Current Stories
Friday, 3. May 2013
Adding an Extensible User Admin UI to Meteor.js05/03/2013 Surprisingly, there was no UI for managing users in Meteor.js, so I wrote a package named "accounts-admin-ui" for it. This describes some of the design details that didn't belong on that package's description page.
(0) Friday, 5. April 2013
Entering the Atmosphere with Meteor.js04/05/2013 You generally don't get to try out an entirely new framework on a consulting project, so this year's framework to play with on my time was Meteor which is a Node.js framework. There's been a lot of excitement about Node.js on the web development side the past few years (with the promise of coding in Javascript on the server and client) and one of the leading frameworks using Node.js as a base layer is Meteor (as of this writing version 0.6.0).
To truly understand a framework, it's not enough to look at documentation and examples. IMHO, you have to implement a non-trivial application that includes security and attempt to roll it out for public consumption. I decided to write an app named ChoosePix that would help with my photography hobby; in particular, the process/workflow of culling out "keepers" from a photoshoot is what I implemented.
(2) Friday, 1. March 2013
Olimex MSP430 JTAG Debugger Pinout Differences03/01/2013 Thought I'd warn folks about it here as well on the Olimex forum in case they want to use
Tag-Connect cables w/ any Olimex MSP430 debuggers. The official TI FET-UIF pinout is as follows (if you're looking at the end of the 14-pin cable, pin 1 is at the upper left of the red indicator, then 2 is lower left, etc.):
1 - RST
2 - VCC to board
8 - TEST
9 - GND
Instead of following this standard pinout, Olimex decided to move RST (SBWTDIO) from pin 1 to pin 11.
Then on all of their MSP430 development boards, they added two jumpers to make their boards compatible w/ their MSP430 debuggers and TI's:
If you're using the MSP430 Launchpad to test this, disconnect the RST/TEST/VCC jumpers to disable the Launchpad's built-in debugger which doesn't support blowing the security fuse. Olimex's MSP430 debuggers at least don't require the 330 ohm resistor that the TI ones do to protect their devices from damage from the high voltage used for the security fuse operation.
p.s., on 20-pin MSP430 devices, pin 1 is VCC, pin 20 is VSS/GND, pin 17 is TEST, and pin 16 is RST
On the tag-connect 6-pin IDC cable, pin1 is RST, pin 2 is VCC, pin 5 is GND, and pin 6 is test
(0) Friday, 15. February 2013
Fixing Non-persistent Mapped Network Drives with UAC (Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8)02/15/2013 04:05 PM If you map local drives so you can have a uniform build environment (e.g., mapping drive S: as your source code drive), you'll get bitten by this if you switch to Windows 8 because of UAC. Apparently, the network drive disappears if you run a build script that runs other executables. You have to add the EnableLinkedConnections setting in the registry and reboot to go back to XP's old behavior:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937624?wa=wsignin1.0
(0) Monday, 11. February 2013
Hacking Radioshack's USB Electronic Scale with libusb-win/libusb-java02/11/2013 12:18 PM I upgraded to Windows8 64-bit recently and found out the Radioshack postal scale I bought a while back no longer works. Radioshack no longer plans to update the ancient drivers so, thanks to posts from Eric Jiang and Caskey Dickson, I wrote up a quick utility in Java that uses Swing for the GUI:
Not a pretty graphicical UI of the front of a typical electronic scale like the OEM application, but it shows the info I need to put into various shipping sites. One thing that bugged me about the old UI is that it didn't display the weight in Pounds w/ a decimal point that some sites wanted, so I had to convert the display Lb/Oz values to a straight Lb value so that's why there are two English units readouts.
(3) Saturday, 2. February 2013
Meteor.js/Derby.js (Node.js underneath) vs. Vert.x02/02/2013 03:34 PM Quick comparison of these frameworks for a new web app I'm writing (note that these frameworks are rapidly evolving so what is below is only valid as of the creation date of this article obviously). This is a summary of features (though Vert.x isn't really a web framework...it's mostly the foundation on which you can put frameworks on via its event bus so it'll depend a lot on what modules are available for the language you use in Vert.x).
(2) Monday, 7. January 2013
!DOCTYPE html Fixes MSIE Floating div Layouts01/07/2013 09:15 PM Reworked the Lotus Notes FAQ website to use a "Responsive CSS" layout using the Bootstrap Framework and it worked great until I tested w/ older versions of MSIE and horrible floating <div> issues. After lots of copy/pasting thinking I had missed a tag pairing, the culprit turned out to be the HTML documents missing "<!DOCTYPE html>" at the top. Nuts. :-P (0) Saturday, 1. December 2012
OMG Funny: OS/2 and IBM and MS...the old days12/01/2012 06:22 PM This is hilarious, for the folks that remember OS/2 (I helped port COM/OLE to OS/2 for Lotus, so it's particularly funny to me because I've seen MS code 
)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/23/why_os2_failed_part_one/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/26/os2_final_fail/
(0)
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