Due to a harddrive failure, I was forced to reinstall Linux on my aging laptop.  Previously, I had been running Gentoo which was built completely from source (if you want to learn about linux, building your own Gentoo installation from source is a great way).  Gentoo ran pretty fast on my old laptop since the only packages installed were the ones I had taken the time to build using Portage.  However, upgrades were always a pain since every package had to be built from source.  Yea yea yea, I know you can install pre-compiled packages from Portage, but what’s the fun in that, right?  Anyways, I’ve been running Debian on a home server and it’s pretty stable with no frills.  Ubuntu, being a quasi-derivative of Debian seemed like an attractive choice for a laptop.  Wow, is it ever.

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I can never leave well enough alone, so I started playing with the NextGEN Gallery WP Plugin today to spice things up. It has a fantastic administrative backend to create galleries of images and then albums of galleries, all of which can be easily inserted into posts using a small tag. While customizing this plugin, I stumbled upon the Highslide JS project which can be integrated into NextGEN, after some serious finagling, to enable cool effects when displaying your images. These effects include image navigation, fading, being able to drag images around, etc. The WP-Highslide plugin is a good place to start messing around. This plugin integrates a part of the Highslide JS codebase into WP as well as supplying a good place to locate all of the Highslide-specific CSS. Don’t ask me to explain how it works, as it took me a few hours of code and CSS editing to get something usable. If you don’t hate yourself, the NextGEN gallery plugin works perfectly fine without it. However, your images won’t do such cool things when you click on them as mine do. Here is an example of displaying a small gallery (caricatures of a few friends in the spirit of South Park).  When you click on a photo to enlarge it, try dragging it around and then maybe clicking on another one and dragging it around.  It’s oddly entertaining.

Wow. I did a double-take when I read the original FARK.com headline: “Group wants Wi-Fi banned from public buildings — because they’re allergic to it”. Much to my surprise, people really do believe they’re allergic to wireless communications. Hmm… maybe my own hypersensitivity to WiFi is what is causing this uncontrollable urge to beat my head against my computer monitor.

As my crappy 802.11b wireless router gasped its last breath, I started looking for a suitable replacement. My home network includes a web/email server, a dedicated MythBox, my standard desktop tower, and a laptop or two. Naturally, I wanted to upgrade from a just a simple router to a more full-featured firewall without spending a whole lot of money. An old AMD Athlon 900MHz computer with 512MB or ram would become an excellent base for a Smoothwall Express 3.0 installation.

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In the lab where I work, everyone has desks with smooth faux-wood tops.  The natural reaction is, “Oh man, my optical mouse is going to work great on this!”  If you thought this, you would be horribly wrong.  The shiny smooth top inhibits the optical mouse’s ability to image the surface and track its own movement.  Luckily, a researcher named Mike Carr came up with a solution by creating the World’s Cheapest Optical Mousepad.  Just print out the PDF on a black-and-white printer and affix it to your desk.  When it gets worn out, throw it away (or better yet, recycle it) and print out another.  The random pattern is an ideal surface for enhancing the performance of any optical mouse.  If you’re an online gamer and you get fragged, chances are that your enemy is using this optical mousepad.  Ah, the wonders of modern technology…

When generating a printed circuit board (PCB) layout, it’s a good idea to know the capabilities of your PCB fab house before you start. I’m ashamed, but I’ll admit that I recently finished routing a board with Altium Designer only to find out that I had created a layout which didn’t fall within acceptable manufacturing tolerances. I didn’t find this out until I tried to submit my design to PCBexpress.com (they’re pretty cheap and decent quality). It turns out that I had used a 5mil tolerance between traces instead of 6mils. Doh! After I had finished cursing myself up and down, however, I noticed that PCBexpress lists “Altium Designer 6″ and “Altium Designer 6 (With Sunstone DFM’s)” under the options for CAD software when you submit your design. That got me thinking. What are Sunstone DFM’s?

Sunstone Circuits is the actual fab house servicing PCBexpress.com. After hunting around on their website, I stumbled across this. Sunstone offers Design For Manufacture (DFM) rules for download for both Altium Designer and Eagle. In the zip file for Altium are two rule files and a set of instructions in a word document. The rule files are for single and double-sided boards, and multi-layer boards. Importing the appropriate rule file into the rule-set for an Altium PCB design establishes all the important layout rules to ensure your design gets manufactured the first time every time. Rules are set for things like trace width and spacing, via and hole size, thermal relief sizes for internal planes, solder mask tolerances, etc. This really beats trying to translate the manufacturing information on PCBexpress.com into working rules on my own, since apparently I’m not very good at it.

I’ve been working on a project for about a year which requires a high speed digital data link between a GUI (running on a generic windows computer) and an Altera Cyclone II FPGA. I wanted to implement this link with a high-speed USB 2.0 connection, a hardware task I was sure I could undertake. However, I didn’t want to spend a whole lot of time writing windows USB drivers and implementing the USB standard in an FPGA. Enter the Bitwise Systems QuickUSB 2.0 Module.

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