My previous attempt at building a simple IR pen did not work as expected. The power source was too weak for the IR LED, and consequently the Wiimote had difficulty detecting the IR light.

For my second attempt I purchased an IR LED, some wire, a momentary switch, a 10 Ohm resistor, and a battery holder for two AA batteries. I also had a whiteboard marker lying around, which I used to create the casing for the IR pen.

I wired up the circuit so that the IR LED was in serial with the switch, resistor and battery holder. I then cut off the nozzle from the whiteboard marker casing. I needed space to fit the switch, so I cut the cylinder shaped casing in half, and drilled a hole to push the switch through. I then popped the LED through the nozzle, and wrapped the casing around the circuit. Everything was then held in place using electrical tape. It was a prototype, so I didn’t bother with aesthetics, which the rubber band holding the pen and battery holder together clearly shows.

I am glad to report that this particular IR pen works perfectly with my laptop screen and the Wiimote. However, I will need to test it out on a projected image from a data projector before officially giving the thumbs up.

My previous foray into using a Wiimote with my laptop led me down the path of building a USB sensor bar so that I can use the Wiimote to control the pointer movements. This approach worked better than expected, but it doesn’t work so well if you want finer control of your mouse pointer. For example, when I was demonstrating the Wiimote integration with my laptop I was quite nervous about the demo not working, and this was made apparent by the shaky lines that I was drawing with the Mouse Gestures. As a result some of the Mouse Gestures did not register.

A better approach would be to do what Johnny Lee did with the Wiimote to create the Wiimote Whiteboard. Johnny Lee used the Wiimote as an IR camera pointed at a projector screen, and created a pen with an LED which the Wiimote can track. This approach provides for more accuracy and smoother movements of the pointer.

The barrier of entry to the Wiimote Whiteboard is creating the IR pen. Johnny Lee suggests wiring up a circuit containing an IR LED, momentary switch, resistor, and power supply, then shoving it into a pen. If you google “IR pen” you will also come up with some complicated solutions. One guy even tried to cram the circuit into a highlighter casing.

My solution is really quite straightforward. In fact you only need to go to your local electronics store and pick up two items: an LED keyring torch; and an IR LED. When purchasing an LED keyring torch, make sure that you can easily replace the LED. I used this LED keyring torch from Jaycar Electronics. I then pulled the torch apart, pulled out the LED, and replaced it with an IR LED. This solution meant I didn’t have to do any soldering or fiddling around. It all fit together into a nice compact form factor that cost me less than $10, and took no longer than 10 minutes to switch the LED.

I just got back from my company’s Christmas party in Melbourne. Yes, that’s right in Melbourne!. I was one of four that won a trip to the ThoughtWorks Melbourne office Christmas party, all expenses paid. The prize included hired car to and from the airport and one night’s accommodation in a serviced apartment. ThoughtWorks were even generous enough to pay for partners to go as well. A similar prize was offered to the Melbourne folks to attend the Sydney Christmas party held in November.

I have to thank Kai, a colleague and new hire for drawing my name from the office raffle. Kai worked with John and myself on a project before rolling off on Friday. Funnily enough Kai thought that he had seen the last of John and myself after 6 weeks of friendly “hazing”, but had unwittingly invited us to his office Christmas party. Anyway it was a good opportunity to get the team together for a photo (below) before we all move on to different projects next year.

The party kicked off at 7pm, but most of us arrived a little earlier at One Fitzroy in St Kilda. The entrance had red carpet laid out, a professional photographer (aka the Paparazzi), and a person interviewing all attendees. Our managing director gave some sound advice for the evening when interviewed, “pace yourself throughout the night and finish off with a bang”. It was very Hollywood, and everyone was dressed to impress. The night kicked off with beers and champagne, followed by an open bar, hors’ dourves, prizes, dancing, and lots more drinking into the early hours of the morning. ThoughtWorks certainly do know how to throw a party!

I’m heading to Singapore next week for a holiday with my partner Kimmy. Unfortunately Kimmy is heading to Singapore for work, so I have had to find things to do to keep myself entertained during the day. I could have been content with heading to the Raffles hotel and knocking back a few Singapore Slings, but I did one better and organised to give a presentation at the Singapore Java Meetup at a microbrewery and restaurant called Brewerkz. I will be presenting on Agile, Mingle, and working through a Test Driven Development exercise with the group. The event will be sponsored by ThoughtWorks and it is already booked solid. Goes to show that you have to get in quick when free beer is on offer!

Update: My presentation is available online as a Google Doc.

