We've got quite a few blossoms now, but seem to be suffering blossom drop. There's really not enough pollen to use a q-tip for fertilization, so I decided to pluck one of the blossoms for direct pollination. Hopefully one of the flowers will take.

The first bud has bloomed with blue stamen. This is definitely a Naga Jolokia.

Jim has purchased the new pots for the next round of Naga Jolokias. The pepper farm is bigger!

Oh and our pepper guardian has returned.

The first Naga Jolokia is continuing to show good progress. There are quite a few buds getting ready to bloom. Probably within a week we should seem some blooms.

We're getting more and more convinced that this is a Naga Jolokia. The flowers should be fairly definitive... not to mention the fruit.

On the Nth day of Sprint M my company gave to me:

12 failing testsuites
11 bugs to fix
10 different platforms
9 scrummers scrumming
8 devs a' devving
7 QAs testing
6 cups of coffee
5 hour builds
4 perforce timeouts
3 syntax errors
2 bleeding ulcers
and a task that could be done by monkeys.

Get back to work.

We caught these from the beginning:

We've been monitoring the "first" Naga Jolokia, and we're a bit startled. The plant looks nearly identical to the sweet peppers we've been growing. We're beginning to wonder if it is a Jolokia at all, or if it is in fact a misplaced Sweet Pepper seed... If anyone knows what the leaves and plant structure of a Naga Jolokia is /supposed/ to look like, please send me an email.

The good news is that we've got two starts that we are nearly 100% certain they are naga Jolokia seeds... After only being in the soil a week, these two came up over the weekend much to my surprise. We changed quite a few variables to get these starts, so I'm not sure what caused them to germinate so quickly. I should have a post-germination video soon. The video should allow us to compare the behaviors of the two plants. Most noticeable in these starts is the length of the initial sprout. The hope here is that the depth the seeds were planted played the role in the sprout length.

Again if anyone has any info on what a Naga Jolokia /should/ look like, it would be much obliged.

Edit 12/17/07 2:06pm:
Josh Fuhs, a co-worker, points me here. We may have a Naga Jolokia after all?

Jim and I wanted to prepare for the Naga Jolokia by eating something less spicy. So we tried orange habaneros. These are rated between 100,000 and 300,000 units on the Scoville unit of heat scale. In comparison, Naga Jolokia's are roughly 1,000,000. The orange habaneros are the 5K to the marathon that will be the Naga Jolokia. I've never run a marathon, but Jim has. He notes that the marathon (40K) is a lot harder than a 5K. We now look at our little plant in a much different light. There have been at least two surprises after eating the pepper. The first 45-60 seconds of chewing were easy. Then the heat built and built and built. Even 2 cups of milk didn't seem to quench the incredible burn. The next surprise was the abdominal agony. My stomach hurt, like pitch fork in the gut kind of pain, for at least an hour. It has finally begun to subside... ouch.

See the full gallery here

Aaron Lint and I decided we should dress up for Halloween. Best costume idea... ever.

After only getting 1 of 9 Naga Jolokias germinating, I've decided to start a second batch going this morning. They are being started in the same manner as the sweet peppers which had a better germination rate.

I've purchased a new light that appears to be working well. It's a 2 foot shop light that has 2 17W bulbs in it. Meijer had them on clearance for $4 so it was hard to pass up. We'll see if these lights help out.

Significant growth over the weekend:

Here's a picture of some developing fruit

Hand-pollination:


Watching the development of fruit:


Up close and personal:

Front row seats:

We use Twiki at work and I frequently use PolyCaps class names that turn out to be wikiwords. Too often I find my self having to write:

!PolyCaps

Granted WikiWords are a fun feature but sometimes I get really tired of all the PolyCaps? links that surface.

To turn off auto linking of WikiWords in a TWiki topic try:

<!--
   * Set NOAUTOLINK = on
-->

More pepper goodness:

Good news, we've got some flower buds developing.

The Naga Jolokias have been planted for nearly two weeks now and no sign of germination, however germination may take up to five weeks for Capscicum Chinense. More videos to come...

The ultimate goal is to grow at least one Naga Jolokia at the office. What you see above is an initial proof of concept from 09/01/2007 demonstrating that we can at least germinate sweet peppers indoors. The sweet pepper plants are quite a bit larger now.



I'll discuss more later.

I just found out today that my gallery was the source of comment graffiti. Lots of comments used to no doubt boost a page rank of some site. Most of them had words interesting words. Regardless, I tried to delete them using gallery2's interface, but there were so many it was time consuming.. so I whipped up an SQL delete query. It's pretty safe as long as noone comments with urls:


delete from g2_comment WHERE g_comment ~ '.*url.*';


TODO: post pic of positive pregnancy test.

Like many of my co-workers, I jumped on the Wii bandwagon. I've been able to enjoy many of the classic games again. Last night I started playing Kirby's Adventure when I noticed that Kirby started moving for me without any intervention. He kept squatting and moving right. I could move the D-Pad or analog stick on the classic controller or the Wii Remote up and left and that would keep him still. Let's try Legend of Zelda, surely the problem isn't across all games. Yikes! Link is moving down and to the right as well!

Batteries, surely this must be it. Even though the Wii home menu showed full power I figured maybe this would fix it. I couldn't figure out why a controller would drift on low batteries, but maybe this would help. Nope.

Restart the game. Maybe because the virtual console allows it to suspend, the down-right got locked in to the emulator. Nope, restarting the game changed nothing.

Resync the controller! Yes, maybe? Now Link is moving only to the right! Uh resync again. Now he's moving down and to the right again. Yarr.

Check the forums. Aha, someone else has had a similar problem, but didn't post a solution.

What then what is the problem?

My Wii is nestled between the 5-disc DVD changer and has about 5 inches of clearance to the edge of the entertainment cabinet. My co-worker Dan Noland let me borrow a gamecube controller. When I packed the controller away last night, the gamecube controller's analog stick was pressed down and to the right. The gamecube controller, classic controller, and Wii Remote were all fighting for Player 1. When I resynced the Wii Remote that inadvertently mildly bumped the controller. When I resynced the Wii Remote again that bumped the stick a bit more.

Lesson learned. Keep the gamecube controller unplugged, or keep the gamecube controller from leaning against the analog stick!

Rick writes:

This is AWESOME!! The power that is Google has brought this page and I together. Do you think a USB -> Serial adapter would work on the same code?

As long as the adapter pinouts supply enough voltage to switch the relay (and current for that matter) it should "Just Work TM".

Paul writes:

Hi Joe
Have just come accross your page on how to control a relay via the serial port. I am doing a small project that controls a relay using 3rd party software but looking at your solution I would love to let the computer control it. All i have to do is turn on the relay for 1 sec every time a program is run. I have looked at your code but cant understand it as I have very little experience. My software allows me to run .exe files so it would be neat if it your code could be compiled into an .exe file, can this be done.
Many Thanks
Paul

Pending his response I'll probably be posting a binary soon that toggles the serial port on/off for a given amount of time.