|
Firstly, I've started tagging photos that I've used as backgrounds before here.
First-and-a-halfly: posting to WordPress from WebKit nightlies is still broken. Firefox on OS X. Yuk.
Secondly! Last weekend was the GNOME Developer's Summit; Matt and Robb and I went. We stayed at Matt's house again, which was excellent and convenient as always! The first day involved a talk from two of the awesome guys working on gobject-introspection (which is also a cornerstone of our project), which cleared up some of my fuzziness about introspection and their implementation (to some extent).
We (Robb) talked to Mark a little bit that day, and explained our plans (which I have yet to detail here, and won't today!). More about all that later...
Seed release later this week, after the planned gobject-introspection release. Yay for Seed! I'll write more about it after the release, post the tutorial I'm writing, etc. Pay no attention to the tutorial in SVN; I haven't gotten a GNOME SVN account yet, so none of my updates are there... we just switched to SVN from a Bazaar repo @ Launchpad, so all of our commit history is missing too... oh well. In any case... all will be fun!
P.S. Intervalometer is waiting on PCBs from BatchPCB, so it might be a while!
P.P.S. Registration soon (the third)! Looking at... Programming Languages, Graph Theory, Models of Computation, Multivar, Engineering Processes, Electronic Circuits (that'll get me through the end of Junior year CS and a little further... also not taking Typography this semester because apparently the teacher is... not... optimal... and everyone)
P.P.P.S. Robb's going to be working for litl starting next week. Yay for an NDA with your roommate :-P
I'm on my way to the GNOME Developer's Summit, but some news just came down the RSS tubes:
MacBook Pro video flaw
Apparently they're going to pay us back for having repaired our machines because of the flaw, and they're fixing the flaw for free from now on out (I presume this means out-of-warranty, which is good for everyone!). They're also acknowledging that it was still a problem with machines shipping last month (probably even this month), and that NVIDIA supposedly misled them in suggesting that no MacBook Pros were affected...
2008.10.05 in school
Today started rather lazily; Amy got up and read for a few hours; I got up at 11 (not being used to getting up at 6:00 like she is...). After getting dressed (we dressed up, to some extent, certainly a bit more than usual) for the day, we went to Commons for breakfast/lunch, dragging Matt along with us. A pretty normal, quiet Saturday morning, except for the Amy-being-here part.
We thought that one of the shows we were going to was at 2:00, so we headed over to EMPAC to pick up tickets and go to the show; I took my camera so we could take some pictures in the 30 minutes between ticket pickup time and the actual show (so that they didn't give away our tickets!).
Those pictures are on my Flickr now; it turned out we misread the website vs. the ticket receipt, and the show wasn't until 10, which was really optimal because that was the same showing Mike and Nate had three tickets to. We wandered a bit more, ran into Eli (my physics grad TA from last year who graduated, but came back to see EMPAC and have coffee with a bunch of our old class), and some others...
Carol had planned on doing dinner tonight, but for numerous reasons ended up making lunch instead; Amy and I headed over there in lieu of our 2:00 show. One of Carol's friends from home, Anna, is up for the weekend, so the four of us sat down to some excellent eggplant parmesan (I'd never eaten eggplant in that quantity nor cooked that way, as far as I can recall, but it was really very good!) and a long game of Apples to Apples... eventually we were joined by Victoria, which further broke the already broken-for-RPI ratio. All in all we had a great time, good food (as always!); even Amy came away smiling and admitting she had a good time, which is something to say considering the number of people she knew going in! We were there for a few hours, and when we finally returned to Davison (at a bit past 5), it was time to wake Robb up...
... and head back to EMPAC, this time with Nate and Mike and Matt and Robb! We met up with Carol and Anna again, and eventually Gino and Jillian, and the whole bunch of us went to the inaugural concert (with the Albany Symphony Orchestra). We were sitting just in front of the construction manager; it was rather humorous to hear some of his conversations with other people about some of the features of the building. The concert hall is absolutely beautiful, and really rather perfect, and every single one of you should convince me to take you to something in it some time! The concert was quite good, though they started out with rather old music even in the scheme of classical music, and it had a somewhat dark, dissonant feel. Things cheered up by the end, though, and they — of course — finished with a standing ovation!
