A few months back while searching for solutions to automate the observatory’s roof, I came across a small shop on Bulgary that sells USB and Serial relay boards, in various configurations. At the time I bought a couple of USB One Channel Relay Units and they sitted around for a while, while I finished some other small projects.

Today I finished the assembly of the board. I got a small plastic box, that turned out to be a tiny bit smaller that it should, forcing me to chop off a few millimeters at the corners of the PCB, cut a slot on one end for the USB port and power cable, and got a cheap triple extension cord from the local hardware store to make the thing useful.

The final result was this, with a unused board on the side:

To control it, I made a small C# application (.NET 2.0, Windows only), that presents a simple form with a button, and can be controlled from the command line. You can download it here (zip, 5Kb) if it’s useful for something.

To change the COM Port, you should edit HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SigmaPower\COMPort on your registry (the key is created on first run)

To use it from the command line, you should pass it a single parameter: “ON” / “OFF”, or “1″ / “0″. Ex:

c:bin>SigmaPower ON

This one should be installed on the observatory by tomorrow!

Last week I visited with some friends a abandoned building in Lisbon, to explore the photographic possibilities of the place (old, decadent, industrial). There, I asked Joost if he would help me with my first assignment for the Strobist Boot Camp II.

Joost is a freelance photographer that has walked half the world (actually, half of Europe, Asia and Africa) shooting for magazines, newspapers and for himself, and he’s much better qualified than me to run the controls of a DSLR. Even so, he kindly agreed to place himself on front of the lens, and with the help of two strobes, a small umbrella, and a Lumiquest Big Bounce, I managed to get my first real portrait:

My thanks for Joost, and Sonia, my assistant for the shoot

O Hubblecast é um videocast produzido pela ESA e pela NASA, com novidades e imagens do Telescópio Espacial Hubble. O video é uma produção de alta qualidade de divulgação cientifica, e já há algum tempo que o acompanho.
Hoje decidi traduzir o Episódio 28 para português, e construir legendas para o filme, para as pessoas que possam ter dificuldade em perceber inglês.

As legendas estão em formato SRT e devem funcionar sem problemas (na verdade, no meu Mac o Quicktime com o Perian não conseguiu ler as legendas) num qualquer leitor multimédia que suporte este formato. O VLC é gratuito, Open Source, funciona em Linux, Windows, e Mac OS X, e reproduz sem problemas o filme, e as legendas.

Links

• As legendas: heic0907a.srt 16Kb
• Os filmes: em vários formatos do site do Hubble

From code.flickr via kottke.

Interesting analysis of client-side processing and data transmission…

From typeface’s website:

Instead of creating images or using flash just to show your site’s graphic text in the font you want, you can use typeface.js and write in plain HTML and CSS, just as if your visitors had the font installed locally.

You still a licensed font for this, but there’s tons of open source fonts out there…

Via kottke the Milky Way Transit Authority map by Samuel Arbesman.

From svn:

…remember that performance optimization is never about the optimal, it’s about the good enough. Performance is a problem when it’s a problem, but otherwise it’s just not relevant.

Recently I had to tweak a site to perform a little bit faster… in the end the gain was not that much, but just taking a look and improving a bit is often all it’s needed.

From Slashdot:

Computers and their strange behaviours…

From svn:

Imagine if Information Architects and Designers worked together with Developers to create a working section or feature of a site. Wireframes can be part of that process but don’t have to be presented. The more real it is the better feedback you’ll receive.

Exactly on spot ! Only problem is, IA aren’t abundant in small companies, and designers end up doing that job, what (usually) leads to poorly thought features and interactions. Design is a visual process, and it’s too easy to look at that shiny polished look that’s appearing like magic on Photoshop and forget that what’s on screen is just a still, a frame from a bigger movie where the main character is played by the user.

Or, Developers take a shot at it, and being good faithful geeks they suffer from the reverse problem: everything is interaction, and every possible solution must be taken in to account, regardless of the look and interaction demanded from the user. We (I fit comfortably on the geek squad) end up making forms that present error messages on the wrong places, with non sequential fields and sometimes even loosing all the information the user just entered.

All this leads to frustration, with one (or more) of the following results:

• the developer that likes to have a polished look and feel, sees a nicely designed page that breaks conventions and is not easily expandable
• the designer sees his/her hard work completely trashed by a dumb geek that can’t see the difference from Helvetica to Georgia
• the user sees a waste of his/her time

Of course, we can work hard and try to make something good, designers, developers, and information architects (even the ones that perform this role in good will). But sometimes it’s hard…