http://www.laen.org Chaos is the raw material of order Wed, 14 May 2008 01:16:34 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en For dorkbotpdx last night, I made this little toy: It's an 8x8 red+green LED Matrix, driven by three shift registers driven by a Bare Bones Board Freeduino by Modern Device Company. Before the meeting I just had it flashing fun patterns based on odd bit-math equations. During the meeting, I was ... http://www.laen.org/2008/05/13/the-wii-matrix-board/ Analog pins 0-5 on the Arduino can be accessed as digital IO pins. They're numbered 14-19. http://www.laen.org/2008/05/06/arduino-hot-tip-of-the-day/ I just received this set of prototyping boards from ucHobby and their sponsor Wright Hobbies!! Hooray! I'm psyched. I have some projects I want to do that these boards will be perfect for. http://www.laen.org/2008/04/23/prototyping-boards-from-uchobby-and-wright-hobbies/ In order to encourage us to play with electronics more, JWA and I have begun doing monthly challenges. For our inaugural challenge, we decided upon an LED Birthday Candle. This is my entry to that challenge. You blow the center pole towards one side, and the LED shuts off. ... http://www.laen.org/2008/03/21/electronic-birthday-candle/ This is a Blog entry using Jott. This is using the Jott service, a voice to text service that so far is free, hurray. listen Powered by Jott http://www.laen.org/2008/03/20/this-is-a-blog-entry/ My Wiichuck adaptor arrived a couple of days ago, and I just hooked it up.  As my first project, I've written this, which uses the Wii nunchuck as a musical instrument.Source code: Freqin' WiiHook a speaker to the output pin (defined below, 13 by default), and hook the Wii adapter up to analog ... http://www.laen.org/2008/03/03/freqin-wii/  The electronic man holds his joy aloft.  He loves it, because he was built to love it.  It shines with the energy that courses through his body.  He wants to share his Light with the world, but fears that if he lets it go, he'll never know it's glow again.  http://www.laen.org/2008/03/02/awed-by-the-beauty-of-the-light/ I've recently become enraptured with a little microcontroller development board called the Arduino (pronounced "Arr-dwee-no"). This little thing is a great way to get started with electronics. You hook some electronic component to it, write a little bit of C, upload it to the board, and "tada!", you've invented some ... http://www.laen.org/2008/01/01/arduino/ 1 box double cheese hamburger helper 2 cups nonfat milk 1 1/2 cups hot water 6.5 ounces whole wheat rotini 1 pound frozen chopped spinach 1/2 pound ground turkey Prepare as per box instructions. Yum! http://www.laen.org/2007/12/13/healthy-hamburger-helper/ * 1 cup of rice * 1 small can of mushrooms * 1 carrot (sliced) * 1/2 bell pepper (diced) * 1 yellow or red potato (sliced into 1" pieces) * 1/2 onion (diced) * 1 large tomato (quartered) * 1 can vegetable or chicken broth * 2 cans canned chicken (drained) * 1 Tbsp paprika * 2 Tbsp dried ... http://www.laen.org/2007/09/19/vegetable-pilaf-with-chicken/ "Advanced Message Queuing Protocol":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Message_Queuing_Protocol ..An open protocol for messaging systems. Some implementations of AMQP(Advanced Message Queuing Protocol): * "Apache QPID":http://cwiki.apache.org/qpid/ * "RabbitMQ":http://www.rabbitmq.com/ * "OpenAMQ":http://www.openamq.org/ And some more information about it: * http://www.amqp.org/ http://www.laen.org/2007/04/23/rpcipc-and-messaging/ "0142 - Workgroups":http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0142.html This is for sending messages to _roles_. Several entities may join a Workgroup queue, and other entities may request chats with the workgroup (which then routes to the different entities when the chat is accepted by one of them). So, for alerting, we can send to the ... http://www.laen.org/2007/04/23/potentially-relevant-jeps-to-the-system-management-project/ Solaris patching is, frankly, a pain. Patch Check Advanced makes it less painful-- even _pleasant_. It'll automatically download the patch list from Sun, correlate it against what you have on your system, and present you with a list of what needs to happen. You can tell it to install all ... http://www.laen.org/2007/04/09/patch-check-advanced-solaris/ Two new photos, both taken from my living room window. Not photoshopped. Just a fortunate reflection: http://www.laen.org/2007/04/09/new-photos/ At dusk today, the fog rolled in. http://www.laen.org/2007/01/08/fog/ X4100s have a pretty cool integrated lights-out management card, but it doesn't have an easily integrate with Conserver. To fix, I created an expect script named "ilom-connect" like this: #!