Through a walk to Davison and back to EMPAC, we lost Carol, Anna, and Matt (on purpose) and went to a show in the theatre which turned out to be incredibly strange, and also rather loud (they handed out earplugs while we were walking in!)... it's not clear to me (or, I think, anyone else... numerous people walked out on the show) what the show was about, though there was a point where a girl laid on a bit of grass in the middle of the stage chanting "I wish ... (xyz)", over and over... and another point where a person dressed only in underwear and a space helmet was dancing around on the stage with a toy space shuttle and disk on a stick... and (at a different time) another astronaut-like-person sang Somewhere Over the Rainbow... it was really rather... strange. But cool! They made good use of the theatre, in any case, and it looks incredibly cool... ah, the possibilities :-)
We dragged Amy to Pizza Bella after that, had our midnight snack, and now we're back here, arguing over Orange and how best to destroy Robb's laptop... so, check out Flickr, comment on stuff, and have fun!
Later!
Tim
Yay! It's finally the opening weekend of the "Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center", or as we've all been calling it for a whole year now, EMPAC. It's a pretty big deal for the school, and is almost certainly the sink of most of our tuition money (along with the new athletic village, which makes even less sense...), so hopefully it turns out to be all we're hoping it does!
Amy came down for the weekend to say with Robb and I and to go to the opening weekend events we'd gotten tickets for; to pass the time tonight we went and saw Get Smart (again) at UPAC; we dragged Matt and Robb (who hadn't seen it before) along with us...
Tomorrow we're going to go to a concert, and various other EMPAC events... should be interesting!! Tonight they've got lots of searchlights (which, of course, made light-pollution-aware Matt somewhat unhappy), as you can see in the picture below!
2008.09.25 in school
A: Not to be nosy, but why haven't you been coming to analysis recently?
B: To be honest, it's because I've been working up the courage to ask you out!
So yeah... expect the occasional heard-at-RPI bit... except this one is a bit closer to home... and not... real :-P
So! It's been an awfully long time since I've written here; that's mostly because of school and stuff, also because I wasn't quite sure when I was going to get around to introducing my latest project, which is one of the only other things I have to write about right now!
I guess I'm finally getting around to introducing said project to everyone!
One of my "complaints" about my D80 is the lack of built in intervalometer (providing, of course, the ability to take time-lapse photographs). I won't be happy until I've duplicated every bit of functionality that my old Coolpix had, and this is really the only thing remaining... but the market for such devices leaves much to be desired. Prices are insane (as is usual in the photography world), with less justification than usual.
I've been a long time out of electronics (long long time), so I figured this would be a good project with which to get my feet wet again (in the process, I remembered how much fun it is to be able to manipulate things you build, and how awesome — if frustrating — the added puzzle of DIY hardware is)...
I started out by deciding what I wanted in my intervalometer, and ended up with the following list:
- Interval mode: straightforward, take a picture every so many seconds.
