First the technology. RESTful calls are actually pretty cool. It is neat to simply send off a GET or POST message and extract or update the server with vital information. I am not going to write up a long article, well at this point anyway, describing RESTful calls.
Due to the flexibility and function of these calls there are a lot of tools and systems that make use of them. One such tool is Postman. This is a perfect tool for testing your RESTful calls on your servers. This might be during testing or it could be during development.
Performance
I was tasked with setting up some performance tests in another tool and my specification was a Postman script. You cannot really ask for a better specification than something that almost works like a finished program.
The only problem was that I had to run a few different steps and one of the steps required value from the previous step. This is actually almost trivial in Postman but the problem was I needed both the name and the value. The source code that I had needed parse looked like this.
I need to pass back a variable called xsrf_CppTDEqKjryFYA9agpaloQ with the value LugLnMWKGWyiZD64jwys4g in the next postman step.
The good news is that postman uses java script as its scripting language. This allows you to do plenty of interesting things when testing response values. In my case I decided to use java script to parse the login page that is retrieved and then essentially an inelegant search through the text for these values.
mysplits=data.split(” “);
searchname=’name=”xsrf’;
var idx;
var valueidx=-1;
var cnt=mysplits.length;
for (idx=0; idx < cnt; idx++)
{
//console.log(mysplits[idx]);
var search = mysplits[idx].substr(0,10);
if (search == searchname)
{
var pieces=mysplits[idx].split(“\””);
console.log(“found”);
console.log(search);
console.log(pieces[1]);
valueidx=idx+1;
}
if (valueidx == idx)
{
var pieces=mysplits[idx].split(“\””);
console.log(pieces[1]);
}
}
This isn’t the type of code you would want to use for any production solutions but it is a fun little hack to assist during development.
Posted inprogramming|Comments Off on Stupid postman tricks
A few weeks back I did my blog “Just making it – a new cube” which was my experiences doing my next led cube. This cube was an 8x8x8 cube. The only thing that I didn’t do was to put out a video of the patterns.
This cube actually was really well programmed. You can find a link to the video below.
Posted inprogramming|Comments Off on Better late than never – LED cube
Clone drone In the danger zone is a game made by Doborog games. You are a human mind implanted in a robot form. You can either battle royal, campaign or costum levels. You either have a sword or a hammer.
Here is a video of a challenge from clone drone in the danger zone.
There are a lot of words and concepts in the world that are bad. just one example of this is the suffix “ist”.
sexist
racist
white nationalist
ageist
exhibitionist
bigamist
chauvinist
Depending on your own personal circumstances it is easy to pick a side of an argument and feel strongly about it. Sometimes over the years opinions may change (or may not) but anything that is written down will haunt you forever. All of this came to mind when I was recently reading that former judge kavinaugh’s spot on the federal court will need to be filled and that his possible successor had indeed written down a few things back in the day. It appears that successor, judge Neomi Rao, had apparently written in the 1990s that victims of date rape were partly responsible if they’d been drinking.
It is bad is to blame the victim for the behavior of others. This particular argument of blaming the victim may sound to be reasonable until you really considered analogous situations to see just how a specious argument this is.
Perhaps the way to try and disprove that this position would be to “accept it” as case law and then see how this precedent would affect different cases.
Not so smart “smartphone”
A person is walking across the street at the crosswalk like some sort of zombie staring at his smartphone. The driver is driving at a constant rate and the pedestrian gets hit by a car.
Result
The driver argues that the pedestrian was not paying enough attention and is responsible for being hit by the car.
Assault
While discussing politics it becomes apparent that the two people do not agree. One of them instead of taking the time to make a strong argument uses this as an opportunity to make statements about the other person(person is stupid, looks ugly, isn’t intelligent, …) Nobody likes hearing these types of things and so he hits the other guy. Can you imagine how this would play out in court?
Result
If he hadn’t been such of a jerk I wouldn’t have had to hit him.
I would imagine that it is possible to create other situations and “blame” the victim to a certain degree as well.
It is important that we don’t lose focus.
It is important that everyone tries to be responsible for his or her actions. It would be frustrating to watch someone taking an excessive amount of time crossing the road, especially if you are in a hurry or have an appointment, but this is not illegal behavior. In my opinion is you are being very short-sighted if you are not paying attention to the world around you.
The same is true for having a discussion or argument and hitting the other person. It is sad that people get so emotional that they lose control but it still isn’t illegal to be a jerk. It is also legal to be an incredibly arrogant asshat although who wants that as a reputation.
Getting back to the main premise of “is the victim at fault” when he or she has been drinking. It is bad style for anyone male or female to get drunk to the point that you lose control but you shouldn’t be penalized for that legal behavior – especially when the other party is doing illegal behavior. In general no matter what situation is taking place you might want to keep the following in mind.
