Category Archives: Technical

Technology specific posts related to software/hardware development.

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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)

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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

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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

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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

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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′));

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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)

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SQL to select filename component of path

The following works on MySQL to extract base filename component of a complete file path.

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