- Interval Bulb mode: take a picture every so many seconds, keeping the shutter open for a given duration
- Bulb mode: provide a way to hold the shutter open for longer than the camera's 30" limit
- Trigger mode: coupled with external trigger devices, allow the capture of photographs based off of high-speed triggers; such devices could be a laser beam-break switch, or a microphone
These seemed like a reasonable goal — if anyone can come up with an obvious or otherwise useful mode I'm missing, I'd be more than happy to add it! Next step was deciding my platform; this wasn't a particular problem, what with MAKE and the rest of the hobbyist electronics internet heralding the Arduino as the next coming of Einstein. I bought two Arduino-derived devices: the official Diecimila, and an unofficial clone, the Stickduino. Both have FTDI chips onboard, so they can plug straight into USB and be programmed from the Arduino environment (based loosely off of the Processing UI, which luckily runs natively on OS X, which factored in to my decision a little as well). Of course, our dorm wasn't exactly set up for electronics work, so I spent a bit more GSoC money getting all the random generic parts, breadboards, wires, tools, etc. that we would need for just about any project. I also grabbed some more project-specific parts: rotary encoders, LCDs, and various bits of silicon. I posted some pictures of the subsequent assembly on my Flickr, though none of them are up-to-date at all (I'll post more pictures tomorrow, perhaps, depending on homeworks). In fact, I'm confident in saying that nothing that sits in the most recent pictures is still on my breadboard, and the addition of 4 external ICs (shift register, digital potentiometer, 7400, 555) for various purposes has massively complicated things. New pictures must be taken! I'm at the point of PCB design now; I have working software, though there's still lots to grow there! I have to reconstruct my circuit from the ground up, and also test out the part of my schematic that involves driving the ATmega, since I'm not putting a whole Arduino in each intervalometer... EAGLE is a little bit complicated (much more so for PCB design than schematic work, which I'm getting quite comfortable with...), but seems to be what everyone uses! I've posted my code and schematic here, in a git repo. Have at it! (Especially if you see any obvious reductions to be made...) The last thing I have to figure out is what I'm going to do with the design when I'm done! I'm most certainly going to publish complete schematics, source code, ideas, pictures, parts lists, etc., but I think that it would be not-horribly-unreasonable to offer a kit, or even a constructed version for a significant bit of profit, and still be incredibly competitive (competition being ~150$ devices with no LCD and a couple of random knobs). The parts cost for my design is ~30$, not counting an enclosure and the PCB, neither of which will inflate the price much beyond ~50$... a featureful, pretty, easy-to-use, Canon-and-Nikon compatible intervalometer in the 80-90$ range would — I think — be welcomed, and provide a fair bit of profit, as well!
2008.08.30 in school
So! The first week of my sophomore year at RPI is over; some disconnected notes below:
- Our housing is excellent; two large rooms connected by a bathroom, so we've got lots of space; also, Robb and I bunked our beds, so we have a lot of space, especially on the other side, which is currently mostly filled with guitars, amps, and various electronic components.
- The only class I tend to be excited to go to is Intro to Visual Communication; the rest are just... bleh. I managed to get a lot of really dry professors this semester...
- It's really, really nice to be back with everyone again! Three months is too long!
- I've finished my GSoC evaluation, and probably won't be blogging about E anymore (or very very very sparsely if so), so if whoever runs planet E wants to remove my blog, that would be cool...
- EMPAC looks awesome. I can't wait until it opens.
- Bunking beds in Davison is hard — it requires disassembling 4 beds, in total, at least in our case!
- Carol (& DJ)'s apartment is really very cool! Good place to hang out/cook/whatever...
- More later... also I have Carmen and Intervalometer posts to write someday...
I'm going to be moving tomorrow, so this machine is going to go down sometime later tonight, and will be back probably tomorrow night.
I can't wait to get back to school :-)
So! Today marks the official end of Summer of Code, at least as far as coding is concerned. Final evaluations are due to Google between noon today and noon on September 1st...
I've decided to call revision c2c3fccb856771bf56fe15ad7c7ff66cf67ed2d9 my reviewable commit; I've not yet tested the Ecore stuff (which has progressed much further in the last 24 hours) in a clean install of Mac OS X, but that (and a patch!) will come soon.
It's been a lot of fun, for sure, and I learned a lot! Especially about Cocoa/CoreGraphics, and a bit about the EFL architecture and what it is the Enlightenment 'team' spends all of their time on :-) I'm not leaving for good, but what with moving back to RPI on Wednesday, and the end of GSoC, etc., I'm probably going to be missing for a week at least.
So I'll say... Nathan and Dan were both excellent mentors (I was sad to see Dan leave Enlightenment, what with his clearly rather rare knowledge of a significant portion of the EFL, but I quite much understand his decision, and hope he finds something excellent to devote his time to in the future), and I'm very glad I got to work with both of them (as well as the brief encounters I've had with other members of the team)!
And, to the project: there's certainly a good bit of awesome stuff going on here; I just hope that everyone can hold it together long enough to bring all the pieces together into something as awesome as the overarching idea of E seems to be. Good luck with that, for sure, and if you ever want an 'outside' head, drop me a line!
|
|
