Installing a Blackmagic Intensity Pro on 64-bit Windows7

Hardware,

I help out with the webcasting duties at my church.  We recently purchased a new machine to replace on old WinXP Pentium4 box that had been around since the beginning.  The new box was very similar to the other two webcasting rigs we have (both Windows7 on Intel i5 processors), except that it had an Intel i7 processor on board.

When we went to install the Blackmagic Intensity Pro video capture card, we were prompted with something the other two rigs never required:  a firmware update for the card.  I’ve never been fond of firmware updates as I’ve bricked a handful of motherboard over the years.  This firmware update was repeatedly failing despite following the instructions to the letter.

Fortunately, after some hardcore Google-fu, I ran across this forum thread on Blackmagic’s support site.  It turns out there’s something about the power saving features in this OS/Processor/Chipset combination that was the culprit.  Disabling the power saving features by switching to the “High Performance” power profile did the trick.  The firmware update sailed through and we were webcasting in minutes.

Exporting SVG graphics to PNG or JPG

Web Development, ,

Over the past 6 months, I’ve had the pleasure of working on a project that sought to use d3.js to generate custom graphs on the fly. The learning curve was a bit steep and I still wouldn’t consider myself a d3 expert, but we’ve managed to come up with a tool that allows users to select one or more data sets and graph them over a custom time span with options to tweak line colors and styles. The customer was pleased, but now that they had these impressive graphs, they wanted to be able to export them as images for use in their reports.
Continue reading Exporting SVG graphics to PNG or JPG →

How did I get here?

Uncategorized

The more I mull over ideas regarding what to blog about, the more I come to conclusion that I can’t get into what’s going on today without talking about how I got here.

My first exposure to programming came in the 6th grade, at Beaumont Middle School, where I took an Introduction to BASIC class.  The next year, I was grasping at ideas for a science project when I realized that the library where the science fair was being held had an Apple IIe computer located front and center.  I figured I could take the easy way out Continue reading How did I get here? →

Away we go

Web Development

Welcome to my professional home.  I’m Josh Piper and I’m a full-stack web developer, located in Portland, Oregon.  I’m a huge fan of Twitter, but sometimes I need more than 140 characters to document the thoughts rattling around in my head.  I hope to use this site to document some of interesting things I learn along the way.