Wed, 31 Oct 2007
Gratuitous Update
In a transparent attempt to not leave the month of October blog entry-free here's a quick and gratuitous update.
One-way wiki
As noted back in July, I've been running a personal "one-way wiki" as an experiment. My primary goal was to get more of my in-progress hacks off my harddrive and onto the public net where they might be of more use to someone. The secondary goal was to try to reduce the number of browser tabs I had open and chewing up memory.
Overall I think the experiment has been a success with a (very) rough count of about ten-thousand words over about thirty pages in the wiki. While many of those words are only links there's a few in-progress projects partially documented also.
I still probably have more tabs open than I'd like but I think I'm making progress on that front.
The wiki has definitely been a plus for documenting in-progress projects and keeping track of details for recovering from context switches. Hopefully the notes—such as they are—are of use to others as well.
I think the only down-side is that my blogging activity has become even more curtailed than it was—mainly because I'm documenting items in the wiki rather than on the blog. It is entirely possible of course that I wouldn't have posted anything more to this blog even if if I hadn't had the wiki. In light of this however (and a couple of requests in this direction) I'm thinking of generating blog entries from the "recent changes" record of the wiki so people who are interested can still keep track of what I'm up to. When or if this idea actually gets implemented remains to be seen. :-)
Recent changes
In the interim here's a few links into the wiki:
- Most of my recent projects have focused on the Arduino hardware platform. I've been working on interfacing an I/O expander and ethernet module with success. You can check out my Arduino interfacing demonstration videos too.
- A growing list of links on various electronics topics including PCB-making, DIY test equipment and tutorials.
- Some notes on using the open source elecrtonic design software package KiCad on Mac OS X.
- I also created a set of electronic breadboard templates in SVG, PNG and PDF formats. That page even got featured on the Makezine blog.
- Finally for now, an in-progress project to reverse engineer the Skannerz Racerz hand-held link-able toy racing game. This project has also made use of the xoscope sound-card oscilloscope software package.
Posted at: 23:20 | category: / | | Comments ()
Fri, 27 Jul 2007
pwyky wiki
Like many hackerly-inclined individuals I tend to develop or research a lot more stuff than I release or comment on. The reasons for non-release vary but generally relate to the non-trivial amount of work it takes to put even a half-baked idea on a webpage or blog entry. (A workload increased by the accompanying handy case of perfection-itis.)
The amount of work required to document something depends significantly on the tools at hand so in light of that I've installed a version of the pwyky python wiki on code.rancidbacon.com. The version I'm running is actually a cosmetically modified version of a modified pwyky version hacked by a guy I ran into during my Google Maps hacking escapades. There's some notes on the modified pwyky version and they include some Apache configuration suggestions also.
I'm treating the site as a "one-way wiki"--it's intended to make it easy for me to update it, not in order foster community additions. Various obvious reasons apply.
The updated site will include project documentation and general link-storage--I guess a local del.icio.us replacement--in an attempt to reduce my browser-tabbage when I'm exploring half a dozen paths at once. While much of the wiki is intended purely for my use I made it public on the off-chance it ends up being useful for anyone else.
With some use of mod_rewrite I think I even managed to preserve the existing URLs on the site.
"Oh, I'll chuck it in the wiki" will hopefully help with my information processing activities... :-)
Posted at: 02:05 | category: / | | Comments ()
Tue, 27 Feb 2007
Blog software update
I finally got around to adding some features to this here blog:
- Paged display—yep, now you only get ten entries displayed at a time rather than 60+. Faster load time, less bandwidth, everyone's a winner! Functionality implemented thanks to the wbgpager PyBlosxom pager plugin.
- Category list—thanks to the
pycategoriesplugin from the PyBlosxom contrib plugins pack the right-hand sidebar now actually lists the entry categories. I don't overly like the default display but as I'm thinking of switching to a tags-based approach anyway I'm not going to look into changing the layout at present. - Tags—Speaking of tags... I used this "sorted" version of Joe Topjian's
tagplugin to implement tag functionality—roll on 2004, or something. I should go back and tag my earlier posts, but we'll see if that actually happens—if I do so I'll probably move the categories over to tags and remove the categories. I should also display a tag cloud (or as I like to call it: a "list") but we'll leave that for later too. - Monthly archive links—the right-hand sidebar now also lists direct links to archives for each of the months in which I've posted entries. (I wonder if this year will see entries in more than half the months? :-)) Which reminds me, still on my blog's to-do list is importing my entries from Advogato. Unlikely to happen anytime soon.
Oh, I don't think I mentioned when I was putting this blog together originally that I *cough*stole*cough* the style-sheet from Andrew J Todd of halfcooked.com. I've meant to add an attribution to the source which I have now done and have finally emailed to check my use is okay with him. Such terrible netiquette on my behalf, just shameful. [Update: Andy replied and apparently the theme is now available from the MainlyGreen page of the PyBlosxom flavour repository.]
I wasn't planning on doing all this when I started tonight, but I guess it's done now. :-)
Oh, yes, and thanks to all the coders who made this new functionality possible.
Posted at: 03:30 | category: / | | Comments ()