I just signed up for BarCampSydney. It is an ad-hoc unconference, which is a kind of conference but without a set agenda and expensive registration fees. I came across it a while ago, but decided to signup after seeing Bruno Mattarollo’s name in the list of attendees. Bruno used to be a member of the OpenACS community, which I was an active participant of as well. It will be good to catch up with Bruno.

The blurb for BarCampSydney is as follows:

The first BarCamp is being held in Australia this year! BarCamps, those crazy unconferences, will be held in states across Australia at the same time on the 3rd and 4th of March. BarCampSydney is calling you!

NO SPECTATORS, ONLY PARTICIPANTS

When you come, be prepared to share with BarCampers.
When you leave, be prepared to share it with the world.

BarCamp is an ad-hoc unconference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees. Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to participate.

What’s Next?

Sign up on the wiki, check out the blog, tell all your friends, prepare your presentation, ask your company if they’re interested in sponsoring…

I am participating in Saul’s World Cup Tipping Comp. Funnily enough, I am clueless when it comes to football (aka soccer), yet I suddenly have an opinion on which team will win the World Cup. I’m tipping Germany, only because of the home town advantage, but it would be great to see a team other than England or Brazil winning the Cup.

I went to the Waratahs vs Blues game a couple weeks ago. I have delayed posting something about it as I was waiting for Google to approve my video of Lote Tuqiri scoring a try off a quick tap from a penalty.

Lote Tuqiri caught the Aucklanders napping when he took a quick tap and raced 20 metres to score out wide in the 32nd minute to give the Waratahs a 14-point buffer.

I wasn’t able to capture it, but after scoring the try, Lote had flung the ball over his head in celebration of scoring. The ball ended up landing in my mate’s lap about two seats to my right!

NSW eventually won the game with a record-breaking 43-9 victory over the Blues at Aussie Stadium.

I was working on my thesis last night, and had the Commonwealth Games showing on the tv in the background. All of a sudden I heard Ray Warren (the announcer) shout “Fargus is going to get gold”! The name Fargus was familiar to me, as I used to train with a girl called Joanna Fargus when I used to live in Hong Kong. So out of curiousity I went to watch the end of the final lap of the 200m backstroke.

Initially I thought Ray was calling the race wrong, because there was an English swimmer coming in second, and it could have been Joanna Fargus. I was amazed to find that at the end of the race that the Australian swimmer was indeed the Joanna Fargus that I used to train with under Captain Harry Wright’s tutelage in Hong Kong! Glad to see that someone from the Mantas/LRC swim team continued to be successful with their swimming!

We found this flash based game online called The Maze. In this video we tested the maze out on an unsuspecting visitor to our office. If the boss dropped by, our excuse would be that we were “performing some usability tests”. Although I don’t think he would have bought it with the Guns n Roses music blasting in the background.

Some people would call this a video log or vlog for short, others would say it is a video podcast. It was quite easy to do, in fact the video was filmed using my Sony Ericsson K608i. The video file was then transferred to a mac using bluetooth. The phone encodes video into the 3gp format, which isn’t the best format to be using for the web. I found an excellent converter called iSquint, that converts the 3gp file to an mp4 file. I then embedded the video into the blog entry.

Alternatively, you can view the video at Google Video.

Geo Map Overlay

I signed up for Google Analytics last month as I wanted to gather some statistics for this website. I thought about using Webalizer, which I use for other sites, but I wanted to give Google’s solution a go.

After signing up for Analytics and embedding a chunk for javascript into the site template, I had to wait a further two weeks before the chunk of javascript was detected by Google. Once it was detected it took a further 2 days before any reports were generated. So if you have just signed up, then expect a bit of a wait before you cast your eyes on your website’s statistics.

I was very impressed with the reports that were generated. Apart from the usual stats that you get with other server log file analysers - such as search engine keywords, entry pages and exit pages - you also get a map of the world showing you the location of visitors from around the world. From this map you can see that most of the visitors originate from Australia, Spain and the US. I suspect the Australian visitors are either visits from my friends, or sadly they could just be me. The visitors from Spain and the US are probably those that are interested in e-portfolios, more specifically tracking my progress on dotfolio.

For those visitors interested in dotfolio, I would like to state that I have not forsaken dotfolio. In fact I am working on this other package called Curriculum Central that will add learner focused tracking features to dotfolio. I have about 2 weeks left of development on Curriculum Central before returning to work on dotfolio.

I find the geographical demographics to be quite useful in providing an overview of this site’s visitors. There are other sections of the Analytics report that provides graphs and numbers. They are useful, but not as interesting as the Geo Overlay.