"Hello World!", said Eee PC.

So I decided to get an Asus Eee PC, and I must admit I am impressed. I really wanted to get a 9" model, but they are still not out yet and to be frank, it looks like the price is going to be a little on the high side as well.

Anyway, Sharon and I are heading to Switzerland on the weekend for a week of vacation and I wanted an utra-portable laptop (especially considering my main laptop fried two hard drives recently, and is freaking huge - about 6 lbs). This thing is incredible! It is only 7" but it packs a punch (that's what she said) in terms of functionality. The model I got came with Linux installed and to be honest I was going to wipe it and put XP on it. I bought a 1GB memory module and upgraded that before I even turned it on, and I also picked up an 8GB SD card for storage (I only got the 4G model, so the main SSD only has ~1.5GB free on it). I even bought an IDE/SATA to USB adapter to immediately put WinXP (or even Ubuntu) on it, but so far it has handled everything I have thrown at it without a hiccup, including:

• Connecting to my wireless network (duh)
• Transferring files to and from my Samba server
• Connecting my digital camera via USB and transferring pictures off of it (I did not expect this to work)
• Gmail
• Skype
• Connecting to Facebook and changing my profile picture (taken with the webcam on the Eee PC - even Facebook Chat works!)
• YouTube
• And now...Blogger

My only complaint so far is that the keyboard is really cheap. I don't mind the cramped size so much - but the key presses are very inconsistent and that gets to be annoying real fast. But I don't expect to be writing novels on this thing anyway.

I guess I shouldn't be so impressed. I mean these are standard OS and web services, and I know that Linux (and Firefox) can handle all of this, but it is just so much more impressive on such a small device. I think this thing is going to pay for itself really quickly in convenience alone and I am glad I didn't hold out for the 9" model. This is going to be sooo convenient on our trip! And since it can do all I need it to do for us while we are traveling I think I am going to leave Linux on it for the time being. Maybe I'll start hacking it later, but for now it does what I need it to do.

I love technology!

Hacking At Home

I came across this awesome hack of not only completely automating an espresso machine with a microcontroller and an LCD, but controlling it all with a Wii Nunchuk controller.



Sweet. Now I wonder if my wife will let me take a dremel to her Christmas present...?

Happy Birthday, Dear

Today was a milestone birthday for Sharon (I won't say how old she is), so I figured since she didn't want a big party (at least that's what she said) I would spend the day baking and cooking instead. For breakfast, I made my signature waffles. Then I went grocery shopping and for dinner I made steak and risotto (OK, the risotto was from a box) with caesar salad. But for dessert I wanted to make a chocolate cake from scratch (icing and all!). I found this recipe online, and decided to go for it.

The recipe itself was fairly easy, the only problem was that the icing takes one whole pound of finely chopped chocolate! Chopping sixteen, one ounce squares of chocolate was not so much fun.



But all-in-all, the end result was much better than I figured I could have managed on my own. Well, I say "on my own" with a couple caveats. Rhiannon did help quite a bit, and I did ask Sharon a lot of questions...but I am fairly impressed with myself anyway, and the end result was quite passable as a birthday cake!



And it tasted quite good too!

The Future Is Unwritten

Tonight I saw the documentary The Future Is Unwritten at the Princess Cinema with some friends. It is a rock-umentary about The Clash, and the life of Joe Strummer.

All I can say is - very cool. I highly recommend it!

Hello, Griffin!

Say 'Hello' to Griffin Hart Hood!



While little Griffin was (a little scarily) premature and had to be delivered early via c-section, everyone appears to be doing well. Congratulations to Sharon's sister Tracy and her husband Jordan.

Chuck Lorre is my kind of guy

OK, I admit it. I am addicted to The Big Bang Theory. Last week's bit on X10 devices was freaking hilarious:



And it looks like they even took the time to create a Wolowizard YouTube user to upload the video that Howard Wolowitz shot at the Physics symposium on his cell phone.



Priceless.

Not only do I think it is *the* funniest show on TV right now (and now that the writer's strike is over we finally get new episodes!), the vanity cards at the end of each episode are equally entertaining. I think Chuck Lorre is someone I'd love to shoot the sh*t with over a pint. The vanity card for last night's episode piqued my interest enough to find the (un?)censored version and I am glad I ventured to Chuck's site. I have always wondered exactly what it would take to write a hit sitcom, and now I have a step-by-step manual.

Like I said... my kind of guy.

Presentation and Source Code Uploaded

The presentation for my talk on extension points has finally appeared on the EclipseCON website for those of you who wanted it. There are a TON of notes in there that are quite useful (I think), so it is worth downloading the source .ppt file for reference.

I also uploaded a zip containing the source code for my demo plug-ins for those of you who were interested as well. It seems the Cloudsmith SVN server is down, so I figured I would just upload them as an attachment to my presentation summary along with the presentation. But judging from how long it took the presentation to appear, it may be a few hours before it shows up. This code is completely unsupported, but shoot me an email (mark dot melvin at gmail dot com) if you run into issues. I tested it on Linux, Windows XP, and Vista, but did not test it on a Mac (let me know if it works or doesn't work if you have a Mac).

Thanks to everyone who attended!

Update: I am not sure the code is ever going to appear as a link on the main talk summary page, but you can always go to the Eclipsezilla submission page and download the attachment here:
https://eclipsecon.greenmeetingsystems.com/submissions/view/388