Sifteo and San Francisco
If you’ve been following me on Twitter you’ve probably noticed I’m not dead yet, despite the extreme silence on this blog lately. Well, possibly I just turned into a really inanely chatty zombie. But either way, I haven’t been cranking out awesome projects like mad. What gives?? First big event: this past July, I moved to San Francisco. Having grown up in... Read More
Another Reason to Beware Bargain Basement Bluetooth
I was debugging a Bluetooth-related problem on a Windows 7 machine recently, and I found another great example of why sometimes you get what you pay for, even when buying something as nominally standardized and homogeneous as a Bluetooth adapter. It so happens that this machine was using one of these $5 adapters with the fake antenna: That was the first thing I noticed about these... Read More
Espresso Machine Sous-vide
This project is a bit different from what I normally do. No firmware to write, just several trips to the hardware store and a lot of quality time with the drill, files, and nibbler. But this one has a higher purpose: Food. It was actually a commission by a friend of mine. He wanted to try sous-vide cooking, but neither of us were crazy about the idea of paying for something lab-grade,... Read More
Failed Antenna Design 101
I just got some more Bluetooth dongles in from DealExtreme. This one advertises extended range and EDR support, for $5. The package looks convincing enough, nevermind the engrish: So I cracked it open, naturally. (Hey, I was planning on using it for that crazy project.) And I was shocked to find this: Read More
Baking success
My boyfriend’s dad and I made some delicious french bread, and some dangerously tasty white chocolate and milk chocolate cookies! Read More
Announcing vusb-analyzer 1.1
The Virtual USB Analyzer is a graphical tool for analyzing USB sniffer logs. It can do some basic protocol decoding, and it has a graphical timeline view which helps to visualize the latency and concurrency characteristics of USB traffic. This release only adds a single feature, but it’s one that many people have probably been waiting for: support for Linux’s built-in... Read More
November Update
I guess I don’t have a complete blog entry to write on any one thing.. but there are several unrelated things that I feel like writing down. I recently joined Twitter, but I must suck at using it because none of these things ended up there. Life Tragic. Introspective. Complicated. This isn’t really a place where I would feel it appropriate to go into detail, but it... Read More
New MacBook Pro + Fyre
Back when I bought my last Mac: USB and the Playstation 2 were new, Altivec and shiny plastic were in, and fans were almost starting to line up for the first Harry Potter movie. Oh, and warrantless wiretapping was still illegal. So, Apple, I guess it’s time to put all those hardware failures behind us and see if this relationship can work. I’ve actually had a lot of... Read More
Graphics in VMware Fusion 3 and Workstation 7
I work on the graphics virtualization team at VMware. The company is about to release two new desktop virtualization products: Fusion 3.0 is in beta, with a release coming tomorrow. Workstation 7.0 has a public release candidate available. There are a lot of exciting features in these releases, and my team has been working really hard on making the graphics virtualization in these... Read More
Moved off of LiveJournal
My old LiveJournal blog has served me well over the last four years, but I was getting tired of LJ. When I first started this blog, I mostly used it like any other whiny homesick new college graduate would. But nowadays, I use this less like a social networking tool and more like a way to organize my projects and post writeups of things I’m working on or things I find interesting.... Read More