My good friend Alexi from Siteground assured me that my new server is a good one. One that has MySQL 5.0 and PHP 5.2.17. Even though my cpanel was reporting 5.2.17, such was not the case for my PHP version…as fate would have it, my Wordpress update to 3.2 puked violently. I did the prudent thing; edited my .htaccess root file, etc. After getting good old swantron.com up and rolling, I still couldn’t access my admin page. That let me know that my SQL junk was also fishy. Looks like I need to look into self-hosting options. Long story short, Alexi got me migrated to a server with some real deal software. Siteground may have had my site hosted on some bullshit tech, but they did get me up and running quickly. I have done some research, and my server neighbors used to be primarily pr0n sites…I wish them luck with their hosting. Guessing they were unaffected by this upgrade that made me stumble, but if not, my condolences to the pervs. We will see…I might get into the hosting biz.

Still dining finely on fancy lunches in the cubicle. This week’s installment…three gourmet burgers. I find three to be the ideal number of main entree items at the office. —————————————————————— Unit 1, consumed at 10:00 AM, acts to lessen the coffee shakes. Unit 2, consumed around noon, acts to kill the smells of coworkers’ lunches Unit 3, consumed at 2:00 PM, pretty much just food show-boating at this point +1 food show-boating

I have two speeds when it comes to projects: percolate and bazooka. Whereas my swantron comment / to / LCD project was bazooka, this Twitter deal has been percolate. Haven’t been able to jump in completely, rather, I have been poking this one with a stick. Still poking… Making progress…snagging my Twitter page via Python, and dumping it to LCD: I just need to hammer out some parsing, and I will be good to go. I really need to figure out some sweet regex and drop this whole ‘import (some junk)’ stuff. Who knows…at this rate, I just may.

I guess I had better find a new bucket list entry… I was so excited upon beating Ocarina of Time, I snapped a self portrait with the end-screen… …and, I am in my 30s. Wow. Now what? My nerd bucket list needs a new entry. Maybe I should finish my LED cube project. Maybe I should finish my command line Twitter work. Maybe I should take on Ocarina of Time 3D… Probably not the last one…not pumped about the 3DS. Something great will ensue.

Don’t call it a comeback. Or a re-branding. You can’t really re-brand something that lacks, in large, a brand. Let’s just say, I’m dropping the ninja. The robot stays, but knows his place. Carry on.

A while back, I collected my first Woot BOC. The prize crap in the bag of crap was, without any doubt, the radio controlled Batman helicopter. Great Scott… Wrong movie catch phrase, right? Well, so too are the aerodynamics of a helicopter SHAPED LIKE BATMAN. She is not a very sky-worthy vessel. The rotors push air directly into the clear plastic tab connected to his booted feet…it is not stable at all. Time to tear it up. I figured that I could remove the obstructive plastic and have a machine that would function well enough to navigate around the garage-shop. I removed the guys legs, which were light enough to be approximated with a zip tie. As I had hoped, the new lower portion acted to dampen some of the erratic flight. It was stable enough to allow me to snap that picture…not a possibility with the unmodified original. Curiosity got the best of me, as it always tends to. I had to break this apart to see how it worked. I am sort of impressed I took the intermediate steps this time…most of my tear down sessions are done quickly and rabidly. This was sort of impressive, actually. The foam chest cavity was hollow to allow for the constituent components…including the mechanical gears. Light, protective, and durable…the triple threat. It was, until I removed it completely… There you have it…pretty basic design. Two variable motors, an IR receiver, a battery, a DC power jack, a switch, some caps and resisters, and a chip to run it. The IR sensor was hidden in Batman’s utility belt. Great Scott that is clever. After all of that, this puppy still flies… I was pretty gun shy to let that rip. It took a couple of dives in my first two picture attempts, wrapping the battery cord around the rotor assembly. It still works…pretty tough little guy. Next step…I’m going to get into that controller. It acts as both the charging unit and IR sender, in addition to providing the variable control to the motors. It shall be awesome. Stay tuned.

Most of the programmers around me subside wholly on Mountain Dew and Cup ‘o Noodle. Time to class-up this joint. Skewers should do the trick. +1 fancy.

