V-Day Eyeglasses

Cranky baby. Not a whole bunch of sleep. Shifted sense of humor, or some sort of tiredness induced insanity.

Either I have completely blasted past any sort of touch with reality, or this is really funny…

awesome eyeglasses

...hmm

A bit of a side note. I was poking around for some new frames, started looking at some online prescription frames, and got fully side tracked. Somehow looking at basic options found me checking out Valentine’s Day glasses, and ultimately dropping a pair of V-Day glasses on top of a sweet robot jpeg. One must admit, the frames are both completely conducive towards Valentine’s day cheer, and for robotic…oh I don’t know…something.

Zenni kills it, regardless of the style. Take a quick look at the source of the image…

zenni frame pink

yep

I think they would look equally amazing on a human. Preferably a female human.

Tired stupor aside, it is very amazing how far the internet has brought certain industries into the hands of the consumer. Glasses provide a terrific point. I have purchased three sets of frames from Zenni, and can say with a great deal of certainty, that my time in a brick and mortar spectacle shop are done. Have prescription, will go.

Anyhow…sorry about the tired ramble post. It still cracks me up though…

Android Dev Teaser

Before the rugrat showed up, I managed to make some progress on my next project. I just realized that I hadn’t put together a teaser post, hence this quickie.

I started thinking about how to make a better UI to control my remote control via Android project. Instead of going with a touch base, I figured I could implement control utilizing the on-board orientation sensors.

This ultimately led to figuring out how to break said values out…a la this little app:

xyz

precisely

I wrote a simple app that dumps the sensor values of each x, y, and z axes, for values between -90 and +90 degrees.

The next step would to be to clean up the display, provide some visualizations, (graph-ish perhaps) and use the values to control something physical. No promises on the timeline, but if it gets to be too far out, I will dump this code on GitHub for general public perusal. Back to diapers…

WWF Royal Rumble

Zig and I have been having some heated Words with Friends battles recently. I had to snap a screenshot of this ridiculous game status…

words with amigos

unacceptable? that shit's got ice, dude

It was bullshit that Ziggy wasn’t awarded more points for playing his handle, and bullshit too that Europa wasn’t an acceptable play. We both got over it.

We are pretty evenly matched…I might be ahead by two games. Sad day in Mudville when I am addicted to a Zynga game…too bad the Scrabble app for Android was borderline unusable. Zynga would kill it, score-wise. Mental note.

SOPA Day

I stumbled upon a SOPA protest last night…I first thought Wikipedia had jumped the gun, but realized it was after midnight on the Eastern side of things.

entropy

nerd search

Elsewhere for some entropy info…which will show up shortly in a post.

Anyhow, this morning I found some good info on the reddit blog that concisely runs through some technical details of SOPA and PROTECT IP. Take a look…it is important.

Managed Service Provider

So, I’ve been doing this software thing for a while now. It is a strange, strange industry. It is becoming more apparent that every implementation of a generic service ends up falling into a similar life cycle. They all start with an idea, mash together a product, and go to market. The tricky part lies in new features, new connectivity, implementing the product on new technology as it arises, etc. That et cetera is sort of the name of the game. As the playing field changes, the product must too change.

To make matters worse, things move at a quicker pace now more than ever. It is pretty shortsighted to assume your product will ever hit a true support phase. When that happens, you are likely no longer a player in your industry.

The name of the game is managing your services…

managed service provider

single point of contact = spoc

From time to time I check out hosting and virtualization providers on the nets. I stumbled across NCC Data, a Dallas managed service provider, who offers a product that essentially addresses my rant above. The key word is, undoubtedly, manage.

Once you hit a certain level of critical mass, you must make the decision weather to support your goods in house (custom code, legacy systems, chopped and screwed…) or take on somebody to hammer out your details. NCC can handle your virtualization, support, security, and the whole other range of hosting headaches. Hit the link to take a look.

RBG LED Controller

My off-the-cuff remark about building an auxiliary bilirubin light manifested itself into a quick project.

In order to approximate the specific color of the bilirubin lamp, I figured that I would need to provide a means of setting PWM values for the three inputs. I had hard-coded values in Arduino code in the past, so thought about taking that route initially. I blew the dust off my Duemillova, fired up the Arduino IDE, and promptly decided to modify my Java servo PWM code to do the job.

Sort of growing attached to the IOIO…sorry Arduino.

So, the controller was born…IOIORBG.

rbg led

RBG ... RGB

Hit the bump for a video and some more info…
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