The Tragedy of Linked Lists
March 24th, 2011Inspired by a comic of the same name that I saw in passing.
Another novel (and silly) use for Roomie
October 11th, 2010I’ve been working (rather obsessively) on Roomie for the past week. In specific, I have rewritten the XML-based protocol that allows the desktop client to communicate with the web service. (Say “hi” to it here.) The new library (which I call WebCommunicator) is sooo much easier to use than my old one, but still has all the nifty (and important) encryption and anti-hacking features. I will eventually publish the protocol as an independent library. (Give me a bit to use it more and work out all the kinks.)
But enough technical talk. Lets get to serious business. Here I have a little RoomieScript that I wrote, just as a proof of concept.
<RoomieScript>
<ZWave.PowerOff DeviceName="Coffee Pot" />
<Core.Loop>
<ZWave.WaitForChange DeviceName="Coffee Pot" PollInterval="5 Seconds" />
<ZWave.PowerOff DeviceName="Coffee Pot" />
<RoomieBot.TextDavid Text="No coffee!" />
</Core.Loop>
</RoomieScript>
Roomie gets some CSS schooling
June 24th, 2010This week I have been furiously re-writing a few key elements of the Roomie website. Specifically, I scrapped the old device button controls, which you can see here. They were ok, but they were very rigid in use, offering only two different pictures to back the buttons. Zooming on mobile devices didn’t work so great either, since the images were PNGs, raster graphics. Now I have created a button framework entirely in CSS, HTML, and ASP.NET controls. Because of this, I can easily create new kinds of controls completely in code, and they even zoom cleanly as well. My original vision for this was to enable the user to create “virtual device controls”, which would display next to the regular device controls.
Classy
November 17th, 2009I’m super-classy. You know it’s true… I should frame algorithms and put them up on the walls. 
Web-CAT is Ultimate Sadness ):
September 21st, 2009The Computer Science department at Virginia Tech uses a little piece of software called Web-CAT to grade students’ code. It makes me sad. I am literally convulsing on the floor right now. I can’t remember any taste other than that of salty tears. It’s amazing that I can even type so coherently, especially considering that my hands are violently contorted in bitter agony.
