list page 11 - Dave's Blog

Wiimote wiissues

2007 Jun 7, 5:29The other day I had the best idea for my Wii remote. Clearly I should use it to control the rotation of Tetris pieces in my N-dimensional Tetris game Polytope Tetris. One of the issues I described with Polytope Tetris is user input. Given a Wii remote the user could rotate a piece through 3 dimensions in a manner that's much easier to adjust to than particular keys on the keyboard.

Anyway, I did a little research into how this might work. I knew that the Wii remote used infrared for absolute positioning and Bluetooth for everything else (LEDs, speaker, accels.) I bought a Bluetooth adapter for my PC after realizing that none of my computers had one already. I used GlovePIE to ensure that my Wii remote could connect and successfully communicate with my computer. GlovePIE is actually pretty cool -- it provides a simple script layer over the Wii remote to control things like your mouse.

Since Polytope Tetris is in Java I looked for and found a Java library for operating with the Wii remote and a long forum thread discussing its use. I then read up on Bluetooth in Java. Apparently JSR 82 is the name of the standard that describes the API a Bluetooth stack should expose in Java. That is, to get Bluetooth working in Java one needs an additional package for Java that actually implements the Bluetooth Java API. This package would depend on the system so I suppose I can't fault Sun for not including it... Where to find such a package? I found a comparison list of implementations and tried the ones that support javax.bluetooth. None of them worked for me because none can address USB devices it seems or they cost money and I couldn't get the trial version working. I also tried bluesock (not listed on the previous list) which seemed promising and could produce an address for my Wii remote as a connected device but couldn't use that address.

And I thought that after I found the Wii remote Java library it would be easy... Oh well...java bluetooth wii technical remote jsr82 tetris polytopetetris wiimote

IE7 Feed Display Update

2007 May 22, 3:22I've created an update to the IE7 feed display.

After working on my update to the XML source view I tried running my resourcelist program on other IE DLLs including ieframe. I found that one of the resources in ieframe is the XSLT used to turn an RSS feed into the IE7 feed display.

My first thought for this was that I could embed enclosures into the feed display. For instance, have controls for youtube.com videos or podcast audio files directly in the feed display. However, I found that I can't use object or embed tags that rely on ActiveX controls in the page or in frames in the feed display.

With that through I decided I could at least add support for some RSS extensions. Thanks to IE7's RSS platform which provides a normalized view of RSS feeds it was really easy to do this. I went to several popular RSS feeds and RSS feeds that I like and took a look at the source to see what extensions I might want to add support for.

For digg.com I added support for their RSS extension which includes digg count, and submitter name and icon. I added the digg count in a box on the right and tried to make it fit in stylistically. For the iTunes RSS extension I add the feed icon, feed author, and descriptions. I was surprised by how much of the podcasts content was missing from the feed view. I also added support for a few other misc things: the slash RSS extension's section and department, the feed description to the top of the feed display, and the atom author icon.

I wonder what other goodies lurk in IE's resources...feed res slashdot digg resource itunes technical browser ie rss extension

Roommate Wedding

2007 May 5, 10:05Carissa and Elijah are married! Sarah and I flew to Oakland the Friday of two weeks previous (April 27th) into the Oakland Airport. We were on the same flight as Jon which was fun but we weren't seated with him. Instead I was seated between Sarah and a middle aged lady who enjoyed talking to herself. It seemed a bonus if others such as myself listened but not a prerequisite for her speaking.

Sarah and I rented a car and we drove Jon first to Hayward where he was staying then we drove to our hotel in Dublin. The car we got turned out to be a PT Cruiser which was a surprise of course but actually wasn't that bad. The power windows are controlled by the center console rather than by a switch near the windows themselves which led to several embarrassing seconds when we later tried to pay the toll for the Bay Bridge.

The next day we went to Carissa's wedding which was lovely. In a small church with white roses Carissa's mom married Carissa and Elijah. Afterward we went to the reception at the Senior Center. "Senior Center" may conjure up images of rolley charis that smell like old people but it wasn't like that at all. It appears to be a community center funded by the Senior Condos next door so it was very nice.

