Archive for the ‘Computing’ Category

James Gosling interview transcript

There’s a good interview with James Gosling at Basement Coders. Some comments on Sun, Oracle, the future of Java, Google, and much, much more.

New Robot picture

I’ve got a picture now with the Ping))) ultrasonic rangefinder installed. I also added some collision switches in front of the wheels. Here’s a link (finally) to my project files.

New robot pictures

Here are some new robot pictures. I have a much better mount for the sensors now and they are working as well as they can. Unfortunately, I don’t think passive infrared motion sensors will work for what I want. They’re too erratic for use on a robot. They’d be fine for a stationary unit that […]

My cat-chasing robot now has sensors

I now have sensors. They’re a bit lopsided, but they function. It’s worse that they’re a bit off-center. My code needs work. It tends to find a cat (or me) and then move forwards a bit, then start spinning. And here’s a movie. Click the image to play it.

My cat-chasing robot

This is very early. The robot doesn’t yet have any sensors. It has two front wheels and a caster in the center back. My plan is to put some thermal motion detectors on it and go towards the motion. At the moment it just goes in squares. Forwards for a second and a half, then […]

Dithering about phones and tablets

Those who know me know that I’ve been dithering about mobile phones and internet tablets for some months now. I’d like a larger screen than my iPhone 3G has, but I consider the iPad a bit large. And it doesn’t make calls. I was rather hoping for an ideal Android tablet to come out with […]

Arduino is fun

So I have long been irritated at the lack of flexibility of the sort of programmable thermostats you can get through the retail market, e.g. Home Depot, Lowe’s, etc. I’ve wanted to make my own. Now, thanks to the Arduino platform I can do it with a minimum of soldering! Behold: And some detail on […]

Against iPhone Framework

I’ve gotten past my general disgust at the look of the Objective-C language. After all, I programmed a lot of Perl over the years. But no garbage collection on the iPhone? This is 2010! You’ve got to be kidding me! “Hiya developers, hiya, hiya, hiya. We’ve got this device with seriously limited memory, so we’re […]

IOS 4 (formerly iPhone OS 4)

The Gold Master of IOS 4 was released to developers this week. I downloaded it and installed it on my iPhone 3G, which is the oldest hardware it will run on. It runs a bit slowly, but that’s to be expected. There are features such as the multitasking that are advertised not to work on […]

DTerm is a great app for the Mac

I’ve been using git for awhile now and I also use Eclipse as my IDE. Eclipse doesn’t yet have good support for git, though they’re working on it. So I do a lot of command line git commands. I found the DTerm app and it’s great! Basically, you just press Cmd-Shift-Enter and a command line […]