Now that they have all been sent (hopefully!) here’s a snap of one of our wedding invitations, which we prepared earlier…

They also include a lovely map, thanks to OpenStreetMap, and a very detailed information sheet, just in case the internet encounters a terrible catastrophe and stops working in the near future. If you ever decide to make your own wedding invitations, I would definitely recommend keeping it simple… or just invite 3 people! Actually, deciding who to invite has been the only stressful bit of the process so far- I would love to invite everyone but that’s not really an option, in any economic climate, not just the current one.

The result of a fair bit of googling and a weekend of hacking is… [drum roll]… a circuit to connect my gas meter to a CurrentCost Envi using a nice little dev board from CurrentCost…

Now I’m much more familiar with messing about with software, not all this messy hardware stuff, so I’m really hoping to get some feedback to improve this early prototype!

So, my theory is that the stuff on the left will trigger the timer on the positive edge of the pulse from the gas meter. R1 and C1 control the 555 timing; more on that in a second. And the stuff on the right (LED and the CurrentCost dev board) should be triggered whenever the gas meter is running and emitting pulses. It all seems to work, except that I can’t seem to get the timing quite right. The gas meter takes about 1m40s between pulses, and I can choose values for R1 and C1 that trigger the output for the right length of time when a single pulse is detected, unfortunately subsequent pulses don’t keep the output on as I was hoping. The best I’ve managed is with R1 = 3M ohms and C1 = 100uF, which does stay on as long as there are pulses from the meter… unfortunately just for a little too long at 5 minutes. Still, at least the CurrentCost Envi will get a reading all the time the boiler is running, and it won’t get stuck on if the meter stops on the portion of the dial where the reed switch is closed.

Any comments with glaring errors, small problems, improvements, or a completely different way to do it?!

Updated: looks like I was having problems with left and right in my first description! Hopefully I’ve got them the right way round now! (2 July 2009)

I’m getting pretty close to getting the gas meter hoked up to CurrentCost. Not quite the finished thing, but was pretty excited when I got this working…

It’s a 555 timer circuit (using a low power 555 chip) which I’m hoping will keep the CurrentCost dev board transmitting a value as long as the gas meter is running. I’ve since added a capacitor to trigger on an edge so it shouldn’t keep transmitting if the meter stops on the ‘pulse’ position, which is probably around 1/8th of the time on my meter.

I wasn’t quite sure everything was working when I finished last night, but it does seem to do what I want when I was showing Jo this morning, so hopefully all I need to do is get the timing right for the gas meter, rather than me hitting a button every few seconds. More details to follow if it does work.

Just back home* from the second Tuesday tweetup (excellent event once again) with a grand total of zero high-fours (the Poken term for exchanging contact information).

Everyone at the Information on Demand conference (@IOD2009) was given a Poken, so if I’d been in Berlin recently, there would have been a massive captive audience of Poken users to high-four with. A conference seems like the natural environment for a Poken: lots of people with a common purpose all wanting to network, and multiple brands looking for a new piece of plastic to give away with their logo on.

Photo from “IBM Information On Demand 2009 Berlin with customized Poken” set by Ayman van Bregt (some rights reserved).

Unfortunately, as Andy has already mentioned in his Poken review, there just aren’t that many around. One glaringly obvious question is why it’s not possible to use mobile phones to do the same job, which is something almost everyone has already. Poken themselves saw that question coming and have a plausible answer about compatibility and usability but I think the shear number of Poken required before they are even half useful means a phone based solution must still be a strong contender. Using bluetooth couldeasily get round the problem of working out who even has a Poken, and there are ways to use it just as easily as a Poken. For example, the cityware digital co-presence project was pretty similar in lots of ways, using bluetooth device IDs combined with a Facebook application to manage contacts later, rather than beaming bluetooth contact information directly, and all without any awkward high-fouring. Obviously it also had its downsides, one of which was needing cityware nodes to log when devices were in the same place.

To earn a permanent place in my pocket, the Poken would have to deliver more, even if I never see another Poken. For a start, I’m just astounded that the Poken I have doesn’t even provide some simple USB drive storage. Or, to focus a bit more on the core purpose of a Poken, why not build it in to a business card holder? (Or a Moo card holder if you’re Andy!) Or even go the cityware route and log bluetooth device ids as well as other Poken contacts.

I still have my Poken with me but I don’t see them taking off in the wild for a long time, if at all. On the other hand, they are ideal for specific events and defined groups of people, such as employees for example, where I think there’s a lot of potential. A high-four is certainly far more natural than messing around trying to find some well hidden feature of your phone, especially if you know you aren’t going to be met with a blank look for suggesting high-fouring in the first place!

There’s more talk about Poken on Dogear Nation

* I didn’t actually get home this late, but half way through writing this post TalkTalk decided not to bother providing an internet connection for the second night in a row. It’s not going to take too much more of that before I disconnect from TalkTalk permanently.

Updated: …with a photo from IOD. (17 June 2009)

Update: More thoughts on Poken on Barry Leiba’s blog. (26 June 2009)

Tomorrow morning I’ll be walking down to the local polling station and I still have no idea who to vote for. The first problem is finding out what the choice is, luckily the Eastleigh council web site at least has a bunch of PDFs listing who’s standing.