I sort of forget what my original project entailed…something about tweeting via the command line, for Arduino purposes. You can pretty much just toss a bunch of words in a hat, and add ‘Arduino’ and ‘Command Line’ to them, and there you have one of my typical projects. Anyhow, here we find ourselves. I am missing some dependencies with OAuth, but have managed to get twitter working from an interactive python shell: This section is as much for my reference as it is for public knowledge…I snagged the commands that I ran to snag my comments. It first prints swantr0n (my dev account) and then my primary Twitter feed, @swantron

swantron@mini9:~$ python Python 2.7.1+ (r271:86832, Apr 11 2011, 18:05:24) [GCC 4.5.2] on linux2 Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information. »> import twitter »> api = twitter.Api() »> feedSwantron = api.GetUserTimeline(‘swantron’) »> feedSwantr0n = api.GetUserTimeline(‘swantr0n’) »> print [ x.text for x in feedSwantr0n] [‘development account for @swantron | tune into http://t.co/SpDFBkK for projects’, ‘hello world’] »> print [ x.text for x in feedSwantron] [’@vftb …you better believe it’, ‘Twitter Project Teaser : http://t.co/7ZrOLUn | one step closer to tweeting from the #CLI … might take a run at make it tweet’, ‘Might need to implement some sleeves into my wardrobe… @adafruit just flipped the script with open source cuff links’, ‘unsafe at any speed… updating #ubuntu on the road http://t.co/Q8gfc56', ‘Upgrading Mini 9 to #Ubuntu Natty http://t.co/7yT9w81 | posting to kill time… review here ( http://t.co/RM675lX ) lunch-aft on the morrow’, ‘https://swantron.com/basic-mower-cord-repair/ #DIY lawn mower repair from a #math major. spoiler: it works’, “#arduino no you didn’t https://swantron.com/html-to-python-to-arduino-to-lcd/ #LCD project, stepped up a bit”, ‘working on a python script to dump info from web to LCD https://swantron.com/python-teaser/ #arduino’, ‘http://youtu.be/MpomhE6dgww video of #boc unboxing (for the win)’, ‘#woot bag-o-crap unboxing @ https://swantron.com/woot-boc-unboxing/ not too shabby’, ‘https://swantron.com/compiz-error-in-ubuntu-natty/ still finding some compiz issues in #ubuntu 11.04’, ‘#Arduino project @ https://swantron.com/command-line-lcd-arduino-interface/ | driving LCD screen via command line’, ‘@RobotGrrl… what version are you running? I had no problems with IOIO / Droid 2 (froyo 2.2)’, ‘Easy LCD #Arduino Display | https://swantron.com/easy-lcd-arduino-display/ | feels good to have a warm soldering iron and functional hardware’] »> I will keep plugging away until I get this thing hammered out. If not, I can print this suff to my LCD for a real-time Twitter display. Could be cool either way.

Q) What would make a guy throw caution to the wind, and void a (quite significant) warranty on a piece of technology? A) An internet addiction. I rooted my Droid 2 a while back, largely due that answer above. That power-thirsty screen, with all of its hi-def beauty, is awesome for web browsing. My project requirements often find myself hammering out code on either my netbook or notebook, in dire need of an internet connection. Poor wi-fi signals just don’t cut it…I rooted my phone for access to that lovely Verizon 3G. Don’t tell Verizon. Do tell Verizon that my battery life is easily doubled, now that their bloat-wear has been removed. Nuked from orbit. But, I digress. There are many, many places that have either awful cell reception or no reception at all. What is a guy to do? Connect from orbit… Say you have just moved to a new house. Say you are in a trough of garbage cell coverage…out in the country, maybe. You will find yourself with two likely options: low speed dial-up internet, or high speed [link removed]. I bet you know which one I would chose. Hit that link to see what I am talking about. It is the only viable option for a decent connection at times. If you want some numbers, with these connections you can see download speeds up to 1.5Mbp…which is roughly 30 times faster than dial-up. See…no joke here. The weird thing is that these packages are pretty much the same price as my connection with Bresnan. Sort of puzzling how they can offer deals like this. Hit that link to see what I am getting at. I’m off to feed my internet addiction.

A while back, I tossed a little concept video out to the nets regarding CLI interface with my site’s comments and an LCD screen. I figured that I could do a similar thing with my Twitter account…spurred largely by Adafruit’s Make it Tweet challenge. Well, it turns out that Twitter has a few hurdles to jump, in regards to posting tweets to an account. My failed usage from the command line was utilising curl > curl -u swantron:pass -d status=“command line test” http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xmlI was getting an error message, that basic authentication was not supported. For the loss. It turns out that you need a few keys in order to authenticate, which requires registering an app with Twitter… like this There we go…keys in hand. Now, I need to figure out how to sew this together using curl or wget. If all else fails, I am pretty sure there is a py library that I can snag. Stay tuned…this one could be fun.