Sub Ubi

My mother has gone and declared Daisy a progressive.

Sure is a cute picture.

Amazing.

Carrie found a note about a Roomba. She sent it to me via IM. I sent the seller an email saying I was interested, and included my phone number. He called me within 45 seconds of hitting “send”. I’ll pick it up tomorrow.

Hopefully it was a $50 well spent. My hope is it does OK around the house, or serves well in student projects. Perhaps I can find a way to work it into Software Design this semester… I’ll have to look into getting a Bluetooth serial module or something so that students can play with it from their laptops.

I personally watch commits go by for several projects, and it is instructive in many ways to read the commit messages and code. It is a way to learn new things about the software process as well as the implementation of solutions in code. That said, very occasionally, you actually get a giggle from the process…

Today was one of those times.

Date: 2007-08-22 12:22:06 +0100 (Wed, 22 Aug 2007)
New Revision: 1398
Log:
[DJG] IDCheck trunk:

Tests tests tests.

Date: 2007-08-22 12:41:46 +0100 (Wed, 22 Aug 2007)
New Revision: 1399
Log:
[DJG+NHW] IDCheck trunk:

Testing all the way.

Date: 2007-08-22 12:49:21 +0100 (Wed, 22 Aug 2007)
New Revision: 1400
Log:
[NHW+DJG] IDCheck trunk:

Oh what fun it is to ride on a one horse testing sleigh.

The song ends there, I’m afraid… but it does seem like Dave and Noel are a bit cracked out today. Perhaps they should be out playing frisbee instead of coding this fine Thursday. As I’m not in the same timezone, it’s difficult to say what’s going on over there…

Tomorrow, Carrie and I hop the train from Cleveland to Boston. We’ll be looking for apartments starting Friday, and if you know of anything, pass it along. My mobile number can be found under the “Contact” portion of the site.

My ability to respond to email in a timely fashion may be limited over the next few days. We’ll see.

I’ve never really played around with Google Maps. I mean, I’ve gone searching for driving directions from time-to-time, but as a programmatic interface for mapping, it must be pretty schweet.

Right now, Carrie and I are looking at how I might get from public transport (the T) to Olin College. And most everyone I’ve spoken to has said the Green Line is the way to go. Here’s two snaps of the Green line:

Station on the right, Olin on the left

Hybrid view of the same

Now, from Needham Heights station, I could (it seems) take West Road (aptly named) due west, and then jog down to Forest Road, which runs up north of the college. This may, or may not, be a good cycling route. Sadly, street-level views of Boston don’t exist on Google Maps (yet; I’m guessing they’ll do Boston at some point).

But playing with the transit site, Carrie thinks that the Purple Line might be better.

Approach from the West?

The approach from the west looks very residential. It seems to me that hopping off the T to the west of Olin, and biking/walking in from there makes much more sense. At least, from what we can tell from Google Maps, it seems that way. In the next screensnap, you can see that Abbot Road (which runs east from Wellesley Hills Station) has a number of large homes lining it as well as sidewalks.

Abbot Road has sidewalks

Unfortunately, Forest Road runs out of sidewalk as you go east. However, if you go west, Forest Road has a sidewalk (at least, it seems to).

A possible route

I’ll have to ask some people who live in the area whether or not our satellite reconnaissance has paid off, or if we’re missing some kind of critical, local knowledge.

Update: It turns out that 1. I am confusing the subway and rail, and therefore my use of colors for line names may be … confusing to Boston natives. But, as I am not a native, I am not confused. And, 2. from both sides of campus there are good walking routes from the light rail, so I think that either of those lines provide good access to work.

So, it’s that time.

Next Thursday, we move to Boston. We have nowhere to live, which is exciting. Exciting in a “may you live in interesting times” kind of exciting. I suppose that’s a vaguely evil, sarcastic kind of exciting.

What I just discovered was that Google Maps has a “Real Estate Search.” I had no idea such a thing existed. I can type in what I’m looking for (rental), a price range, and keywords (eg. “furnished”), and it shows me places in my current view that match my criteria.

