Brooklynonnolly.

Prospect Heights, how do I love thee? erm, Crown Heights, how do I love thee, erm, Prospect...

2009-08-10T20:11:00.003-04:00

So I'm not sure where I live... is it Prospect Heights? Crown Heights? Near Bed Stuy? Either way I love this goddamned neighborhood... My lease is up in 2 months but I'm pretty sure I refuse to move more than 4 blocks away in any direction. I've opened up my twitter (http://twitter.com/johnconnolly) and facebook (http://facebook.com/jeconnolly).

SRSLY

2009-02-19T14:05:00.002-05:00

Tweeting has replaced my ability to blog. If I'm microblogging, who cares about macroblogging? (That's how I segway into a macroblog post).

Things are different. Have I mentioned that I moved? Oh yes, I did. Have I mentioned that I'm in Barcelona for the MobileWorldCongress.com ? No. I'm here for work and I've seen some really rad stuff. TI, Nokia, Palm all have some really cool devices coming out. I got a chance to see some of them and I'm really psyched about linux and mobile computing, despite the economy. I got a chance to spread the word about BUG, but little chance to see the rest of this awesome city. I need to return soon. I get to sheepishly practice my spanish (though it's mostly Catalan here, not Castillan) and the residents of this city wink and placate my broken Castillan. I wanted to rent a moped, see some sights, get around a bit but I really didn't have any time. Is there a Catalan phrase for "c'est la vie"? I'll find out next time I'm here.

See? Twitter wouldn't let me post something so longwinded.

2008-11-22T17:34:00.001-05:00

So hungry. Where did my desire to cook go?

2008-11-16T20:28:00.002-05:00

Have I mentioned that I Twitter? I do. But erm, it's closed due to recent weirdness. Have I mentioned that there's a new bloggish thing going on at work @buglabs?. I'll post there fairly frequently.

How're you? I'm mainly working now... not too much else to do in November in Brooklyn.

Maker Faire, New Apartment

2008-10-22T19:46:00.002-04:00

I had the privilege of representing Bug Labs at Make Faire Austin this past weekend. There were well over 20,000 in attendance and it was just incredible. I practically lost my voice on Saturday talking to interested people, and the feedback was excellent. I wish I had more time to see the demonstrations and booths of other makers, but we were just so busy. Of note was Sparkfun's booth adjacent to ours, which had soldering stations where people could learn to get hands-on with tech, and Mitch Altman's setup in the Maker Shed with soldering stations and a number of interesting gadgets he has created. All in all it was probably my favorite work-related event, and I hope to make it back to every one of them.

I've also moved into a new apartment, sharing it with Jeff and Ryan, an elementary school teacher and a Citigroup Operations team-leader, respectively. The place is great, spacious and well-renovated... starting to feel like home though many of my belongings are still folded or packed up in the adjacent room.

Not feeling so hot today, I think between the travel and moving up 4 flights of stairs in 50 degree weather with a t-shirt in jeans I got sick. I'm going to veg out for a little while now.

As of 10/10/2008...

2008-10-12T16:34:00.000-04:00

I'm 28. Thanks for the birthday wishes.

Babylonnolly again...

2008-10-06T18:22:00.002-04:00

I started a post that was all "Well, I'm back in Long Island again until I find a place..." but, I just found a place. Cut a check for security, first month's rent due on the 15th of October, a week from tomorrow. Thanks craigslist.

The apartment is in Prospect Heights and it's 2 blocks from beautiful giant brownstones... the kind that radiate a warm light-washed woody glow. That is to say, I'm two blocks into a not-as-nice neighborhood, but it's not bad. Rent is cheaper than before, and I'll be living with two male perfect strangers. The two of them seem nice enough and I'm sure I'll get along fine. So long as I get the bigger of the opening bedrooms. ;D

So yep, Babylon for a week, then back into Brooklyn. Catch me if you can. ;D

nuttin' muchb

2008-09-16T05:47:00.002-04:00

Rode my new bike (below) to work yesterday. My route, close enough. It felt pretty good. I love the new bike.

Not doing it today though... need to go back up to Massachusetts for work. I'll probably microblog about it.

Summer is over...

2008-09-13T14:32:00.002-04:00

so sad. Not that it feels like it today. Muggy and humid in Brooklyn.

We were supposed to do a camping trip with BUG peeps, but it looks like that's off. Unless interested parties spontaneously decide on a late september weekend. I know I'd like to go.

Looking forward to the Great Irish Fair next weekend, a trip to NYC Resistor Wednesday of next week, and a party at Ashleigh's next weekend too. I'll also be going back up to ACT Electronics this week for work.

