Categories
Projects
Archives
- September 2018
- June 2018
- March 2018
- January 2018
- December 2017
- October 2017
- September 2017
- July 2017
- June 2017
- April 2017
- March 2017
- February 2017
- January 2017
- November 2016
- October 2016
- September 2016
- August 2016
- July 2016
- June 2016
- May 2016
- April 2016
- March 2016
- February 2016
- January 2016
- November 2015
- October 2015
- September 2015
- July 2015
- June 2015
- May 2015
- April 2015
- March 2015
- February 2015
- January 2015
- December 2014
- November 2014
- October 2014
- September 2014
- August 2014
- July 2014
- June 2014
- May 2014
- April 2014
- March 2014
- February 2014
- January 2014
- December 2013
- November 2013
- October 2013
- September 2013
- August 2013
- July 2013
- June 2013
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
Category Archives: Technical
Experimenting with a Particle.io Photon
The Photon, made by Particle.io, is a small microcontroller with built-in wifi. What makes the Photon unique as compared to many other MCUs is its integration with the Particle ecosystem. That ecosystem makes it exceptionally easy to develop, deploy, and … Continue reading
Pan-Tilt with OpenCV
Face Tracking to a Drive Pan/Tilt This was an ad hoc project using OpenCV to detect faces in real-time and drive a simple pan/tilt platform with a camera attached. A built-in laptop webcam ran the face detection and controlled the pan/tilt servos. A separate webcam attached … Continue reading
Get off my lawn – Why Java/Spring/Hibernate/Maven still Wins
This could be a risky post for me to make. At the end of it, I could come off as an old man that simply doesn’t want to learn new tricks, and thus, my future job prospects might decrease. However, … Continue reading
Posted in Technical
Leave a comment
Adding external directory to Spring Boot’s static resources handling
I’ve been using Spring Boot recently, and it’s great. However, some things are not yet intuitive. For instance, mapping an external directory to the default static resources handling. The only way I know of, currently, is to provide a custom … Continue reading
Posted in Technical
Leave a comment
Pan/Tilt Servo Control (v4)
A few photos and brief video showing showing new interface and latest iteration of my custom pan/tilt video system. This is a small experiment inside of a larger software framework for interacting with physical devices. I’ve also been using it … Continue reading
Posted in Projects, Technical
Leave a comment
Java vs .NET, I am no longer ambivalent
I’m not one to take part in flame wars. Luckily very few read this blog, because I feel compelled to go on record with the following statement: “No developer that is proficient in both modern Java and Microsoft .NET, would … Continue reading
Posted in Miscellaneous, Technical
6 Comments
Using com0com and RealTerm on Windows 8 (x64) & 8.1
Every new version of Windows seems to make this harder. (See updates below for windows 8.1 x64)
Posted in Technical
5 Comments
Posting compressed JSON Content to ASP.NET Web API Controller
I had a requirement to POST gzipped JSON content to a .NET web api controller. It turns out the technique for doing this is not easy, or at least not common knowledge. (Have I mentioned lately how much I dislike working with .NET?) So I decided to post here so that I can become a .NET expert some day too. Continue reading
Matlab Integration and Alternatives, such as SciPy
This post contains informal notes collected while researching options and techniques for using Matlab to do complex numerical programming work while integrating with existing code bases. Also includes notes and links on alternatives. I used a trial version of MATLAB … Continue reading
Posted in Technical
Leave a comment
Useful Visual Studio/Resharper Shortcuts
Useful non-obvious shortcuts: ctrl-minus back to previous position ctrl-shift-minus forward to previous position alt-end navigate to derived symbol works on various symbol types shift-alt-l locate in solution explorer <resharper> No one that has used and learned IDEs like IntelliJ or … Continue reading
Posted in Technical
Leave a comment
Bookmarklets for iPad
Send to Pocket (ReadItLater) javascript:(function(){ISRIL_H=’d1ad’;PKT_D=’getpocket.com’;ISRIL_SCRIPT=document.createElement(‘SCRIPT’);ISRIL_SCRIPT.type=’text/javascript’;ISRIL_SCRIPT.src=’https://’+PKT_D+’/b/r.js’;document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)[0].appendChild(ISRIL_SCRIPT)})(); Send to Evernote javascript:(function(){EN_CLIP_HOST=’https://www.evernote.com’;try{var x=document.createElement(‘SCRIPT’);x.type=’text/javascript’;x.src=EN_CLIP_HOST+’/public/bookmarkClipper.js?’+(new Date().getTime()/100000);document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)[0].appendChild(x);}catch(e){location.href=EN_CLIP_HOST+’/clip.action?url=’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+’&title=’+encodeURIComponent(document.title);}})(); Send to Pinboard.in javascript:q=location.href;if(document.getSelection)%7Bd=document.getSelection();%7Delse%7Bd=”;%7D;p=document.title;void(open(‘https://pinboard.in/add?url=’+encodeURIComponent(q)+’&description=’+encodeURIComponent(d)+’&title=’+encodeURIComponent(p),’Pinboard’,%20’toolbar=no,width=700,height=350′));
Posted in Technical
Leave a comment
Tomcat 7 startup time with metadata-complete
For anyone using Spring Framework with Tomcat 7, be sure to research the new annotation scanning (servlets-2.5) and web fragment (servlet-3.0) features of J2EE6. It’s enabled by default in Tomcat 7. The result when using Spring’s annotations, is that … Continue reading
Posted in Technical
2 Comments
Software Framework for Robotics
This post describes the current state a software framework I have been working on randomly over the past year. It was designed to allow for advanced experimentation around concepts that come in to play when interfacing a computer to the … Continue reading
Posted in Projects, Technical
Leave a comment
Nokia and Microsoft
http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/blog/nokia-developer-news/2011/02/11/letter-to-developers wow. What a storm this has kicked up in the developer community. I’m kind-of frustrated as well and I don’t even have any skin in the game. On the mobile side, this play makes a lot of sense for … Continue reading
Posted in Technical
Leave a comment
RGB LED w/ Joystick
Summary The PC reads the joystick position and communicates messages to a Parallax Propellor microcontroller. The microcontroller processes the messages and then controls the BlinkM RGB LED using it’s I2C interface. Video (I also created a much longer explanation video. … Continue reading
Posted in Projects, Technical
Leave a comment
Regarding Facebook
Pondering Companies worth less than Facebook Assange vs. Zuckerberg Technical How Facebook Ships Code Building Facebook Apps for Clients Advertising Facebook is a like Ponzi Scheme 3rd Biggest Advertiser is (Allegedly) Bing Affiliate Scam – (more)
Posted in Miscellaneous, Technical
Leave a comment
SQL to select filename component of path
The following works on MySQL to extract base filename component of a complete file path.
Posted in Technical
Leave a comment