I got a portable hard drive and ran into an issue of being afraid to move my laptop while it was running.  I also almost had it drop while giving a presentation which would have been a very bad thing as it was running 2 virtual machines at the time.  This had to be fixed ASAP. With about $4 worth of 3M removable poster mounting Velcro, I was able to mount it and remove it if I chose to.  Here are some pictures.

There really is nothing really wrong with the current one however there are a lot of aspects I dislike.  I find some of the colors too washed out and the fact I used Win32 instead of WPF makes scalable an issue.  I’m chatting with the same guy who designed the first version, Ian Hill, to help redo the UI with me.  WPF will allow me to have non-rasterized graphics via XAML that can scale and won’t be pre-rendered.  It will also let me have animations and some neat flow control abilities out of the box. I whipped up some...

I learned a harsh lesson when I had to send a part back with the bartender.  I didn’t have stuff able to be disconnected so literally I had to take the entire system apart to send in the relay boards to get it fixed. Now everything is designed to be a quick disconnect and able to view where it is. I still do need a label maker (going to get that tonight) to label all wires.  Board 1 runs 12 volt DC and side 2 will run 24 volt DC.

Progress after a day is pretty good.  I had to actually dive into the code a few times with SubText to fully understand how to do the skin properly as it wasn’t straight forward.  I’ll do a post but I think if you really want to do a skin, you’ll have to be able to understand ASP.Net at some level. Here is a localhost version of the skin after a few hours of hacking.  I still need to do the comment section and properly do the right navbar.  I have to tweak the header a bit too and get...

I upgraded my blog to Subtext 2.1.0.5 today along with upgrading my mail server 2 days ago.  I discovered a few interesting things in my failures. First thing is if you want to do something creative is to test before you attempt to deploy live.  I should have tested upgrading subtest to .Net 3.5 before just shoving it on my live server. Secondly is to merge your Skins.config with the new one if you have a custom skin.  The new skins.config has a mobile phone skin that you won’t want to live without. Next is to...