I also had the privilege of meeting Mitch Altman this week, which was pretty rad. He invented the TV-B-Gone and has some far out ideas for tech. Pretty cool.

It looks like I'll be having a party at my place for my birthday. Laura wants to do something so it'll probably be 10/10, a Friday, or the next day. That's all for now...

Vacation remorse, the Great BUG Leap Forward

2008-08-26T08:12:00.002-04:00

I took of Monday through Wednesday of last week and I felt like I missed a lot. 3 days and the pace is incredible. The list of features to accompany the new BUG platform number too many to enumerate (awkward phrasing), but the push to get it out the door very soon is successful.

The Monday Great Leap Forward for R1.3: BUG apps ... working, Motion, LCD, and GPS modules working. Full connectivity to the SDK. Knight Rider. Hotplug working all the way up to web services. VH support in Java. [ tweaked ] on-screen keyboard. among others.

It may not seem like much, but we ported to a new linux kernel, moved to a new platform, migrated things to udev, tweaking Poky to suit our needs, and xserver/matchbox to our hardware... it's a lot.

I'm going to run some apps on the BUG today, including something for the von hippel, now accessible from Java-lang (for better or worse), maybe with a web service to set GPIO pins or something... for the GUI apps, I'm going to use fbgrab to get screenshots, and post them on the forums. exciting stuff.

2008-08-16T21:12:00.003-04:00

I'm in Long Island, visiting mama Connolly, trimming hedges, weeding gardens, repairing fences, buying power washers. It's like living in Brooklyn forces me to squeeze all suburban misery into a single day.

Tomorrow Laura is coming out and we're heading to Noyack for some sun and sea before it's time to stop wearing white pants and straw hats. I'll be taking monday and tuesday off of work to kyack around noyack bay/shelter island sound, and maybe catch some fish. What I mean is, I'll probably bring this laptop into the kyack, make laura row while I ssh -t build@darner screen -x build to check on how the build is going on darner.

I'm super happy about this upcoming release and hardware push. My code will be running in the API, some of my recipes will help build our distribution, and it's just really gratifying. That said, I'll probably not sleep from Wednesday the 20th through Thursday the 28th, trying to make sure that everything is done... speaking of which. my download of zImage-bug.bin and bug-image-production.ext3 just finished. I'm going to go give it a try.

work stuff

2008-08-11T20:02:00.002-04:00

Sweet, got some sound working at the application layer for the BUG:

http://cvs.buglabs.net/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/com.buglabs.bug.jni.audio/?root=cvs

Since phoneME personal CDC builds without access to the java.sound API, and tritonus doesn't work out of the box with phoneME, I went with a pretty crude alsa wrapper of aplay. The idea is to get a more robust audio api out after R1.3...

more later

von hippel very near...

2008-07-21T17:38:00.002-04:00

Great things coming up for BUG. wifi is almost done on the software side, von hippel on the hardware side, and we're moving out platform to openembedded/poky.

I'm happy to be working on the Java bindings for our Von Hippel module at BUG. It's one of the coolest extensions to a product I think I've ever seen, much less worked on. It's really rad.

more later.

BUG goes for OpenEmbedded/Poky

2008-07-21T15:00:00.003-04:00

So hot. Screenshots to come, but it's the bomb. It's eye-candy, it's a vibrant open source community, and it means good things for BUG.

See the post from Ken Gilmer here:

http://bugblogger.com/bug-adopts-poky-linux-155/

screenshots and video of the sexy new BUG environment coming soon.

-John

10 day recap

2008-07-16T21:31:00.005-04:00

I'm working on a few panoramas using Hugin panorama creator. I've got some good candidates for a panorama, including one from the corner of Brooklyn Bridge Park in DUMBO, and one of the new space at BUG Labs. I'll post them somewhere once I've actually stitched them together properly.

I love Brooklyn though. I had a black leather loveseat I got from my sister's boyfriend when I moved here. Laura and I have since picked up a pull-out couch in better condition, so we were looking to get rid of it. We called an unnamed and well-known non-profit and it was scheduled to be picked up for donation. The two movers get here yesterday afternoon, and after a cursory glance at the couch, mover1 proclaims it un-donatable. There's a dime-sized tear under the fold of one of the arms, and it won't pass the thorough examination to be performed by his supervisor. He's got a friend though, who, for $20 will take it off my hands. They'd be happy to move it. Mover2: "but I'll have to work late tonight!" Mover1: "We're name-of-non-profit, we do things for people. just lets do this." So I give them $20, and he gives me a tax deductible receipt. All parties happy, they depart. Bunch of hustlers though.

