Pirateguillermo
Mechadarwin
A blog about my evolving relationship with and understanding of technology.
Something I discovered recently that bears writing down: you can define all the handlers and actions you want in your code but if you don't actually list them in your android manifest, then you can't dispatch intents to them.
I had written the main Action of the chicken book to list all the entries and that worked, and I'd made a second Action to display and edit a single entry and that worked. Then, since it was perfect, I fixed it and in the fixing I removed the reference to the...
I just read a story on NPR's website about a co-working space in New York. There are a couple of co-working spaces in our area; Hope Foundry (the excellent program that developed this website) happens at NextSpace in Santa Cruz, and...
I just read a story on NPR's website about a co-working space in New York. There are a couple of co-working spaces in our area; Hope Foundry (the excellent program that developed this website) happens at NextSpace in Santa Cruz, and...
From time to time, and increasingly frequently at this time of year, my dear wife has to send out emails to big segments of her company's customer base. That's her job, after all. However, for reasons that are outside the scope of this blog, the list of customers doesn't always have an email for each customer and, for various other reasons, the email addresses are not always well-formed. It takes her several hours each time to go through the list and manually screen them all. I like to see...
Over the weekend I started working on writing a simulation environment. On Saturday morning, I had an empty project. This morning, I have a couple of sample components that I can link together (programmatically, it's true). I can tell them that time is passing and have messages flow and computation occur correctly. And I've got unit tests for all this, so I can tell when I break it in the future. Not bad for a day and a half!
I keep thinking about the Salamander Simulation Engine (SSE) -- a codebase I worked on in the mid-nineties -- and thinking what a cool tool it was. For that matter, it likely still is, although the company has changed name and direction a bit since 1997. Now it's DecisionPower and they're all about market simulation. Back then they (we) were Salamander Interactive and it was about this general purpose simulation engine.
The SSE was a way of...
Recently, the Nuu-nuu's battery has gotten flaky. Eventually rechargeable batteries will stop being able to hold as much charge as they once did, and the time has come to replace the power pack. I ordered a replacement battery pack from iRobot, but was notified (by email) after I'd placed the order that the battery was on backorder.
Then, a few weeks later, I received another email telling me that there is no expected ship date for the battery. This email encouraged me to call...
To make the BIAJ talk, we wanted some kind of chatbot to respond to typed comments. My first thought was of the classic ELIZA program, but I wondered if there might be something more appropriate.
See the full description and download the source from my repository.
We've set up a web camera to look at the chickens. It seems to be dropping packets -- some when it's mounted outside under the eaves looking at the yard, lots when it's mounted inside the chicken house. I suspect that, because there's no external antenna, the camera suffers more from signal attenuation than my laptop does (where the antenna is in the lid, behind the screen). Even the laptop has less than perfect signal in the chicken house, so that would make sense. Meanwhile, it's dark in...