Archive for the ‘Random’ Category

Glowback – Arduino-powered glowing ceramic creature

While I spend most of my time in front of a keyboard and monitor, my wife Eva Funderburgh spends her time sculpting amazing, imaginary ceramic creatures. Her beasts are assembled out of different clays and wood-fired. About a year ago she enlisted my help in building a new type of beast with egg-shaped domes on its back. The idea was to have the domes glow and pulse with an organic, bioluminescent light. (Note: This was way before we’d seen Avatar!) Eva had already built and fired the beast a few months earlier, using thin shells of translucent Southern Ice porcelain for the domes. She left a few of the domes unattached so we could get lights inside after the firing.

The start of the Glowback

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Middle mouse button on a ThinkPad

File this under small victories, I guess. A couple months ago my trusty old ThinkPad R51 decided to cook itself to death, so I went ahead and got a shiny new ThinkPad T500. It’s quite an upgrade, but I missed one feature from my old machine. ThinkPads have this weird hybrid pointing device called a TrackPoint which consists of a trackpad and two buttons, then a nubbin-pointer and three buttons for that. On my old ThinkPad I could use the nubbin’s center button as a middle-click, which is great for opening links in new tabs, closing tabs, Unix-style copy/paste, etc.

t500

I didn’t even use the nubbin, I just used its button. However, on my new ThinkPad, the center button switched the nubbin to scrolling mode, and turning that off in the driver just made the button do nothing! However, I recently stumbled upon the solution. If you completely uninstall the UltraNav driver, the middle button becomes a normal middle mouse button again, and the nubbin and trackpad still work. Tab management is easy again!

Posts I haven’t written

I haven’t been updating this blog too much recently. I never meant for this blog to run on a schedule, but I did intend to post more frequently than this. My original idea was that the blog would serve two major purposes. First, it is a place for me to announce new projects or updates to software and websites I’ve already released. It’s done that quite well, though I haven’t had much to announce recently. My job has been taking the majority of my development time, and most of the projects I’ve been working on at home are either private or haven’t been released in the form I’d like to because my employer hasn’t approved them for release yet.

The second major purpose for my blog is as a place for me to record the solution to problems I run across while developing software, so that others won’t have to spend hours Googling or using trial and error to come to the same conclusion. I didn’t intend to rehash things that were easily found or that had already been discussed – only to post when I felt it was something that added value to the internet that hadn’t been there before. So a lot of the blog posts are not really a narrative or running commentary – they’re not meant to be subscribed to, but found individually. It’s for this reason that my most popular posts tend to include the exact text of error messages. This type of post has suffered both because I haven’t been doing as much development, because I can’t discuss a lot of what I’ve learned due to the nature of the projects I’m working on, and because I’ve been learning new stuff (like Ruby on Rails) and haven’t done enough to have solved problems others haven’t already posted solutions for.

The third reason I have this blog is to occasionally talk about my thoughts on different technical topics, from web development to video games. Again, I don’t like to make a post unless I think I’m adding something new, and most of the topics I’ve wanted to talk about have already been covered. I had a lot of draft posts sitting around about web development, web standards, and the evolution of browsers, but then I discovered Alex Russell’s blog and it turns out he’s already said most of what I wanted to say, and better than I could. Other stuff, like my impressions of Windows Vista, critique of stackoverflow.com and suggestions for the Xbox Live Arcade lineup, have been covered to my satisfaction in plenty of places. Maybe some of them will end up posted, but probably not.

Another part of the reason I haven’t posted much is the sheer weight of unfinished posts I have. Right now I have 64 drafts and only 52 real posts! So I’m going to attempt to clear things out by writing a little about what I haven’t posted. A lot of this stuff wasn’t posted because it fell under that third point above, but some of it I was just too lazy to flesh out into real posts. Some of it’s just random stuff. So here’s what’s been happening in the last year:

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Website work

I’ve been pretty quiet on the blog lately, partly because I went on a long vacation and partly because I’ve been too busy with real work to do anything much on at-home projects (at least, at-home code projects). Another reason is that I’ve been working on a couple websites that hadn’t launched until recently. The first project was a website for Butterfly Haptics, which is my parents’ new company. They’re producing a really cool magnetic levitation haptic interface – a sort of super-high-tech 3D mouse that lets you feel virtual objects as if they were solid. I’m really excited about what they’re building, and I’ll be at SIGGRAPH this year manning their booth in the New Tech Demos area.

Butterfly Haptics Screenshot

The other site, which just launched, is my wife’s new art site. She makes wood-fired ceramic sculptures of bizarre, cute creatures, and the new site was hand-drawn by her to reflect their style. It’s implemented as a Wordpress theme, which gives her a much easier way to manage the content of the site, and it also means that she can now blog about her process and other art topics. Check out some of the cool time-lapse videos of her sculpting the critters.

evafunderburgh.com Screenshot

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to. Hopefully soon I’ll be able to get back to building more cool things and talking about them, as well as clearing out my backlog of draft blog posts.

Setting up IIS7 (with bonus PHP instructions!)

Every time I try to set up IIS7 on a Windows Vista machine I run into the same series of problems. You’d think I’d have learned by now, but I usually just struggle through the cryptic error messages and get it working one way or another, then forget about it until the next time I need IIS7 on a machine that doesn’t have it. Finally I’d had enough and so I decided to write myself a little guide here so I won’t waste as much time next time. These instructions are basically the same as these, but with additional detail and screenshots.

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