Discretion is the better part of valor.
It is pretty much a truism that nobody loves yourself as much as you do. As pessimistic as it may sound it is best if to a certain degree you have a small bit of skepticism in mind in all situations.
On a lighter note
Not all words ending with “ist” has to be a bad word.
technologist
nutritionist
agriculturalist
Depending on the situation, perhaps living next door to an exhibitionist might be a silver lining.
Posted inprogramming|Comments Off on A thought experiment
The problem was a project I built for my boys was no longer working. I put everything together just a few months back and one of the relays was now failing me. The actual problem was the switch no longer was catching but instead it was simply switching on and off constantly.
I purchased a package of five small relay boards for Arduino projects as I needed two and might use the others on something else. Replacing the old relays with new relays should have been a task of 30 minutes at most, but I spent a lot longer working my project than I expected.
The problem was that one of the relay boards that I was using in my led project was not responding to my signals. Eventually I swapped it out with a different relay board and all of a sudden everything worked perfectly (should have done that sooner).
My real question is why did the first relay’s fail? Did I buy poor quality? Was it because they were mounted on their side? Had they been used more than would normally be expected? Was the power I was using too much for the switch and that caused the short life?
In the past when these types of questions came up I would have asked Mikhail. He was both a sympathetic ear for your problems but was also an interesting sparing partner for verbal debates (I still think that Linux was a good decision for Munich and could have made them vendor independent and saved money in the long run, but they did at least gain the German Microsoft headquarters in Munich. )
I think we all have a “Mikhail” in our neighbor who helps answer our questions about computers, helps us move apartment, helps with minor plumbing, pick up the mail when we are out of town, cheers us up when we are down and also helps us buy our electronics.
We should all remember thank our own Mikhail for their assistance.
Posted inSoapbox|TaggedDIY|Comments Off on The Expert, helpful neighbor and friend
I guess I never really believed that a lot of the news organizations were being overtly “liberal” with an agenda. It seemed to me that any individual writer(s) may have a personal opinion and that is perhaps why he wrote the article
i.e.
“Clubbing baby seals now seen as cruel”
I have had about 24 or so days to listen to or hear about how the US government shutdown is the fault of the president from one group of the media while hearing that it is not from another group. I actually think there may be enough blame to go around so here is my chance to offer my impartial view.
President Trump
Could the shutdown be the president’s fault? The easiest person to blame about this is the president. He doesn’t make it easy to give him any benefit of the doubt when he says things like.
Dec 21, 2018
I am proud to shut down the government for border security
I will take the mantle of shutting down. And I’m going to shut it down for border security.
In one sense you could say that it is refreshing that he is willing to stand up for what he believes. You could also imagine that this is a pretty unrealistic desire. President Trump was unable to get wall funding approved when he had a majority in both the house and the Senate. How did he imagine it would work with the house of representatives expected to be counter to a lot of his ideas.
Republicans
Could the shutdown be the Republicans fault? The Republicans in both the house and the Senate did agree in Dec 2018 on a stop gap bill to keep the government open. This was not approved by the president which was the start of this shutdown. However, a very similar bill has been approved in 2019 by the house of representatives but it has not even been brought to the Senate floor for a vote. (naughty naughty Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell)
Democrats
Could the shutdown be the Democrat’s fault? It is possible to suggest that the Democrats are at fault over this budget impasse. They just got into power and perhaps are kicking up their heels to prevent the “good works” of the president. After all the difference between that money that President Trump wants (5.7Billion) and the total budget of the US government (3.422 Trillion in 2018) is, in essence, a rounding error of 0.16%. They did try and submit the same stop gap bill as in Dec 2018 to the Senate where it didn’t really go anywhere.
How did this start exactly?
The Congress did not actually manage to create a budget for the government by the Oct, which is the beginning of the fiscal year. In order to keep the government running, they did manage to pass a continuing resolution to fund the US government, but this temporary resolution was not passed by “The Donald”.
Congress
Is it the fault of the congressional branch of the US government? This is also a very strong possibility. The taking the busiest of congressional years, 2007, the number of days spent working was 190 which does compare pretty favorably to the number of working days for the average US worker (260).
Don’t misunderstand it is not that I am jealous (I am) as they work less[1] and earn more money than most people. The reason why this might be a congressional problem is that the budget is late but more importantly it isn’t a proper budget. Not only that but in the last 48 years which covers a lot of republican and democratic majorities there have only been four budgets that have been in surplus (1998-2001)[4]. A budget deficit in a family budget can occur but usually only for a short time and never for an entire year. This means that most members of Congress have not really done their job for decades.