Carissa is the first of the college roommates to get married! I guess I'm just having trouble imagining any of us getting married...wedding friend personal california nontechnical

Commenting Wishlist

2007 May 1, 4:33In the past I've come up with ideas for software and find that the very idea is implemented soon after. So this time rather than getting down about it I'm going to make it work for me. I'll state what I want to use and hope that its magically implemented. In order to uniformly support comments on my website I want a web service with the following features:

• Allow users to view and add comments for any particular URI.
• Use OpenID and optionally Card Space to identify users.
• Use a captcha system that's optionally cute or humorous.
• Has atom or rss feeds of the comments available.
• Doesn't require users to register.
• Doesn't require any extra steps for commenting on a URI that no one has commented on.

I'm going implement this now so no one go off and do it before me so that I can use it without having to do anything...technical homepage

Movie Times

2007 May 1, 3:48The Sunday of the weekend before last I had friends over and we watched Antitrust and Sneakers. Watching Antitrust makes me wonder if Bill Gates has seen it. Tim Robbins plays a character that is essentially based on him but so over the top that its ridiculous.

A few days before that I watched The Prestige with Sarah. I can't tell if I was or wasn't supposed to know what was going on until the end but it was cool anyway. I didn't know until later but David Bowie plays Tesla which is just awesome all the way around.

We also watched The Illusionist sometime before. Both movies are adaptations of novels with stage magicians set in turn of the century England. And I enjoyed both of them. I thought one would be a rushed attempt by one studio to compete with the another on the same ground but that doesn't seem to be the case. I've noticed this before with those asteroid disaster movies and the two movies about Truman Capote. It turns out Wikipedia has a huge list of competing similar movies.personal movies nontechnical

Opera Speed Dial Code-less Hack for IE7

2007 Apr 17, 11:45Opera (the fifth most popular web browser) has a new feature named Speed Dial (video of it in action). Whenever you open a new tab you get your Speed Dial view which consists of nine thumbnails of user-settable pages. Its like a quick-favorites that appears every time you open a new tab. I think this is a neat idea and was considering how I might do that in IE7. The following is my hack-y and ugly but no coding required version of Speed Dial for IE7. I like my hack and I'm about to expound upon it in unnecessary detail so skip to the last paragraph if you're afraid of losing interest.

By default in IE7, whenever you open a new tab you navigate to 'about:Tabs'. As noted in wikipedia the result of navigation to 'about:Tabs' is determined by values in the registry. Specifically, values in the key in "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\AboutURLs". Usually this fact is exploited by malicious software to hijack "about:blank" and show you ads but we can hijack it too in order to display our Speed Dial-ish page.

Of course since this is a code-less hack we've got limited options on what to change 'about:Tabs' to display. It should have the following requirements.

1. Something local so that our 'about:Tabs' doesn't disappear when we go offline and so that its relatively fast.
2. The user should be able to modify its content.
3. Show links that the user uses.
4. Show thumbnails of those links
5. Provide easy to use drag and drop interaction and generally look cool.

Now, I use del.icio.us which allows me to store all of my favorites online and which provides RSS feeds that list my saved links. New in IE7 is an RSS platform that will, among other things, cache RSS feeds locally. So, by pointing about:Tabs to my del.icio.us feed 'http://del.icio.us/rss/sequelguy/quickreference' I get (1) from IE7's RSS support, and (2) and (3) from del.icio.us. Of course requirements (4) and (5) are missing but hey, I said this was ugly.

In summary, if you change the registry value "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\AboutURLs!Tabs" to point to an RSS feed of your favorites you can get a hack-y version of Opera's Speed Dial. I should note that although its referenced on pages such as wikipedia changing your 'about:Tabs' URI in the manner I describe is not documented and not supported by Microsoft. There could be all kinds of horrible repercussions from this change of which I'm not aware. Yeah, actually you know what? Forget I said any of this. Pretend I never wrote it...browser technical hack