Aaron Parecki

presented by Aaron Parecki & Effie Siverts

I just stumbled across Google's Treasure Hunt. They're always doing neat things, so I checked it out. It's a series of four problem-solving puzzles released one week at a time. I found out about it after the first question was already over, so I jumped in starting with the second question.

When you have a database of books or movies, some of the titles begin with "The." If you do a regular ORDER BY on the table, all the titles that start with "the" get clumped together. One option is running an unsorted query and sorting in PHP, but it would be better to sort at the database level. Here is a query I came up with to do that, using an IF function in MySQL!

This is pretty much the coolest thing in the world! I am posting from my laptop which is connected to my cell phone's wifi connection, using Sprint's EVDO connection to the internet. The software that enables me to do this is called wmwifirouter. Earlier this month they released their first final version of the software, and started charging for it. It's not outrageously priced, but you can still find the earlier free versions on the internet if you search for versions 0.90 or 0.89.

Well I did it! I got the HTC Mogul on Sprint's SERO plan. Everything has been pretty painless so far. Activation was easy, text messaging works, and Internet browsing is pretty fast! Now comes the hard part: getting my data to sync between Windows Mobile and OS X.

But not in the radiation kind of way... in the omg-too-many-things-to-think-about kind of way.

Project Description

A lot of information about this device online is misleading. When I first heard about this, the site I was reading claimed the transmitter didn't have a battery, and used the energy from the foot impact to power the burst transmission of the device's ID. This is what got me excited about the device in the first place: that it was so simple.

I just got a Nike+iPod gadget thingy. It's pretty cool, and stores all the running stats in xml files on the iPod, making for easy hacking of the running data. However, that's not what I really want to do with it.

Using VMware Fusion and Multiple IEs, I set up my iMac to run the four major browsers simultaneously! IE 7, IE6, Firefox and Safari. With a 1920x1200 display, I can get all four to fit on the screen at once.

Haven't posted on this project in a while, but there have been some developments.

I bought a new 24" iMac last week, and it arrived on Friday. It worked flawlessly for the first day, but on Saturday, I noticed a pixel at the top of the screen about in the middle that was stuck magenta.

I was scratching my head on this one for several hours before finally figuring out the solution which turned out to be ridiculously simple.

Thank you Brandon K! You just saved me 6 hours apparently:

Just as I had suspected, the new 16mhz crystals work great.

Disclaimer: The posts in this "Ultrasonic Sensors" category are primarily a reference for myself during this project. However, I suspect some of the things I discover will be of use to others doing similar projects, so I will make them public.

Update:

We just got caller ID at my house. One of my roommates doesn't have a cell phone, so eventually everyone else stopped answering the house phone because it was always for him. But then he would come home and not know who called. Now of course, caller ID solves this problem by logging who called on the phone handset, but being me, that is not enough!

Ok, so I wasted about 3 hours on this, and have only sort of found a solution. I have a PHP script which is going to be running 24/7 checking a message queue and then interacting with a database when a message is received. It was mostly working, until it sat there for a day and I tried to use it the next day. The PHP script had quit, with the error "MySQL server has gone away." I figured there must be some sort of time limit that the mysql server will keep an idle connection alive. I couldn't find it, but luckily I was talking to nick, and he did! He found this blog entry. So I changed the my.cnf file to set the timeout to one week:

I had a thought of using a RAM disk as a message queue for a messaging application I am working on, as opposed to creating a table in a database, or using a regular flat text file. Every time I need a message to be sent, I'll add a text file on the RAM disk, then the sending process can scan for files. All of this is happening in RAM, so it won't be thrashing the disk!