Today was another quiet and sleepy day.. our big foray outside of the nest was to go and decorate a tree in the forest for the animals This year we chose a clump of small pines off the Rivershore trail where we run and walk the dogs. Last night we spent an hour or so stringing old bagels and donoughts on strings.. today, diane spread them with peanut butter and birdseed.. We pied them all in a box then headed off to the trail It was the four of us. Gabes friend Kristen and all three dogs.
The tree we always had decorated in the past was way to tall now for us to reach the higher branches. These were nice tress.. we could reach the tops of them all.
We each grabbed a handfull and started hanging our edible ornaments…
They’re doing well down there. They’re workign in an orphanage filled with street kids. We’re goign to be dooign a clothign drive for them in the next week or so, so please beging collecting any kids clothes that oyu can spare…
One fun thing we did during the call wasto let the guys in Peru drive the very cool Rovio robotic camera that Billy and Shaun got us for Xmas.. It’s a camera and mike that you can steer over the web !..Here’s a picture of Hannah driving it around the room looking at our dogs and the christmas tree.. it was cool and surreal !
It was great hanging out with Avery.. She’s so funny and cool…
It was fun to do simply because it wasn’t straightforward…Here’s how I had to do it.. (Warning .. geek speak approaching)..
- First, I needed to create a simple ‘hit counter’ that I could embed in and query from myspace.. Nomrally that would be a piece of cake in PHP.. but myspace blocks PHP .. and javascript.. and everything else marginally useful due to seccurity concerns.. I found a loophole though.. because they do allow you to call Flash (I guess to allow Youtube videos)..
- So .. I wrote the counter in Flash..
- Inside the flash it callls a PHP file which updates a file with a hit count that resides outside of Myspace (on the Samstones website, actually)..
- I then embeded the SWF from the flash code in the header for my blog (You can now see the total hits counter under the scolling pictures at the top of my blog) . Every time soemone reads the blog , it updates the count in the file on Samstones.org.
- Then…. I wrote soem code in Python that runs constantly on my PC that every so often (every 10 secs or so) goes out and queires that hit counter file on SamStoens.org..
- If it’s been updated, it calculates the number of new reads since it’s last visit and sends them to the USB port.
- At the other end of the USB port is an Arduino microcontroller board. It’s runnign a short AVR C++ program that poles the USB port looking for input.
- When it sees a new hit counter come in it raises one of it’s control lines which drives a simple one transitor amp that drives the fan motor..
- et voila !
..
Gnite Sam
-me
