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I am always interested in the actual building of cool technology. There are so many cool applications of electronics that just aren’t mass-produced. We should be able to make them ourselves.

It’s amazing how much the internet has made this possible.

Groups of people band together to share a 155 inch panel of printed circuit board, each using several square inches for their own panel, and each only paying a fraction of the cost of getting a custom piece made for them. ($2.50/square inch!!) So, how can you get your board designed?

Well, you could use a pre-designed, open source circuit design. Or you can use free software like CadSoft Eagle. If you do use the free software, you’ll need some instructions on how to convert Eagle files to the Gerber format used by the manufacturing folks.

Now you’ve got a circuit board, but how do you attach components to it? Well, you can solder, but that takes, like, FOR-EV-ER. I just discovered you can use something called a Hot Air Rework Station.

This is a hair-dryer-like device which uses a blast of hot air to liquefy the solder paste you’ve put on the pads of your circuit board, fixing the components to it. This makes it possible to solder on surface-mount components without too much pain. Beautiful! Maybe slower than wave-soldering, but definitely a great hobbyist option.

The amazing thing is that you don’t need expensive tools to do your manufacturing. With a little effort you can use a $30 hot plate as a soldering station.

The internet is a great place to learn more about making electronics!

Resources:

• Hack a Day – daily project ideas and news.
• Gold Phoenix – get a 155 inch panel made for $100.
• SparkFun – project ideas and tutorials, as well as parts.

• Codeproject: Serve Images from ASP.NET/SQL
• Microsoft cloud database: SQL Server Data Services
• Codeproject: Get notifications from a .NET Web Service
• A review of free minid mapping softwares and web services
• Codeproject: Session Helper (scope)
• Codeproject: Prevent session timeout
• Running your blog for a six figure income
• Console app execution library
• Outsourced, American help desk services

Like meat? Get yours at Phil’s Uptown Meat Market:

17 NW 23RD Pl
Portland, OR 97210-3534
Phone: (503) 224-9541

I’m continuing my progress into the wonderful world of Ruby. It’s such a mind-bender. It’s like a meta-language. Programming it is like writing a language for your program to be written in. The simple stuff is fast and easy. The complex stuff is mind-bending. There’s a page on Ruby Central with some good stuff on creating your own container classes. Good stuff for UI controllers. Another book I need to mark is Hashes are Cool: a note on how to use hashes and their role in ruby method overloading.

I’m still working on the idea of inversion of control/dependency injection/testability for my CSLA classes. After some thread searching, I figured out I need to watch DNR TV Episode 60 with Rocky! It looks like he covers exactly this kind of stuff in there! For the archives here’s some discussion on returning a ‘no results’ object from a CSLA query. I may also find a use for LINQPad sometime soon. Steve Eichert has some thoughts on automatic setup for DAL unit tests.

Yesterday’s big task was building some firewalls for a VOIP VPN. I discovered that I was going to have too many troubles getting IPSEC working, so I bit the dog and learned how to get OpenVPN going on PFSense. It wasn’t so bad, except for getting the routes to show up on each device as they should.

I must remember to tell my old man how to decline doing tech support. His mother is killing him with stupid mac problems.

I just bought CodeRush! Developer Express has the stupidest credit card validation ever, but I think I’m going to be happy with my shortcutty goodness. I must spend some time learning it better.

I just discovered that I really like Yahoo! Widgets. It’s embarrassing how much better it is than Vista Gadgets. It’s not much better than Apple Dashboard, but the widget selection is probably better.

I’ve also been seeing some stories on NuevaSync it looks to be an Exchange Activesync gateway implementation for Google Calendar, Contacts, and (coming soon) Mail.

ASP.NET health monitoring is something I should be using in all of my apps. Why the hell is it not turned on in studio? Codeproject also has an Excel interop library that should be useful. Also there is a C# wrapper for the google static map api. I also found a dll linker for .NET. Finally combined assemblies. Now I just need to use Cruise Control and automate my builds.

I also wanted to know about Low Carb Diets and Pregnancy. I found a number of articles that are interesting on the low carb subject. JESUS! I just found an article documenting a study that says CARBS KILL THE BRAIN CELLS THAT STOP HUNGER!

• A Forum Post with all the good documentation for my X3 game. I need to play a bit more of that.
• Zoiper is a SOLID mac SIP client.
• Asterisk Guru has a Queue Stats reporting tool
• Meesa wants some Free CSS Templates!
• Have I said I like Stock Xchng?

So we start with menstruation. The date used for this by everybody is the first day of bleeding of the period. That’s day one. This lasts for 3-5 days. Next comes the follicular phase, where the lining gets rebuilt for implantation.

The next major event is LH release, which is measurable by over the counter tests such as Clearblue and Ovuquick (more info). This immediately presages ovulation.

After ovulation is the Luteal phase which lasts between 10 and 16 days until the next period starts. Measuring this time period with tests can give you a reasonable predictor of future ovulation. This period+period length-luteal length=ovulation day.

