A fast-growing company has to adjust to new conditions quickly, and we at Stream57 have generally been keeping our heads above water.  We’ve opened record numbers of new accounts, and to keep up we’ve been developing new processes, streamlining our bureaucracy, expanding at both the productive and administrative levels, and keeping our personnel information up-to-date.  We’re all set in all but one area.

We don’t have enough chairs.

We’re not picky.  It doesn’t have to be gold-plated… it just has to have something to keep our butts company.  Our office is flexible, and I think we’re getting a new one anyway, so we’ll give your office chair a great place to retire.  Have a surplus of chairs?  Recliners and stools bursting out your windows?

Here are a few reasons to let Stream57 adopt your seating apparatus.

1. We’ll give it a good home.

Your chair will be greatly appreciated by its new owners.  It will be assigned to a new sales-person or developer, and they will attend to it carefully and protect it from molestation by upper-management.  It will probably be traded from owner to owner, and late at night, event staffers will give your chair extra attention.  Our floors are firm carpet, ideal for rolling without slippage, but not so soft that the chair will be frustrated.  The lighting is excellent, and our employees know how to adjust your baby without hurting her.

2. Our chairs are friendly.

We DO have chairs… we just don’t have enough of them.  Our family is currently made up of Steel Cases and Herman Millers, with a smattering of Kmart chairs, all well-socialized and housebroken.  Even when its sitter has left the office and the maintenance crew closes the doors for the night, your chair won’t be lonely at Stream57.  Perhaps it’ll find a new best friend, or even a mate, and maybe one day you can visit us and find that your chair has spawned a brood of young.  Just think – the adorable hybrid of one of our Herman Millers and your La-Z-Boy, complete with red upholstery and adjustable arms.

3. Your chair will lead an active lifestyle

At Stream57, we don’t just coddle our furniture… we put it to good use, being productive and developing healthy habits.  Chairs often move around the office, serving at event stations, visiting the development box, and occasionally joining other chairs for meetings in the offices.  A developer may depend on your chair to be there, steadfast and stable, to provide the kind of environment necessary for coding a webcasting application.  We’ll find a way to turn even saddest little cafeteria stool into a capable, well-bred coding chair.

So please, help us find seats for our growing staff of developers and sales-people.  Your chair may even be assigned to a stressed-out Project Manager or a shoulder-rubbing Managing Partner.  Do it for us… but more importantly, do it for a neglected chair in your own life.  Give us a call today.

I live in an old fashioned NYC railroad apartment – long, skinny, and impossible to cool down with air conditioning in any reasonable amount of time. After returning from work, lugging my bicycle up the stairs, and flipping on the AC, I get the very special treat of sitting around for 45 minutes in molten-hot swamp air while waiting for my living room to cool down.

The bottom line: I can now turn my air conditioning off and on from my phone before I head home.

I took the DIY approach - X10 or a similar solution would have been too expensive and impractical, plus the AC is controlled by remote or a power button, so simply plugging the unit in isn’t enough to turn it on. My solution was to trigger the remote control in order to turn the unit off and on.

The project cost under $10 along with a spare USB keyboard that I already had. Why a keyboard, you ask? Well, the tricky part was figuring out how to trigger a relay from the computer. I found this instructable which suggests using the LEDs on the keyboard (I ended up using only scroll lock, the most useless of all locks) to trigger the relay. When the relay is triggered it closes the circuit where the power button used to be. I used a 5VDC/1A SPST Reed Relay from Radio Shack (suggested by the fine folks over at the Make Forums) which conveniently triggers at 5V, which is the same voltage as the output on the LED. The relay was then soldered directly to the innards of the remote (we had to sand away the protective coating and very delicately apply the solder). Once this was put together it was pretty convenient to test as all we had to do was press the scroll lock button on the computer and we’d know if things were working.

Frankie and I accomplished this on a late Friday evening (we really intended to go out in the Lower East Side, but sometimes soldering just gets out of control). Once everything was working, the project was put in a casing. I drilled some holes for cables and LEDs. The whole thing looks pretty smart, although inside all of the components are kind of jammed in there.