/usr/bin/expect -f expect { "(yes/no)?" {exp_send "yes\r"; exp_continue; } "password: " {exp_send "\r"; } } expect "\\-> " send "cd /SP/console\r" send "start\r" expect "(y/n)?" exp_send "y\r" Then, in ... http://www.laen.org/2006/10/09/conserver-and-sun-x4100s/ Slashfood is a delicious food blog, full of delicious looking food porn. Yum. http://www.laen.org/2006/10/09/slashfood/ ..This is a veggie wrap from a place I used to eat at in Florida. 1 eggplant, thinly sliced 1 yellow squash, thinly sliced 1 green zucchini, thinly sliced 1 red pepper 1 green pepper 5 ounces goat cheese 1 ounce sour cream 2 large spinach tortillas Lightly grill eggplant, squash and zucchini. Blacken peppers on grill, place in ... http://www.laen.org/2006/09/27/grilled-vegetable-and-goat-cheese-roulade/ This is an approximation of the "Zuppa Toscana" soup they serve at Olive Garden. It's sooo goood, and really easy to make. 1 lb. spicy Italian Sausage - crumbled 1/2 lb. smoked bacon - chopped 1 qt water (2) 14.5 oz cans chicken broth 2 large russet potatoes - cubed 1 medium onion - sliced 2 garlic ... http://www.laen.org/2006/09/27/zuppa-toscana-soup/ I spent the weekend loading Nexenta on my two home PCs. Nexenta is basically Ubuntu on an OpenSolaris kernel.  This gives you all the awesomenes of Ubuntu (apt-get, gnome, kde, GNU tools), with all the awesomeness of OpenSolaris (zones, ZFS, DTrace). Some cool things: The opensolaris packages are available via apt-get.  I wanted to set up some zones, so I did an "apt-get install sunwzoner sunwzoneu". "zoneadm -z zone1 install" fires off debootstrap and creates a Nexenta Zone. The install is super-easy.  Just boot ... http://www.laen.org/2006/09/26/nexenta-gnusolaris/ I was having a problem with Solaris's Basic Security Module. I'd make changes to the audit_control and run "audit -s", but it didn't look like it was having an effect. Or at least it wasn't taking effect for _every_ process. It turns out that each process's audit flags are ... http://www.laen.org/2006/03/23/solaris-bsm/ So, I wanted to play with a python package, but I didn't want to install it into my primary python distribution tree just yet. I couldn't find out how to override "site-packages", though. Finally, I found this: Create a file called "setup.cfg" in the directory that has your "setup.py". ... http://www.laen.org/2006/02/01/python-overriding-site-prefix-for-things-that-use-setuppy/ Okay, valuable things when learning ruby: * ri - This is like "perldoc". Use it to view the live ruby documentation. * irb - Interactive Ruby. This is like the perl debugger. ** "IRB Tab Completion":http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?Irb/TipsAndTricks -- Use this to view every available method on every object. * gems - A packaging ... http://www.laen.org/2005/11/26/learning-ruby/ If you get this CUPS error, it may mean that you don't have write permission to your CUPS spool directory (/var/spool/cups, by default). http://www.laen.org/2005/11/15/cups-request-entity-too-large/ Here's the build flags I used for building a 64-bit GCC for Solaris 9 (using Sun's Forte C compiler). This uses the GNU binutils ld and as. export GCC_EXEC_PREFIX= export LD_LIBRARY_PATH= cd build; test -d gcc-4.0.2 || gtar -jxvf ../src/gcc-4.0.2.tar.bz2 ... http://www.laen.org/2005/11/07/building-gcc-for-solaris-9/ Since this isn't documented anywhere in the ruby install docs that I can find... If you want your Ruby build to have openssl support, you'll need to compile with --with-openssl-dir=, pointing at your OpenSSL build. It seems kind of basic, but it doesn't show up in a ./configure --help, and it's ... http://www.laen.org/2005/11/07/ruby-and-openssl/ I'm jetlagged. It's not what I expected. I thought jetlag was primarily a sleep disorder. I thought I'd just have a tough time getting to sleep because of the time difference. This I can understand. You were going to bed at 2300 GMT, now you're going to ... http://www.laen.org/2005/09/01/jet-lagged/ Dear Endocrine System, I feel I owe you some of you an apology. While you've been working so hard to keep my body in balance, I've been undercutting your efforts. To those of you I've inconvenienced tonight, I'd like to apologize individually. Pineal Gland. You may be wondering ... http://www.laen.org/2005/01/30/to-my-endocrine-system/ I don't know how I feel about this photo. "The original":http://timestudies.skylab.org/origbeach.jpg was really plain and uninteresting, so I messed with the levels a bit in an attempt to cut through the fog and get some detail. Not very sucessful. So I went the opposite direction, shifting the histogram down ... http://www.laen.org/2005/01/16/oregon-coast-2/ An ice storm rolled through last night and coated the city in a thin layer of ice. !http://photo.zefyr.org/albums/userpics/10001/normal_CRW_0059.jpg!:"http://photo.zefyr.org/displayimage.php?album=19&pos=4" http://www.laen.org/2005/01/16/so-cold-so-very-very-cold/