This is the first of a set of posts detailing projects that never made it to the blog. This last winter, I was working on a relationship with an ex of mine, and I decided to learn a new trade skill to make her something impressive. So I etched some copper plates using the electrolytic etching method outlined at steampunkworkshop.com and attached them to moleskin notebooks. It’s really quite an interesting process, and the results are spectacular. This is the first of the two plates:
Copper Plate Electrolytic Etching of Justice and Athena
My work is one of the most political environments I’ve ever set foot in. Smoke and mirrors, backstabbery, setting up other managers to take your fall and empire building are all daily events in the building. Well, today I had a set of magnets made as a tribute to middle management everywhere. I present to you my first work of magnetic commentary:
What Would Machiavelli Do?
For those of you who don’t know, this is the esteemed Niccolò Machiavelli. A 16th century diplomat, political philosopher, musician, poet, playwright, author of The Prince, and all around political badass. Far and away, his most famous quote from The Prince is “It is best to be both feared and loved; however, if one cannot be both it is better to be feared than loved.”
Personally, I plan on giving these things out like candy. If your work happens to also be a political nightmare, you can get your own in the evilsoft store at cafe press.
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately working on various electronics projects, but for some reason I haven’t been posting the results. Well, I’ve decided to end that with my latest project. A bit over a month ago, I was reading Jonathan Guberman’s call for other people to join his project to make an RGB 40h monome clone. It looked like a lot of fun, so I decided to get in on his board order and join the project.
So after a few weekends of soldering, and lots of waiting for numerous part orders from digikey and sparkfun, I have gotten my Tinct (since dubbed Tinct 1) up and running about 7 days after Tinct 0 first bathed Jonathan in it’s cool LED glow. So, here it is, along with some other photos in my new flickr photo stream
Now I need to get crackin on making some useful command line utils for Tinct, as I’m on a linux box, and the vast majority of the software for monome appears to be for the proprietary Max/MSP environment, which does not run on linux. Besides, I think that this has a lot of potential as a visual feedback device for a unix box.
Last month a bunch of us were sent by Vonage to RailsConf 2007. I did a talk (with my co-worker Stephen Becker) on working with legacy systems, and the approach we have been talking to using rails (and other technologies) to eat away at the problem (I’ve since nick named this approach the “Evaporative Model of Legacy System Maintenance”). I’ve had a couple people ask me for the presentation or a transcript, so I’m posting those here now.
Some time ago a co-worker passed me an article about “Extreme Feedback” devices that could be attached to your autobuild system with the express intent of making it very visible that the build is broken, and potentially being irritating enough to help motivate people towards fixing the broken build. Since reading this article I have been somewhat consumed with the concept of creating one of these devices for my team. Keeping builds clean is hard, and without a constant reminder, it can be very easy for people to let the build stay broken for long periods of time. This essentially defeats the purpose of doing autobuilds, and potentially even unit testing.
I Looked into the Ambient Orb, but I have to admit, I wasn’t particularly thrilled with the fact that it has a monthly subscription, and you can’t talk directly to it with your computer. So I started to teach myself electronics in the hope that I would be able to build one of these devices on my own. After a month or so, I ran into the Arduino platform, which struck me as the perfect platform for building an orb from scratch. This is the end result of my project is this, The Arduino Orb Build Warden:
This Device has the following features:
USB
Simplistic API for scripts that monitor a build system
3 modes
Single color mode: You can send colors in web format (e.g. #RRGGBB)
Alert mode: The orb will flash a color passed in from full intensity to %20 intensity (Format is similar to web format: %RRGGBB)
Roam mode: The orb will morph from one random color to another for as long as you leave it. (Format is the string ‘roam’)
Here is the device in action:
The design of the Build Warden was heavily influenced by Tod E. Kurt’s Arduino Ambient Orb from his Spooky Arduino class. I started with that as a base, and went from there.
Simpify