Well, I imagine that these men and women of Congress, nay public servants, are actually barely able to make ends meet. Perhaps they are all overworked with second and third jobs just to pay their bills[2]? This also does not seem to be the case. These public servants not only can pay the bills but they are accumulating enough wealth that they may actually disprove the classless society in the united states.
No, those tireless public servants have not been spending their free time thinking of how to balance the budget but have instead spent their time funding raising[3]. The amount of time spent fundraising is mind-blowing. It seems to me that whether or not Congress is to blame for the current US government shutdown is a bit of a moot point as they have been complicit for nearly 5 decades of poor fiscal management.
You and I the voter
Is it possible that the reason the US government is shut down is the fault of you or me? I would say that unfortunately the American voters have also been complicit in these problems. This is not immediately connectable with shutdown but in the permissive attitude that they have supported, nay, encouraged in their representatives.
All of these are important
Strong defense
Protect the weak
Clean water
Safe food
Clean air
Global warming
Anti-discrimination
Strong borders
Nation of laws
Equal protection under the law
1st amendment rights
Right to bear arms
You may not agree with all of these but if we the voter do not look at the bigger picture when we elect a congressman then we are with 100% certainty responsible for this shutdown and the next.
A workaround
It is still possible for both houses of Congress to pass a common bill with 2/3 vote of both houses. This would override any possible presidential veto and would get the government running again. Once that is done then having real fact-based discussions on the wall or other ideas for a better and stronger America would be good.
There is enough fault to pass around. Rather than trying to assign blame lets work in a non-partisan fashion and get things done.
Some time back, I had a fair amount lot of free time. I spent the time working with a friend in the evenings to create my own LED cube from scratch. It was actually quite a bit of fun, the electronics was not overly complicated with most of it being done by a raspberry pi. It was fun to see both the hardware and the software side by side.
However, I am not an electronic engineer and I had to make some decisions which limited the overall solution. Part of this was the solution was pretty slow and the LEDs were actually not overly bright. The cube looks good in a dark room but you cannot hardly see it in normal lighting conditions.
I was also a bit disappointed in exactly how my cube wasn’t completely symmetrical. Not bad for an amateur but I was hoping for better. This time I was going to try my hand at building someone else’s kit.
Building the cube
The most challenging part is to actually build a LED cube. Keeping the spacing consistent and soldering internal connections of each plane makes building the cube an intricate 3D puzzle.
The plan to create a very symmetrical cube was to build a template to assist in building the layers. The idea is that if each layer is built identically the chances are better that all the LEDS will line up for the rows and columns.
There are two different directions to go, either to build each horizontal layer or to build a vertical layer. In my previous cube I learned the hard way that it is really pretty difficult to assemble these horizontal levels. This was while trying to make 4 internal connections that were not accessible from the edge. Building a larger cube will have considerably more internal connections, in the case of a 8x8x8 cube this would be 49.
My mentor Mikhail suggested that it would be much easier if I used a vertical slices. He suggested it might make the assembly easier. I have seen other examples on youtube assembling either as slices or even just adding each column as it is completed.
First attempt
The first step was to try and build the template to create each vertical slice.
The template looks pretty good in this picture but unfortunately looks can be deceiving. The actual LED’s are not perfectly aligned but more importantly the groves are not all straight, some of them angle slightly. This makes it quite difficult when trying to get the layer off of the template.
I tried to create a few small “slices” using this template but discovered that the defects, mainly the groves for the vertical lines, make using this template infeasible.
Second Attempt
I still wanted to build the cube in slices but I needed some assistance to create a more perfect template. This would be easier if I had better wood working tools and wood working skills so I thought perhaps I could purchase some parts that could allow me to create a consistent template.
I started with small wooden blocks that already had a hole drilled through them. Despite how similar they appear in your hand they are not truly identical. My solution was to get a long straight wire to help ensure that they are all nicely aligned. It is not obvious but after all the blocks were glued down I had to add glue around each block to help make each block more secure.
This template for building a panel does not use the legs of the LED’s hardly at all.
Third Attempt
My third and final attempt was to to build the cube in an entirely different way.
Of course once you create a lot of rows like this, you need another template in order to assemble them into a panel.
In retrospect this should be intuitively easier to assemble a cube from panels. The problem with building and assembling each layer is that it is necessary to connect up all of the “columns” with a led. In the case of a 8x8x8 cube this is the task of attaching 64 columns on each layer. The wires for each column would of course be standing straight up which means you need to carefully get your soldering iron to each spot without really bending these wires.
Most of the complexity This problem goes away when assembling the cube as a series of side panels. Of course you still do need to connect the different panels together. This task is much simpler as it is no longer necessary to have eight wires connecting each panel together at each layer. One wire is enough. This reduces the number of wires that need to be added to hold everything together from 64 to 8. I actually used a few more than that to give the cube some extra stability.
