I dressed up as a jukebox for Halloween this year. At first glance, not such an interesting costume, but I installed some LED lights and used an Arduino to blink them according to the music being played by the jukebox.  

Here's a video to describe more about how the costume works:

To help anyone who's trying to make something even remotely like this, here the code I had loaded on my Arduino...

I've been testing out Go, walking through the tutorial on developing for Google App Engine. I was fumbling around while getting started, but was able to perform the login redirect fairly quickly.

I came back to the project after a few hours and started having trouble. The same exact redirect was no longer functioning. Something was breaking down as the app was trying to write the HTTP headers...

I set up a simple web site using the CherryPy framework (version 3.2). It was just serving simple text. Then I modified it a bit to serve a simple "Hello World" Jinga template. Then I decided it was time to render some simple text as page content and load that into the Jinja template.

I wanted to have the template loaded in one place rather than in every single PageHandler (which is the class that generates the page data), and the best way to do that Read in full

Magento Improvements

I recently started using flat product tables in Magento. It drastically sped up the site load time and I could never go back (to learn how to enable flat product and category tables, visit the following link and read Tip 4 - http://blog.nexcess.net/2010/10/22/6-tips-for-making-magento-production-ready/)

When I did that, I noticed some product attributes that should be displayed on various pages suddenly stopped showing up...

I recently ordered a LaunchPad Development Board from Texas Instruments and needed to program it using my Fedora 16 linux machine. I've had an Arduino for a couple months now, but I'm really a beginner when it comes to programming for microprocessors. I really wanted someone to walk me through the setup process and give me the tools I needed to get started. Sadly, that sort of help was unavailable...

The Situation

I’m developing a module for Magento (v. 1.5.0.1) that creates a product Archive for old products (so the information can still be found by people doing research on past product, but it won’t clutter the interface for people looking to buy currently available product). The module will also place products into the Archive automatically. That automatic processing will likely be done via a cron job, but for the time being I am triggering it manually from the configuration section of the Magento admin...

A couple years ago I built a simple computer from some spare parts and made it a linux desktop. A few days ago I decided to use it to replace an even older linux server I had running at my house. I turned it on (for the first time since I built it) and decided, after a few failed attempts at upgrading from Fedora 11 to Fedora 16, to put in a new hard drive and install Fedora 16 from scratch.

The old hard drive was a 40GB IDE drive. My new hard drive is a 750GB SATA II drive.

I took out the old drive, plugged in the new drive, and boot the machine from a Fedora 16 live CD...

When you’re looking through pictures on a SocialEngine website and you click through to look at one by itself, there’s a list of options underneath the photo. These options vary depending on whose picture it is, but often you’ll see the option to “Make Profile Photo”. That supposed to enable you do quickly swap in a new profile photo.

The Problem

Users have started complaining that this link is not working properly. Instead of allowing them to change their profile photo, a modal window appears with a “Page Not Found” error:

Page Not Found

The page you have attempted to access could not be found

I dug into the code to see what was going on...

Getting Errors

Sometimes when working with the SocialEngine platform I’ve come across an error message that sits in the middle of a blank, white page. It’s quite a bit less scary than a typical error message, but there’s not much information to help the developer know what’s wrong. This is how it reads (though not as pretty):

We're sorry! We are currently experiencing some technical issues. Please try again later. Error code: a0dceb

There’s always an error code underneath the apologetic text, and that’s the important part...

Users have recently reported receiving error messages when accessing Groups on a website built on the SocialEngine platform. The site was recently upgraded to SocialEngine 4.1.7 from 4.1.3

The Error

The error messages the users received weren’t very detailed (as usual). This is the relevant message found in the log file:

2011-09-16T03:15:03+00:00 ERR (3): [4096] Object of class Zend_View_Helper_Translate could not be converted to string (/socialengine-root/application/libraries/Engine/View/Helper/HtmlLink...