I went to BestBuy on Bway and Houston this morning and picked up a PCI 802.11b/g/n card because we still don't have an ISP at the office and I want to leech off an unsuspecting access point. Except I forgot that getting the drivers for Ubuntu will require googling around. chicken: meet egg. So I can't get it installed and I end up working from home most of today. I got a lot of good work done, and just now I tried to get the drivers for the PCI card. I built ndiswrapper from source, installed the CD drivers on my alternate windows partition, pulled the WN311B.inf and WN311B.sys files from windows, and installed it that way. ndiswrapper -l, modprobe ndiswrapper and voila. I have wlan0 as a NIC. so hot, and it actually works.

Laura is up at her parents for the remainder of the week and I miss her already. (aww).

Posted some pics to flickr

2008-07-05T23:16:00.001-04:00

That's my brother. Enjoy.

bugblogger

2008-07-04T08:32:00.002-04:00

So I says to Jeremy Toeman, I says wouldn't it make more sense for me to be posting about work-related questions/observations/entries on bugblogger.com? I mean, since much of my traffic here comes from fellow technologists looking for the same answers I post about looking for, wouldn't it make sense for them to be seeing this on an official BUG forum? So Jeremy says to me, he says: "yes of course. Blog away." So beginning today, I'm going to begin using BUGblogger for these types of observations. Maybe I'll crosspost here, like "oh, so I haven't updated in a while? no no, check HERE for the latest action..." that type of thing.

The rest of of Brooklynonnolly will end up looking like brooklyn-related entries: woe is the 20-something with a heavy bicycle in urban Brooklyn... woe is the consumer with a 2-DVD queue on netflix. you know, the interesting stuff.

So, tah tah for now.

More work-related stuff

2008-07-01T15:00:00.004-04:00

So I'm out of QA and into the development team at Bug Labs. This is great for me because I'm a coder at heart and the allure of BUG is the wide-openness with regard to programming... lots of stuff to do, and it's all open.

So, along those lines, I'm looking to enhance the Sound API for our BUG. The BUGbase has an onboard speaker, and we have alsa configured to handle sound at the OS level. Command-line mp3/wav playback works. I'm looking to configure this at the application layer, but JSR135, the sound API for J2ME is owned by Nokia and it's not open source (yet?). This means that the sound functionality for phoneME is, right now, limited to .au uLaw playback which is *ahem* limiting.

Ideally, I'd like a BUG user to be able to attach an mp3 as a bundle resource for their BUG app and just call the Sound service to play it back. This means I will have to be fairly sophisticated in handling sound:
1) determine the file type and encoding either at the Java or C level
2) play it back
3) synchronize access to the Sound player at the App layer.

JLayer is out because it's written for J2SE and requires classes not implemented in PhoneME Advanced, Connected Device Configuration, Personal Profile, which is the VM and API we're using on the BUG.

What I'm currently working on is a JNI implementation, where I use some of the source from aplay (part of alsa-utils), to interact with the alsa driver. The method signature should just have a URI or File parameter (the latter is easier)... and the implementation will likely have the guts of the aplay implementation.

I've already gone through the hello world for JNI, and a simple playback tutorial for building a program using the ALSA API. Now I need to combine the two and make it intuitive to the end user.

Interesting. I'll document my progress.

BTW, it seems like many more people come across this blog as a result of my posts regarding tech, coding, and BUG, so I'm going to be pretty tech-heavy from now on. On the plus-side, this means I'll post more frequently as I hit stumbling blocks.

I love working for an open-source company.

behold the power of xeyes

2008-06-16T17:28:00.002-04:00

NEVER HAVE YOU SEEN SO MUCH POWER.

Things I'm excited about... both work and non-work.

2008-06-14T07:22:00.003-04:00

Work @ Bug:
1) R1.2 release is scheduled for Monday 6/16. There is a lot of cool new functionality in the API for Accelerometer control, more sophisticated WebService handling, and exposing the OSGi back-end via web-services. There is also a kernel-update utility coming with this release... so, with the new onboard audio support, there will need to be a kernel update. But this is made fairly painless with the new tool! No serial or network/daughter card required to update the kernel.

2) We got a TI beagleboard sent to the office, and we're looking to port our software stack to it. Since we're moving from our own homebrew linux distro to OpenEmbedded/Poky (by R1.3), this should be fairly straight forward. I'm not sure exactly how valuable it will be without our module hardware support, but it would still be a fun side project.