Another twist
I did play around with this alternative method as well. During my research I saw another cube developer who created a small loop at the end of each leg and then fed the row or column wire through this loop and then soldered it.
This other maker was creating a much more complicated RGB cube and needed to use this method, but it was really convenient in my case as it allowed me to create a very simple cube with clean lines.
In the end, I used both this small loop along with my third attempt at building a template form.
Wire preparation
The template itself actually does quite a bit of the work, it keeps the LED’s separated and at the proper distance from each other. The only tricky part is that you need straight wire for the rows and columns but the wire tends to be purchased in spools.
How to straighten wire was described in how I built my first cube so I won’t elaborate on it much here. I will however give some links to all three methods for doing this.
In theory any of these methods will work to a certain degree. I never did try the drill method but in the end I decided for the final method. If the wire that you are using for the structure of the cube is reasonably thin it is possible to simply pull the wire a small bit with a pair of pliers just using your hands. You cannot straighten wires that are very long but with this method I could straighten a piece that would later be cut into three smaller ones that are each long enough for a 8x8x8 cube.
I did cheat a bit as I used a vice grip pliers and a pair of pliers.
Other preparation
Actually there is not a lot of other preparation but it is a good idea to test your LED’s before assembly. This step is more important if you are building a cube from scratch because you will most likely have a lot of LED’s available. This step is important if you have a kit yet if one of the LED’s is substantially dimmer or doesn’t work you might find it difficult to get a replacement.
3D LightSquared DIY Kit 8x8x8 3mm LED Cube
I looked at a couple of sources for LED cubes on the internet. I could have purchased one on amazon but they were a bit more expensive than I was willing to spend for testing out someone else’s cube.
I found an 8x8x8 cube kit on Ebay for a very attractive price, so I gave it a try. I was a bit unhappy to see that I received a kit but no actual instructions were delivered. I went to the internet to see if I could find anything that would help me.
I did find plenty of pictures in the google search engine looking for my kit but perhaps one of the most helpful things was the following video and instructions that I found at the instructables.com site
I also saw some good photos from the hackaday.io site. You do have to be careful when putting in some parts such as the resister network and make sure that the capacitors are put with the correct polarity.
Actually putting the board together is really very simple with one little exception. The kit contains a whole set of “round pin needles” which you remove the insulation from and solder into the board. It is really a very clever way of connecting the LED panels to the board but it is an entirely irritating way thing to actually solder. No matter how I tried to solder these it it seemed that when I rotated the board that I soldered them in at a slight angle in one direction or another.
In the end this wasn’t quite the problem that I had initially thought as I choose a completely different method of building my panels.
The manner that the panels were built at the instructables side was using the legs of the LEDS as the wire for all of the columns and rows. That actually should help most beginners, including myself, a way of consistently connecting everything up. I would have considered doing this earlier but I didn’t like the method of connecting the panels.
If you look closely at the pictures from the instructables site you will notice that the LED’s in that example was pointing to the side instead of the more normal orientation(in my opinion) of straight up. It appears that the orientation on the hackaday site is with the orientation straight up, but the actual cube does not appear to have perfectly straight lines.
The final result is actually very stunning.
I will upload a video in the near future showing the various patterns of this cube. If I were reviewing this cube I would be stating how unhappy about the lack of instructions but quite pleased with the final results.
Posted inReview|Taggedelectronics|Comments Off on Just making it – a new cube
Heck, just about anything that is not only new to you but brand new on the market is pretty cool.
However, there can be things that you can do that will make your old stuff new – well newish.
It was only a few days ago that I was busy cussing out my smartphone. I didn’t think that it was that old. Perhaps the manufacturer used cheap parts. Perhaps that phone was really not so good to begin with! I was really getting upset when by accident I happened across a Youtube video about cleaning the USB charging port.
The idea is pretty solid. How much lint has accumulated in the USB charging port each time you take your phone out of your pocket. Is it the reason my USB cable seems to fall out without hardly any movement while charging on my desk.
That particular Youtube video was suggesting I get a small metal pin and file it down. I watched some other videos and eventually I did find a more rational approach. Instead of a metal which may really damage the port or channel some static directl into the device I found a video about using some thin plastic packaging that is also fairly strong.
Using this homemade tool you can very carefully pull out the tiniest pieces of lint. If you are careful, thorough and keep at this you would be surprised at how much can be pulled out.
This is more fluff that you could expect to find anywhere other than your dryer.
Indeed once I finished with this small cleaning/maintenance job the USB cable still worked but now it would stay in unless you pull it out. This was quite the difference from falls out if you look at the phone cable too long.
I am unhappy that I could not find that original video but I did find a similar one. I would recommend you are careful. It does make sense that a bit of maintenance will extend the life of any of your devices.
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