Alive and Thinkin'

Thu 26 May 2011

I am alive. Apologies to folks who were following the electronics stuff -- the short version is that it worked, although I didn't get to use it 'in anger' as such. The other thing I learned is that when traveling through UK customs on the week of a royal wedding, having a small plastic box with wires coming out of it and a 9v battery strapped to it with tape is not a clever thing to have in your car (thankfully the customs official had a sense of humour).

Since then I've been doing a bunch of for-money work, and only took time out this week to relax. I occasionally take a week off to hang around at home and get 'life administrivia' done. Think of it as a concrete block on the see-saw of work-life balance.

I've been playing around a bit with generalised messaging for domotics updates. I'm thinking of a centralised controller that can accept events from various signals, such as the Current Cost meter, a wifi device coming in range, or a small IC hanging off the doorbell circuit, for example. A lot of these devices don't have particularly fully-functional network stacks, so I'll have to bite the bullet and get the handful of ZigBee radios I got recently working. Doorbell will be the fun one, I think. My house already has a (private) twitter account, and DMs me for various stuff (unknown hosts grabbing a DHCP lease on the network, etc.). Adding more stuff to this is the idea.

I'm also interested in the idea of cloud applications with local storage or local encryption keys -- so all your data is stored encrypted on the server side, and only you have the keys, so the content is decrypted at render-time. Stuff like 1password does this with secure stuff like password databases, but I think web browsing machines are zippy enough to do this for userdata. I have to see if it's been done already (it probably has), but I want to do some fiddling with it.

So yes, same old. Too much science to do, never enough time.

Category: Log Tagged: imported brain electronics life me meta twitter update


Hibernating

Wed 24 November 2010

'Tis the season, apparently.

One more stint of travel before the long and well-anticipated 2 weeks off work for xmas. I've only had one unbroken year in the streak of taking these 2 weeks off before in my entire working life -- I get very grumpy if it doesn't work out …

Category: Log Tagged: imported life me november update winter

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Now You're Square, Part Deux

Tue 19 October 2010

It's getting to be toward the end of the year, time to resurrect the old monolith.

I've been considering moving to Wordpress, but wordpress is far too annoying to set up, and I realise that most people read/skim via RSS and don't care about delivery mechanisms. It's like putting …

Category: Log Tagged: imported me revival update

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