3) Oh that reminds me, R1.3. While R1.2 isn't released yet (my fault), I still can't help but really look forward to R1.3. It's going to be a comprehensive change of platform, and this will bring many cool things. For one, the MotherBUG could just be a Qemu emulated BUG (and resistant to the physical constraints of actually having a real BUG). In addition, the Virtual BUG, against which many of our loyal BUG users have been programming for the past year or two, may become a full-fledged virtual BUG, complete with the OS backend. This would be so dope.

Non-work:

Coney Island. Period. Laura and I have been making the most of our weekends by hopping on the F train around 7:30 AM every Saturday and/or Sunday and heading to the beach for a few hours. I have to say, despite its reputation as "one of the least bucolic beaches on the planet", it's really quite relaxing. The water is clean, there are plenty of other fat pale people on the beach (so I don't feel quite so awkward), and believe it or not I have yet to hear a single gunshot ring out.

Brooklyn Flea. I look forward to it every weekend. Good times, noodle salad. Laura and I have so far bought three pieces of furniture there (for dirt cheap. An american craftsman night table for under $100, for example. go ahead google it. they're almost always 10x that amount). It's a lot of fun, and eventually I'd like to get a bike there too. mine is too heavy. Oh that reminds me, I should put it on craigslist.

more about craigslist later...

Seth Kurtzberg.

2008-06-10T12:26:00.003-04:00

A coworker at Bug Labs recently passed. It came as a complete shock to us at Bug. He was one of the smartest developers I've had the privilege of meeting and working with. He has a long list of accomplishments and his contributions to BUG are too many to enumerate here. Let me just say on my own behalf that he will be missed.

Moved in, settled in BK.

2008-05-24T13:04:00.003-04:00

So I'm moved in! I'm flying out the door to catch the tail end of Brooklyn flea. Riding my bike... I'm going to load a GPS app onto the bug first, try to get a fix, and then ride around brooklyn. I'll post the data up on GPS Visualizer and then EveryTrail. I'll be navigating by dead-reckoning, so don't make fun of my crooked route.

I'm also going to take some pictures with my loaner BUG. Those pics will go up on flickr (and maybe a few onto twitxr).

Also, you can now spy on me at work: http://motherbug1.buglabs.net/service/picture . That URL takes a picture dynamically (as you request it). There's an application I wrote for the MotherBUG that is something like crowd-security. It snaps a picture when motion is detected between the hours of 6PM and 9AM (EDT) and tweets and twitches about them.

On a totally different note.

Laura got a drastic haircut in solidarity with her mother, who has undergone chemotherapy for an advanced case of breast cancer (which is now lymphoma). Pray for the mama cubana, and tell Laura how beautiful she looks. She didn't bic it. she should have, she could be an excellent swimmer.

Here we goooo

2008-05-12T06:54:00.003-04:00

Okay so it's been a long time since I've updated. I have an excuse!

I've moved to brooklyn. The apartment is beautiful and the neighborhood is fantastic. Furniture is coming in dribs and drabs, but the place is really great. Pictures forthcoming. So yeah, this is the first time I've been on my unpacked computer in almost two weeks.

Bug Labs also sent me to JavaOne this past week, in San Francisco I've posted some pictures I've taken with the BUG on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/26414842@N02/. Those are mostly from the conference and lunch/walking tour with Bug Labs WestCoast. I've got some more coming of pictures I took, thanks to Mehrshad Mansouri for the whirlwind tour of SF. I mentioned that I'd like to see more than the 8 square blocks between the Moscone Center and Hotel Whitcomb in SOMA. Mehrshad rose to the occasion and too me on a breakneck tour of the city, from wharfs to bluffs, beaches to peaks all under an hour and a half. Breakneck. Those pictures should be great, and I'll post about it when i get them.

Oh, this is my first from Brooklyn... and I should probably shower/shave and get on the F train already.

Nothing like the last minute...

2008-04-15T06:33:00.002-04:00

Just filed my federal yesterday and my state this morning. Yow. I'm getting money back though, which is nice. I barely worked in '07, while finishing school. All this talk of finances!

Between the apartment & related expenses and tax season, I'm looking at long-term savings... Roth IRA holmes. I'm definitely going to dump 5K into an IRA this year (and the maximum allowed every year). To hell with an unmatched 401k, contributions to an IRA, it's the way to go. Especially with getting in at the economic ground floor, as it were.

More later.

I so can't wait to move.

2008-04-04T05:14:00.002-04:00

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One way, baby.