December 2007 Entries
Already a little old news, but wow! I love hacking projects and this one is just awesome. Now I want a Wii even more than before! This guy has come up with a hack to use the infrared camera built-in to the Wiimote to watch a specially modified pen (an infrared LED added to it). With the Wiimote sending pen tracking info to the PC, it can track your movements like a mouse on any surface like an expensive digital whiteboard. Even better, it can track more than one spot at once! Incredible job, with obvious applications. If I...
I recently had to work with an Excel spreadsheet that originated as a data export from another system. The problem was that all dates had been imported as string values -- that is, with the leading single quote. I needed to create PivotTables/PivotCharts from the data, but none of the date grouping would work. So what to do? The first thought was to just change the format of the field. Logical, yes? Successful? No. The format field (as makes sense) is for formatting. It has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of a field. I considered writing a macro...
So my newest system (dual core, AMD 64-bit, PCI-Express, DDR2...) had a VGA and an HDMI port on it. "Eh?!" I thought to myself. Why not DVI at least! I was worried that HDMI might only be good for digital TV, or worse, a direct digital connection for the analog VGA output (given Vista's dislike of protected content over an analog connection). I ordered a $5 HDMI-to-DVI adapter from an eBay seller, and it arrived this morning. I popped it in place, toggled "Force TV detection" in the ATI settings, and voila! It sees it properly and drives my Viewsonic...
On December 3, I spoke at the Cedar Rapids INETA meeting about LINQ. Titled, A New World of Data Access with LINQ, I had a great time sharing my enthusiasm about the newest data access technologies for .NET developers. LINQ is fully supported in Visual Studio 2008, even Express editions. I just love how LINQ unifies data access between databases, in-memory collections, and XML sources. The language constructs are a bit of a departure from standard programming, yet I felt acclimated to them pretty quickly. Of course there's a whole range of features that I haven't dug into yet. As...
Recently, I received a review copy of the book, "The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Idea Book" by Martijn Boogaarts. I'm definitely an avid Mindstorms user, so I'm always looking for good books. My sons and I are always playing with our set, I started a robotics club at my younger son's elementary, and I co-coach a junior high FIRST LEGO League team. Finding great projects is a good way to supplement the creative homebrew creations. The included instructions are great for ideas, but you want more after some time.
I really enjoyed this book. The layout is well-done with a good number...