC G1G1 Program netting $2m a day

As reported on Engadget :

Negroptone’s OLPC Buy One, Give One program has been extended to 31 December, 2007 — well beyond the initial two-weeks originally announced. The deal buys both yourself (or rather, your kid supposedly) and a tot from a developing nation new XOs for just $399. Already, the non-profit claims to be pulling in about $2 Million worth of “donations” each day. They’ve also opened up bulk buying to schools in quantities of 100-999 ($299 each), 1000-9999 ($249 each), or 10,000 and more ($199). Oh, and the program is now officially renamed “Give One, Get One” (GoGo) — we presume BoGo’ing the kids just sounded a tad too dirty.

We ordered one for Zach already, and I’d been curious about how the sales were going. Folks on the #olpc Freenode channel were saying that the manufacturer would build based on orders, and if orders were slow, they wouldn’t ramp up the daily production. But it looks like things are moving briskly.
Yay!

Dear eBay. Fix your HTML. Again.

I know you’re the largest online auction house on the planet. I realize that despite the bazillions of dollars you rake in on a yearly basis, you still haven’t been able to hire a single competent site designer, and after 10-ish years of operation, your site still looks like it was hacked together by a business major playing around with Microsoft FrontPage.
Requiring ActiveX when selecting images to upload is patently ridiculous, particularly when my browser signature specifically says I’m coming from a Linux box.

c.activeXVersion = ‘1,0,3,48’;

You’ll be receiving a bill shortly for the 20 minutes I spent booting my Windows machine, moving images over to it, and recreating my auction from scratch.
Luv, me.

Life snapshot…

“Dad?”
“Yeah zach, what’s up?”
“I’m posting something in a forum, how do you make a link?”
(Dad pauses here, thinking scary thoughts about open forums, but willing to check it out…)
“What forum?”
“OneMoreLevel”
(Another pause to check it out – chats about online games. Okay, this seems innocuous enough…)
(details about how to make a PHPBB link in a forum post)
“Oh, that’s easy, thanks!”
“Enjoy!”
sakkura. My son. Am I ready for this? I mean, he’s already talking smack to other players 🙂 🙂 🙂 . Not sure if this should make me squee with glee or totally give me the heebee jeebees.

Mame Cabinets – Things learned thus far

Blk and FroggerWe’re about halfway through the whole Mame project hullaballoo, so, since I inflicted my Mame cabinet on Ubercon a week and a half ago, it’s really only fitting I take a few minutes to contemplate the lessons learned so far.

First and foremost, I have no regrets embarking on this whole rigamarole. It’s been a tremendous amount of work, but it’s work that’s resulted in something tactile. I can point to the cabinet and say “See that? I built that. And those folks gaming on it? Yep, they’re enjoying themselves because of my handiwork. Rock on.”

That’s not to say the path hasn’t been without it’s bumps and bruises. None of the decisions I’ve made so far are gruesome enough to regret, but it’s certainly time for a bit of reflection. Lets see what’s working, and what isn’t.

Works

Lets start things out on a positive note. What’s working?

  • Xmame
    Because I’m using an older version of MythTV on deathstar, I’m still using Xmame. In the retrogaming world, Xmame is a dinosaur. Most serious Linux-runners have moved on to SDL-mame, which is more up to date and has had some wonderful work done to it. Having said that, Xmame has behaved swimmingly for running my games. I will certainly migrate away from it to SDL mame soon, but for the time being, it’s working great.

  • I-Pac from Ultimarc
    Originally I was going to hack in the console controllers using USB-based gamepads modified for the pushbuttons and joysticks. But after thinking about it, using a $39 iPac keyboard encoder seemed to be by FAR the path of least pain. The board arrived, and was up and running in no time. In the basic configuration, it’s awesome (and they even have a USB version now. Double-bonus).

  • Plywood
    I had my misgivings about using raw plywood on the cabinet. However, it’s working out remarkably well. Cheap, easy to build with, quick to assemble. Once the entire cabinet is done, I’ll sand, paint, and finish the surfaces so they’re less rough on the skin, but all in all, I’m pretty happy.

  • Panel layout
    I was very nervous about this one. I came up with my own joystick / button panel layout, after looking at various ones online. It’s not a massive variation from standard 6-button + JS arrangements, but it was also not from any known template. Single player and dual player gameplay worked just fine, with the joysticks and buttons and other controls all working the way they should, and players being comfortable with where everything was.

Needs Improvement

Since the project is only halfway done, what’s really on my mind are the things that don’t work so well. So here’s my punchlist of stuff I want to work on…

  • deathstar
    This makes me sort of sad, but I have to really take it into account. deathstar has been my all-around mythtv / retrogaming box for several years now, and it’s showing it’s age. It’s a mere Athlon 1400, and the larger games were not running well on it. That, combined with it being a full size chassis (heavy!) means that there are better options for the brains of the box. A new machine is really needed

  • Mythgame
    This is the component in MythTV that is used for playing retrogames. In theory, it has a nice GUI interface that allows basic menu navigation, even using the joystick and buttons. In practice, it works VERY poorly. Keystrokes were misplaced, the menus were hard to navigate, and searching through large game lists was nigh on impossible. There are several other Linux front ends kicking around on the net, it’s time to explore the others.

  • 4 way Joysticks
    I picked up the standard el cheapo 4 way microswitch based joysticks off ebay. They’re.. okay. I can feel the springs already wearing out on the left hand controller (it now has ‘slop’ in the neutral position). I’ll need to replace them with 4 / 8 way joysticks with a restrictor plate at some point.

  • Cabinet stability
    If anything pointed out that an arcade cabinet needs to be stable, it’s schlepping the whole thing to a convention and back, and letting others bang on it. The cabinet needs to be SOLID. The current incarnation is getting there, but I’ll need to pay more attention to stability.

  • Monitor size
    I used a spare 15″ LCD monitor, sitting on the cabinet, for gameplay. While this was ‘okay’,it missed a lot of the arcade experience. A 19″ ‘high mounted’ display, which I’m planning for the upper part of the cabinet, is definitely going to be the way to go.

All in all? I’m reasonably happy with the progress. I can see where I need to improve things, and see where things are working. I’m still playing games on it and enjoying it, but I also want to improve and expand it. All good traits, I think.