The application to control the AC runs on my laptop. Running in the system tray I have an application which allows me to control the AC when I’m home (of course I could use the phone as well). This application also exposes a .NET Remoting service over TCP on port 6567 (yep, that’s decimal ASCII code for ‘AC’) – it seems like in order to use the win32 call that emulates a keyboard press (in this case toggling scroll lock for 200ms) the process needs to run in the desktop session, although there might be a more low level way to do this. Unfortunately the Compact Framework doesn’t support Remoting, so I needed to write an additional web service to expose this functionality to the CF client on the PocketPC. This web service exposes the same methods and proxies them over, via Remoting, to the WinForms app that’s hosting the Remoting service. If you'd like a copy of the source code just send me an email at jim<at>s57.com

So, this is the basic flow of how things go down (perhaps also illustrating how appropriate the title of this post is):

The system tray application is loaded on the host machine (my laptop, which has the USB remote contraption attached). The application instantiates an ACService remotable class and marshals the object on port 6567. This was the ony approach that allowed this object to interact with the desktop.

CF app is loaded on the Windows Mobile 6 PocketPC .

Status is retrieved from the server (on or off). 

When the button is pressed (‘Turn AC On’ or ‘Turn AC Off’, depending) the web service is invoked.

The web service invokes the Remoting service on the local machine.

The Remoting service makes a win32 call to activate the scroll lock key and then sleeps for 200ms before deactivating it.

Where once stood a scroll lock LED now stands two wires leading to the relay. When the scroll lock is pressed the relay closes and allows current to pass between the two nodes for the remote control’s former power button.

The AC turns on / off!

This diagram shows how the circuit works.  

Now I just need to add some security to ensure that some intrepid port sniffing hacker doesn’t end up turning on my AC in January.

Hot n’ spicy.  Mmmm.

Monday, June 2nd marked the first ever company wide chili cook-off here at Stream57, featuring 9 bean-stuffed, veggie-loaded, meat-packed tubs of delicious spicy goodness – enough gas power to fuel a small town.

From Ben’s multi-meat offering to Jim’s veg-friendly feast; Jeremy’s holy-hell-that’s-hot to Daniel’s Indian-influenced stew; the chili’s were quite varied yet remarkably delicious all around.

Our esteemed tasting panel was lead by graphic designer extraordinaire (and resident snack-junkie) Jesse Miksic, a prince of the palatable potencies.  Rounding out his crew of saucy spice-lovers were friends of the Mik-man, Dominic a hockey-playing world-traveling designer from Brooklyn; Anthony, a Boston-based cartoon-costumed wrestler with an appetite; and Johnny, a dumpster-diving ‘Nawleans boy who’s just happy to get a free meal without fighting a raccoon (apparently this “freegan” lifestyle of his is a legit thing…).

The 4-man scoring squad sat sequestered in our lovely conference- slash-dining-room for what seemed like at least 45 minutes before emerging with delicately deliberated scores and results, ranking each pot-o’-fire for complexity and subtlety of the flavor (including any noxious aromas), texture and consistency of the pasty and/or soupy mess, and, of course, the “kick” of the peppers and spices.

Super designer / Siberian superstar Kat once again proved her excellence-in-all-things-awesome with a resoundingly delicious Russian-style chili that utilized whole potatoes and sour cream to distinguish it from its peers.  Her presentation of carefully-design recipe cards and a full-color label only added to its appeal.

Rounding out the top tier was head honcho Ben’s beef-and-beer chili and Daniel’s curry-spiced creation.  Jeremy’s sweet-yet-f@#$ing-spicy chili (which he refused to even taste himself) won the special “hot” prize.

All in all, we were really just treated to a week’s worth of chili leftovers and a whole slew of foreign beers in our fridge.  And we’re all just about as regular as can be.

We received a contact request from our website today kindly suggesting to ‘tell Ben to swallow the gum he's chewing in his video clip’. Hmm, we’re not sure what video clip that is… wait, could it be this one?

If you don’t know him, Ben’s our president and an all around nice guy (clearly he’s got a sense of humor or we wouldn’t dare post an image so disparaging).

Note: this is not the first time that we’ve used Ben’s iconic figure in conjunction with well known Internet memes / war propaganda to elicit a warm and fuzzy feeling in those who apprehend it. This image, conspicuously posted in the developer ‘pen,’ reminds coders to do their civic duty and document their code.