Chronicling the depravities of the State.
Nothing new for you today. I did managed to get my ancient desktop running again after pulling out several bad memory modules and tossing in a different power supply. Most of my server infrastructure is fully operational again. Not having an operational e-mail server does suck pretty heavily if you’re wondering.
Oh well, it could have been worse. At least I’ve been having decent luck with my electronic necromancy.
You may have noticed that the website was down most of yesterday afternoon and evening. There was a major power outage at my dwelling last night. Around 2:30 this morning the power was restored and when I went to restart my servers only to find that my server wasn’t turning on (well it was turning on but it wasn’t passing POST). After a lot of mucking about, which primarily included salvaging parts from an old computer to replace the destroyed parts in my server, I was finally able to get my e-mail server online. The web server that runs this site had to do some work on repairing the file system so it wasn’t online until recently.
The downside of running your own server is that you’re responsible for restoring your shit. Needless to say I didn’t get anything written as far as posts and since I’m still repairing equipment that went belly up in an apparent power surge I won’t be getting anything up later today either.
Today’s lack of posts is brought to you by whatever strange plague I managed to pickup over the weekend. On the upside, Sudafed is one hell of a drug.
Martial arts ran late
No posts were written last night
Check again later
I spend most of last night working on the finishing touches to WristCoin and planning a new project. So I don’t have anything else for you today. But I will say that the Pebble wristwatch is an interesting piece of hardware to program for. There are certainly some limitations, which cannot be avoided when you consider its diminutive size and several day battery life, but overall the API is pretty well thought out and complete (which is worth noting because the SDK is still in beta).
If you’re in the Central Time Zone then it is now officially 2014 (at least according to the atomic clock this server synchronizes to). 2013 was an interesting year to say the least and 2014 looks like it will keep that trend going.
I will be taking the day off of blogging as I do most holidays. There’s much to do outside of the blogging world and there is a distinct possibility I will be nursing a hangover. After all, studies now indicates that people who don’t drink tend to die young.
Well it’s Christmas and I have quite a few things to do so no blog for you. When I posted No Presents for Christmas I wasn’t joking.
Once again I spent my night working on WristCoin. It turns out that doing asynchronous lookups of Bitcoin prices and sending them to the Pebble as they come in is a recipe for bad times. The Pebble can only handle a single incoming message, which it must process before it will accept another incoming message. There is no way that I’ve found to check from the phone side whether or not the Pebble is ready to accept another message so I had to switch over to synchronous lookups, which is not ideal in my book (I like firing and forgetting as opposed to waiting around for each price to arrive before looking up the next price). Considering how resource constrained the Pebble is I do understand this design decision but it’s a pain in my ass.
Last night the developers at Pebble released beta 3 of their 2.0 software development kit (SDK). This release fixed a rather nasty bug that was preventing me from continuing development on WristCoin.
The bug was related to how the phone app communicated Bitcoin pricing information to the Pebble. When the watch app is first opened it asks the phone app to fetch Bitcoin prices from the various exchanges. This operation is done asynchronously on the phone and data is returned for each exchange as it comes it. The bug I ran into was that the first message form the phone app to the Pebble worked fine but all subsequent messages failed. That means that the pricing information for the first exchange would be communicated to the Pebble but none of the others. While I could have rewritten the app to wait for all exchanges to report in before sending the data to the Pebble I found that solution inelegant and chose to wait for an update to correct the bug. Since the latest release fixes that bug I have continued development on WristCoin instead of writing additional blog posts.
You’re going to notice a complete lack of new material here today. This is due to the fact that I spent last night putting the final touches on the initial design of an application I’m writing. A couple of weeks ago I purchased a Pebble wristwatch. If you haven’t heard of it it’s a wristwatch that connects to your smartphone via low powered Bluetooth and presents notifications in a manner that doesn’t involve digging your phone out. My interest in the device stems from the fact that it’s programmable.
For my first program on the watch I’ve decided to write a Bitcoin price checker. Since I’m horrible with names I’ve dubbed the application WristCoin. Obviously the application is still in the pre-alpha stage, which means it’s riddled with bugs and isn’t feature complete. But I’ve published the source code on GitHub if anybody is interested in following my progress.
WristCoin requires both the 2.0 beta Pebble firmware and the 2.0 beta Pebble smartphone application. In its current state WristCoin grabs prices off of Bitstamp and displays the last price on the Pebble. I will be adding more exchanges in the near future and the ability to bring up more detailed pricing information for each exchange. Progress on the application will heavily depend on my free time but it’s small and shouldn’t take a great deal of time.
The application, as you can guess based on my views regarding intellectual property, is public domain so you can do with it whatever you wish.