Fertility is highest between 5 days before ovulation (lifespan of sperm), and two days after ovulation. Another measure for this is next period minus 10-19 days. A simple calendar is available online.

Once you hit the jackpot, you have a shiny happy baby in 266 days.

• Cocoa# and it’s documentation portal.
• Some articles on developing web applications for the iphone.
• A couple of takes on database change management.
• RubyCocoa is the BOMB! ActiveRecord support with bindings? Documentation at sourceforge and main documentation portal. How about some web services? A cheat sheet. I really like the Poignant Guid to Ruby! A tutorial with unit testing. Keeping a NSTextview at the bottom.
• Amazon just made block storage available for EC2!
• Not a dev link, but Inbox Zero has some good email management hints.

OpenWinForms is a cool little site with some interesting coding hints and techniques. I hope more work goes in, as it could develop from a cute ideas blog to a good resource site.

Gotta keep track of those CodeProject articles: Reverse Proxy is a cool little ditty to reflect a web page in your web page.

C# FAQ

FreeSwitch Infos:

1. A GUI
2. FreeSwitch
3. Adhearsion (see also O’Reilly) (and blog) (and Google group)

PIAF MSP Management

Oooh I just wandered across Github…hosting for Git. Way cool. Now we just need TortoiseGit.

I also want to look into ASP.NET build automation with CruiseControl.net

Hanselman has the goods on the SP1 release. Lots of cool stuff in there. Unfortunately, from the response on the web, there appears to be a lot of breaking buts. Hurry up and wait for a SP1 service pack.

I’d gloat, but my iPhone crashes now.

You can create a desktop shortcut to a repository location with tortoise using the following command in a shortcut:

TortoiseProc.exe /command:repobrowser /path:"url/to/repository"

I wonder what else you can do with TortoiseProc? Update. Revert. Export. Createpatch. Otta be able to create some cool deployment scripts this way. Documentation.

Remote Buddy is really cool remote control for your Mac media center.

I found a Database Journal Article about how to access a web service from MS Access.

I’m a bit curious about Google Grandcentral. It looks like an exciting new single-number phone service.

SSH for my iPhone? Can I really deal with doing sysadmin on a keyboard that small?

Install VMWare ESX3i on a USB Key

1. Open VMware-VMvisor-InstallerCD-3.5.0_Update_2-103909.i386.iso with 7-Zip.
2. Extract install.tgz.
3. Open install.tgz in 7-zip.
4. Extract /usr/lib/vmware/installer/VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-67921.i386.dd.bz2
5. Extract VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-103909.i386.dd from VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-67921.i386.dd.bz2 uxing 7-zip.
6. Download dd.exe version 0.5 from http://www.chrysocome.net/downloads/dd-0.5.zip.
7. Execute ‘dd –list’.
8. Find USB Key in list, mine looks like ‘\\?\Device\Harddisk3\Partition0′.
9. Execute ‘dd if=VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_2-103909.i386.dd of=\\?\Device\Harddisk3\Partition0 bs=1M –size –progress’.
10. Unplug the USB flash drive (Warning: If you forget to unplug the flash drive from the PC you might lose the data on your hard drives the next time you boot!)
11. UAttach the USB flash drive to the machine you want to boot (Warning: If ESX Server 3i recognizes local drives, you might lose the data on it, so make sure you don´t need it anymore or unplug all hard drives!)
12. Turn the machine on and make sure the USB flash drive is selected as boot device
13. Watch ESX Server 3i boot
14. Configure
15. Enjoy!

Hints

VI Toolkit – For scripting with powershell or others.
Enable remote ssh to ESX3i
esExpress – VMWare backup (maybe compatible in September
VM-Help

• Threadbanger – a gen-X sewing site?
• How to make a cargo pocket
• How to make a sexy,sexy corset

VMWare 1.x doesn’t have signed drivers, which the x64 versions of Windows require. But there’s a fix documented in the VMWare Forums involving the use of a Signed Driver Requirement Prevention Driver called ReadyDriverPlus.

• Common Exception types
• String Formatting in C#

The show notes for this Polymorphic Podcast could keep me in fun reading for a few weeks.

It’s pretty easy to make a class into a template. Not everything get’s magicified, but it works and saves time. There’s some discussion of this in this forum post

If your data access methods open multiple database connections in a Transaction scoped csla method, you’re going to get MSDTC errors (hopefully! since if you don’t you’re dev machine has too much good stuff on it and then you’re going to get the transaction controller errors later when you deploy.). There are two solutions to this: 1) (quick and dirty) eliminate the Transaction scopes. This doesn’t do good things for data integrity, but it prevents problems. 2) share the connection and transaction. This requires some extra code. (see this forum post). This may be in later versions of CSLA than the 2.0 documented in my book, but I’m waiting on the 3.5 book rather than having to buy all the supplements AND a new book in the fall.