Marc Charbonneau’s Blog

I know most of you are here for the programming snippets, but in case anyone from upstate New York is reading I’d like to invite you to visit Croquet Shows. Croquet is a music booking co-op based in Rochester, NY I’m volunteering for this year. We book artists from all over the world in some of Rochester’s best venues, including Bug Jar, Boulder Coffee, The German House, and others. I’ve been a fan of Croquet for years, and there’s a lot of great shows coming this summer and fall. If you’re looking for something to do in Rochester, have a look!

Earlier today I bought a new, thicker rug to replace a cheap thin one my Roomba would push across the floor unless I stacked furniture on top of it (in theory the Roomba is supposed to take the work out of vacuuming, but it doesn’t always work this way). Despite hearing about some problems with dark rugs, I decided to pick up a solid black one and see what happened.

It turned out to be as bad as I’ve heard. The Roomba completely avoided the rug, and wouldn’t work at all when placed on top of it. Worse, my initial idea of blocking off the edge sensors by sticking pieces of styrofoam inside didn’t work at all.

It turns out there’s actually an easier way to get it working though. Just put a piece of clear packing tape across each of the four edge sensors on the front of the Roomba. The tape diffuses the light enough to trick it into working. On mine, it worked perfectly. Of course, this will prevent the Roomba from avoiding actual drop-offs, so if you have stairs in your house you’ll want to come up with something else.

Another great UI component from Matt Legend Gemmell’s source code library. MGScopeBar is a “filter bar” style control, similar to the one found in iTunes and many other recent Cocoa apps. I wish I had this earlier in the year when I was developing the filter bar for Runner’s Log, it would have saved me a lot of work.

Last weekend was BoulderFest 2008, a three day music festival held in downtown Rochester at Boulder Coffee Company. Boulder Coffee is one of Rochester’s best places to hear all kinds of live music, and definitely worth checking out if you live in the area.

See more pictures on my Flickr account.

I should have mentioned this a long time ago, but Cocoa programmer Mike Lee has started a charity to save Madagascar lemurs. Prior to reading I had no idea lemurs were in danger of extinction or the good even a small donation could do, but Mike makes some very convincing arguments.

Instapaper is a new web application for saving links to websites you want to read later. It’s simple and fast, and it’s replaced the .webloc files scattered around my desktop.

Iconfactory released version 2.0 of xScope, a toolset for designers that makes it easy to measure or align visual elements on the screen. It’s extremely handy when doing web design.

Tentacle Arm. Who doesn’t want one?

I found a variety of large format (6.5′ x 2′) posters for sale at Amka last week, via Better Living Through Design. At almost $300 USD they’re expensive, but I think they would look great if you have a large, empty wall space to fill.

Who needs libraries or bookstores when you have the internet?

It’s 1976 again. Abba are on the charts, the Cold War is in full swing — and the Earth is flat. It’s been flat ever since the eve of the Cuban war of 1962; and the constellations overhead are all wrong. Beyond the Boreal ocean, strange new continents loom above tropical seas, offering a new start to colonists like newly-weds Maddy and Bob, and the hope of further glory to explorers like ex-cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin: but nobody knows why they exist, and outside the circle of exploration the universe is inexplicably warped.

I’m a big fan of both the cold war and science fiction, so in my opinion putting the two together can rarely do wrong.

Pandora.com on the new royalty fees:

I’m writing today to ask for your help. The survival of Pandora and all of Internet radio is in jeopardy because of a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora. The new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays and broadcast radio doesn’t pay these at all. Left unchanged, these new royalties will kill every Internet radio site, including Pandora.

It’s bad news if sites like Pandora and Last.FM are forced to shut down because of this; I’ve always thought the concept behind them is great for both listeners and artists.

I thought this was a neat idea.

Over the past month a few links to some very cool street art pictures and websites have found their way into my bookmarks. Here are a few of my favorites; click the thumbnail to visit the original page.