And damn does it look awesome!

I recently finished the newest version of a device I've been designing off-and-on for a while now: the wireless colour lamp! It's an LED lamp that's similar to some of the other mood lights people have built (like this one) with a couple of key differences:

Here are new images of some of the interface changes we've been making. Enjoy.

Finally finished assembling the Turk demo box! At least to the point where all the wires need to be packed into the box and a backplate needs to put on to cover it up...

Too often we’re not taught how to compromise properly. I’ve never really appreciated this skill until recently and it’s possibly the most important skill you could have. Sometimes your product can’t serve everyones needs, often you don’t have enough time to implement all the features you wanted, maybe optimizing your code just isn’t worth the return - these are scary facts you often need to face.

If you code: use the Bitstream Vera Sans Mono font - it's beautiful. Today I changed my editors font from Monaco to Bitstream, which is a much more thicker font and is perfect for technical work since it clearly differentiates between l and 1, or o and 0. There's nothing quite like looking at beautiful code:

Today was our first steps to making Turk Web Applications push information to devices. So when you go to your application online, you can immidiately tell your lamp to change colour, or your radio to begin playing a certain station. We're using XMPP (affectionatly known as Jabber) to do our push communication. The set up was fairly straight forward and a few simple Ruby scripts later we were able to send messages, change statuses and act as a response bot. Tomorrow I'll begin integrating it into our Rails application and I don't forsee any problems. Stay posted for updates.

Whiteboards are great. 90% of what I know today came off of a whiteboard. But there's this one whiteboard right in the living area that's gotten quite alot of attention this summer. Here's some photos showcasing it during various stages.

The prototype for the server that hosts open-source drivers for Turk Platform-compatible devices is now up! We're in the process of testing and integrating it with the existing Turk Core framework, and creating a bunch of example devices to test it with.

After making it to the final round of the Bright Ideas competition, TI took home third place overall. Thank you to everyone who came out to support us, and congratulations to the first and second place winners. We received great feedback and appreciated everyone's input. This was the first real announcement that students at UBC received that TI will aggressively be looking for developers this September. In addition, all money received from UBC related events will go to buying development kits for students who wish to contribute to the Turk project.