Wacky. Even though I know how they did it, it still seems like magic.

Five years ago, we put things in storage.

I’m going to go rummage around in it, inventory things, throw things away, and generally make a mess.

I owe people emails, but I’ll just have to get to those in another day or two. Sorting through five-year-old crap packed in boxes is the kind of busywork I need right now.

I thought it might be worth mentioning (in light of my rants) that it is possible to use the Softbaugh USBP in a Windows XP VM running under VMWare Fusion—that is, on a MacBook.

I was running into problems with VMWare Fusion 1.0beta4. However, I missed the recent upgrade to v1.0 “Gold Master”, or (if you prefer), the final release of version one. In upgrading, Windows XP (running in the VM) correctly found the USBP, and as a result, I can now get on with programming MSP430-based devices on my MacBook. (I think; I have’t actually tried loading code to a device yet, but Windows sees the programming dongle, and I think that’s the important step. I expect things to work at this point.)

The picture above is the Softbaugh PrgUSBP application running in VMWare Fusion’s “Unity” mode. In this mode, the Windows app plays along with OSX as if it were a full-fledged Mac application. This way, I can Apple-TAB back-and-forth between my editor and the programmer, and not have to keep flipping back to the full VM.

As it stands, I think it is sad that embedded programming with chips like the MSP430, ARM9, and other interesting devices is so damn expensive. The programmer was $150, my dev board was $115, VMWare Fusion is $80, and XP… I can’t remember. Granted, many of these things were (in my case) paid by grants, but for a hobbyist, $300+ is rather pricey.

I’d love it if we had a way of programming these chips cheaply ($50 or less), and it worked on every platform. Perhaps, someday, I’ll make that a mission. It would have to be a mission of love, because my guess is that there isn’t enough money in these tools to make it up in volume.

Via BoingBoing, from Wired:

The bill, known as the Protect America Act, removes the prohibition on warrantless spying on Americans abroad and gives the government wide powers to order communication service providers such as cell phone companies and ISPs to make their networks available to government eavesdroppers. (…)

E-mail is plain-text. Currently, I even outsource my email to Google, a company that specializes in search. While I’m not (hugely) paranoid, I don’t believe the government has the right to read my mail. Or listen to my phone conversations. Not without due process, anyway.

I have a growing list of possible projects that students might be interested in working on next year. An easy-to-use, end-to-end secure, open platform for messaging is one of them. PGP with email doesn’t really cut it, sadly; I need a solution that my mother can use without realizing she is communicating with me using military-grade encryption.) I think a good plan with a good group of students should easily get in the door for a Y Combinator summer internship or similar.

I continue to be frustrated by the state of embedded systems programming.

If I want to program an ARM9, I need a special programmer. If I want to program an MSP430, it will require a special programmer. The list goes on and on, for each new chip that I think I’d like to develop code for; the cost is prohibitive, and in each case, it is likely that the tools:

1. Only work under Windows, or
2. Work under Linux if you have a parallel port.

I don’t know about you, but my MacBook doesn’t have a parallel port. And Windows running under VMWare doesn’t always recognize these little programming dongles. And really, I don’t want to use Windows or Linux at all. I want to use my Mac.

I’m thinking that I need a sub-$300 device (sub $100 would be ideal) that can program any small device, whether it is the new Blackfin processor or a crappy little PIC. This implies a software solution, with some mix-n-match cabling coming out of the box.

I’m going to start thinking about this a bit more, because it is a genuine problem in the embedded space. It represents the worst kind of vendor lock-in, and makes my life as an educator and hobbyist a complete nightmare. I need a solution that:

1. Works with any embedded device (via software update, if necessary)
2. Works with any computing platform (Mac, Linux, Windows)
3. Is cheap and portable

In the end, the solution is probably called a “LEGO Mindstorms NXT”, and I should just give up on embedded platforms. But I’m not prepared for that yet.