It looks like I’ll be able to choose from this motley collection for the European election:

• British National Party
• Christian Party “Proclaiming Christ’s Lordship”
• Conservative Party
• English Democrats
• Jury Team
• Liberal Democrats
• No2EU: Yes to Democracy
• Pro Democracy: Libertas.eu
• Socialist Labour Party
• The Green Party
• The Labour Party
• The Peace Party
• The Roman Party. Ave!
• United Kingdom First
• United Kingdom Independence Party

There’s been barely any discussion about what the MEPs will actually been doing in the European parliament. I don’t need a European election to send a message to Gordon Brown (sorry Gordon, but I have just never been able to take you seriously as PM), and it seems fairly pointless to vote based on whether I think we should be in or out of Europe. I kind of like the idea of a pan-European party improving the system but I don’t know enough about Libertas to guess whether that’s what they’ll actually do. (And it will always be a guess, since I bet a few people were expecting a referendum from Labour.) The Jury Team idea sounds interesting but probably not that constructive in practice. Maybe if the party membership were the party whips, voting throughout the term of the elected MEPs in a kind of ongoing referendum… but I suspect people would get bored of that fairly quickly. The Roman Party is in with a chance of getting my vote if I could find out a bit more about Jean-Louis’ plans. (Not much out there, but I did find this leaflet.)

Possibly even less interesting is the council election, with only the usual suspects lining up:

• Conservative Party
• UK Independence Party
• Labour Party
• Liberal Democrat

Ignoring the Labour Party (who don’t even seem to try here, which is fine by me) and UKIP, the choice between Conservative and Lib Dem is hardly great. The two of them seem to endlessly blame each other for exactly the same local problems and say very little about real solutions. One slight difference is that the Conservatives just turn up at election time, which is I suppose at least efficient.

Oil, gravel, houses and the crematorium NIMBY moaning is just annoying. Hands up anyone in Hedge End who doesn’t live in a house under 40 years old, use a car and isn’t planning to die? No, didn’t think so. As for the tap in the council offices; it’s not for a kitchen sink (which would be a bit extreme), it’s a pretty sensible way to provide drinks for employees. I’d go on but I think I’m well in to ranting territory already. If I vote Conservative, it will be at least partly because they haven’t had the front to tell me that one of the other parties can’t win here. And if I vote Lib Dem, if will be at least partly down to @mpntod – more MPs should be connecting with people like Martin.

On balance though, I’m very likely to be voting Limbo.

That was a political broadcast on behalf of a grumpy old man. We now return to our normal service.

If you’ve read my Setting up an MDM Server development environment post in the past, there is now a new white paper on the MDM Workbench developerWorks forum which I would definitely recommend taking a look at.

The White paper on using the MDM Workbench has updated information on setting up a development environment, with screen shots of the wizard used. It then takes you through subsequent tasks to create a working extension to the MDM Server, with essential information about working on the code in a team environment.

The information should provide a quick start for anyone new to the MDM Workbench. Please provide any feedback on the white paper in the forum thread.

Nothing interesting happens for months, then three days out come along at the same time! On Saturday we swam against the tide, driving past all the traffic jams heading for the coast, for Jo’s birthday present: an evening at the Old Vic theatre watching The Cherry Orchard (some famous director and Hollywood stars on stage all lost on me, but much appreciated by Jo).

Conveniently timed the day after was the league one play off final at Wembley.

Really great day out, although from Jo’s point of view, the less said the better.

Last, but not least, a chance to look round what is probably the reason for Eastleigh’s existence at the Eastleigh 100. I mostly wanted to go out of curiosity after years of passing by on the way to Winchester, but there were quite a collection of trains to have a look at as a bonus. She’ll probably deny it but Jo seemed to enjoy herself as well, although mostly for the low flying planes coming in to land at Southampton Airport rather than the trains. (More about the event from the BBC.)

And next weekend? That’ll be the Southampton beer festival!

The blood to biscuit exchange rate is looking increasingly rosy. There was a huge selection today, including flapjacks, although I must admit my eyes may have been slightly too big for my stomach there.

I also picked up the slate coaster to go along with a very nice thank you card I received for donating three times in a year. (Over 500 million years old apparently- hope the flapjack wasn’t quite so old.)

All that and a nice post lunch rest. Bonus.

Am I the only person wondering why Norway won this year’s Eurovision? While I ranked them way down in 19th place, most of Europe must have been watching a different song! After some very scientific calculations, here are the countries which I think should have been in the top five.

1. Estonia
2. Portugal
3. Malta
3. Maldova
5. Iceland
5. Bosnia and Herzegovina

With my taste in music, I’m willing to accept that Estonia may not have been the best, although Andrew Lloyd Webber seemed to like them as well. But Norway? I don’t get it.

I must admit to watching Eurovision most years, but this year we did a wee bit of time shifting just in case any fast forwarding was required. As it turns out, surprisingly little fast forwarding occurred so we were far enough behind to want to avoid any spoilers from twitter; just when I’ve given up watching anything much ‘live’ on TV, something comes along that makes watching at the same time as everyone else more interesting again.

As for the show itself, Rusia did a great job hosting: hogging 30% of the worlds LED screens, ‘this is the International Space Station calling’ (shame it wasn’t to give their votes!), flying pools, and a voting progress bar. FTW.

Having said that, despite much talk of a return to it being a song contest, I’m not sure the results support that. Still, what fun would that be anyway?!

Happy Norwegian Constitution Day (a coincidence?!)

I discovered some very handy preferences in the IBM Installation Manager today…

I think that pretty much explains it! I deleted 4.3 GB of saved files before applying the last update and if I don’t hit any bog problems after the update, I’ll be deleting another 1.4GB. My disk space pie chart is looking much better!