Arduino Contest 2008

The company that is currently distributing Arduino in Spain, Libelium, organized 2 months ago an Arduino Contest. And I force myself to compete with something. I decided to improve my first MrPotato Robot adding voice, led eyes a thermometer, and of course using the new MrPotato Maximus Prime. It took a great effort, I finished the hardware stage, but I couldn't end the software one. Anyway, I sent it to the contest, competing in the Art Hack section.

4 Windows must-have Tools

Developing SysAdmin task on Windows Operating System seems to be a kind of hard, not anymore if you are properly equiped. Here I recommend a set of cool tools to make your Windows usage&control experience easy peasy.

• Windirstat


• Autoruns


• Procmon


• ProcExplorer

CmdHere. Console directory navigaton... Forget it

Some coworker told me that there was a way to navigate your filesystem using the windows explorer and opening a windows console from there. And today I found some time to search the solucion. CmdHere.

If you are using Windows Vista, the CmdHere is a builting feature. The only thing you need to do from your windows explorer is to Shift+Right Click at the directory and choose from the context menu option open command prompt here. For more details, MaximumPcguides

Groupie, groupie!!

Let's give this blog a little bit of color. Here I want to share with you my Conchita's Signed CD. A friend of mine, (Mrs. Andrew), has contacts in the VIP world, and gathered this for me. I'm pretty excited, I'm not sure how much time it will last. Anyway here I add a brush of eccentricity to this blog.

FusionCharts. Cool flash charts with a free distribution

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.boundingbox.es/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/fcf_mscolumn2dlinedy.swf" height="300" width="600" fvars=" dataURL= http://www.boundingbox.es/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/temperature_080321.xml ; chartWidth = 600 ; chartHeight = 300"/]
fcf_mscolumn2dlinedy.swf
temperature_080321.xml

I have to admit that I wasn´t very proud of my matplotlib code to represent the temperature values I was gathering with Arduino. It was pretty complex, and too slow. Meanwhile I´ve been facing several issues that requires data representation and searching for alternatives I came across a nice solution, flash charts. I found two projects, one open source, Open Flash Charts, and another commercial, but with a free distribution, FusionCharts

libgmail. Python binding for Google's Gmail service

I´ve spent some time thinking how to backup the data I´m currently storing in my linux server. First of all, I faced the problem of coding the script to backup and then configuring the cron services to execute it daily. When all was working I had to decide where to put those backup files, because leaving them in the server hard disk wasn´t a solution. So I bought an USB hard disk and from time to time I move the backup files there. I was more or less happy with the solution. But some months ago I talk to a friend and co-worker who was starting to use a gmail account as a backup storage. I thought that was a great idea so I started to find a python library that helps me to send all my backups to my auxiliary gmail account, and I found it, libgmail .

OOOLIB. Python module to create procedural spreadsheets

At the beginning of this year I decided to take control of my expenses. To do so, I wanted to automate this annoying task as much as possible, to be aware of my expenses without spending too much time. I started gathering data from my bank using the Norma43 format, then adding this info to a database and so on. After all this, I needed to create reports, and I thought that OpenOffice spreadsheets could be a great place to store them.

To create your procedural spreadsheets you can use csv(coma separated value) files, but you loose the ability to set format configurations like font color, column width and so on. With the ooolib, you can use Python to to create procedural OpenOffice spreadsheets easily and without pain. It doesn´t support all the format options you have in Calc, but the main ones. Definitely enough for me.