// Tue 2008.08.12 22:16 // {wbl weird blinking lights}
Back in the 80’s, I thought it was the coolest thing that you could call up someone in San Jose, tell them you were interested in such and so category of parts, and they’d send you a great box of literature. I obsessively read the app notes and features of the 8051 and 8048 “single [...]
-->// Sat 2008.08.9 21:58 // {applet wbl weird blinking lights}
For our Trylon and Perisphere installation, it seemed like it’d be more dramatic if the lights only came on at night. Some of these lights are Cool Neon, and others are Pic-controlled LEDs. To do this required three problems to be solved: 1) sense light, 2) switch circuits of various voltages on and off, 3) [...]
-->// Fri 2008.08.8 22:42 // {wbl weird blinking lights}
A Future City
Our project for Burning Man this year is a minuscule reproduction of the Trylon and Perisphere from the 1939 World’s Fair. Google it, it’s worth reading a little, seeing a few photos…
Ours will be 16″ in diameter, with a tiny miniature city inside (as opposed to the giant miniature city within the original).
Naturally, [...]
-->// Fri 2008.08.8 22:15 // {introduction}
Well, well. This blog seems to have settled in to several parallel tracks for me, stripes of several colors. It’s been tricky to discern, since my attention is sporadic, spasmodic, but statistically it becomes clear.
In the first stripe are the occasional attempts at formalizing my half-baked and self-contradictory ideas about How To Make Computer Programs, [...]
// Sat 2008.07.26 23:41 // {mac os x}
Executive summary
qt_tools 2.7 corrects some incompatibilities with Mac OS X 10.5, “Leopard”.
Quick recap
qt_tools is my set of free command line tools for recompressing and examining QuickTime movies. And it got broke by Mac OS X 10.5.
Pointless details
So, somewhere along the way, Apple made a strange and subtle change to their process launcher. The [...]
// Thu 2008.06.12 09:17 // {broad generalities code}
A body of code is never finished
The authors have in mind some “next steps”
The code implicitly supports these particular next steps, and similar ones
The code implicitly hinders wildly different next steps
Adoption by users implicitly supports the current state and, depending on apparent paradigm, supports the intended next steps
Adoption by users resulting in persistent manifestations of [...]
// Tue 2008.06.3 08:43 // {scripting}
Respected cognizant advocates the J-word: Daniel Jalkut over at Red Sweater.
In this case, he’s suggesting making it Apple’s OS-level application scripting langauge.
This darned language just keeps appearing. Standard across the board for Adobe’s application scripting, and Flash (more or less), built into Java 6, built into Qt 4 and later. Interesting.
// Tue 2008.05.27 16:46 // {code java}
I was working on some code, and finding that it broke a bunch of unit tests. By the advanced method of “commenting out the new stuff”, I found that the line in red below appeared to be causing the problem.
If I commented out the line in red, everything worked! Put it back in, it all [...]
// Mon 2008.05.26 22:41 // {wbl weird blinking lights}
SEND MORE BOARDS
Noodling around with more boards. Nothing too insightful here, but I do love to post glamor shots of LED’s and such. I’ll call out the actual technical tidbits in an attempt to be useful.
Useful Technical Tidbit 1: How to Solder Surface Mount Parts
So I got these cute little surface mount boards and TQFP [...]
// Thu 2008.05.22 12:17 // {broad generalities future}
This morning my girlfriend had to get up at 4am to catch a flight to Arkansas. After seeing her off, I dozed and had some abstract dreams, which eventually crystalized into a design meditation for a ludicrous web 2.0 product.
Ludicrous? You decide. Let me know if you get rich with it.
The general concept is [...]