The Trip 2013 - Oaxaca to Chichen Itza

Note: This is a condensed version of the pictures I took with some added narrative. The rest of the pics can be viewed in the album The Trip 2013 - Oaxaca to Chichen Itza. Each picture can be clicked to see a larger version and comment / like

The next stop after leaving Mexico city was the town of Oaxaca. This town has a much different feel to the rest of the destinations we have visited so far. Gone is the dusty desert, instead it has been replaced by lush tree covered hills.

The first day there we spent some time exploring the city checking out the local grub





The following day we took a tour around the local Aztec ruins at Monte Alban



We saw the court where they used to play a ball game. Apparently the looser (or winner) would then be decapitated and have his heart offered to the gods.



I decided that I needed to test the gravity in the region, see if it was any stronger:



On the way out we saw a broken rainbow



That afternoon we went for some traditional Mexican BBQ in the market.



I was dubious at first after looking at the flies buzzing around the racks of raw meat:



Once it gets nuked on the bbq and served with jalepenos salsa and tortillas however it tasted great





Next up was a small city called San Cristóbal de las Casas



There our guide Suzanne taught us how to drink Mescal



Mescal is derived from the Agave plant, the same plant as Tequila but a different variety. Worms that live in the plants are often included in the bottle. If your glass ends up with the worm then everyone has to buy you drinks all night:



The stuff can also be phenomenally cheap. I found this stuff in the super market, almost half a litre for 35p!!



The next day we drove (and I strove not to puke) the windy road to Palenque. Along the way we stopped at the beautiful Agua Azul (blue water) waterfalls:







We were taken on a guided tour around the myriad of falls before given the opportunity to take a dip:



As usual I got a little exited around the water and went scampering off up the falls without telling anyone where I was going. Whoops!

Palenque the following day was excellent.



What I found fascinating about this vast Mayan city is that barely 1% of it has been uncovered and explored by Archaeologists. The vast majority of it is still buried under dense jungle. It makes you wonder what other wonders are waiting to be discovered just a few meteres away.



Our guide for the whole thing was a cute little Mexican named Viktor who claimed to have guided the president of Germany and Margret Thatcher's daughter around the ruins over his 30 years there



Victor had some strange opinions on things. He believed that everything the Archaeologists had discovered was false and only he knew the true history of the place. He told us how he believed that Palenque had been visited and invaded by many different peoples over its history such as the Chinese, Greeks and Egyptians. He claimed that Tutankhamun himself visited the site. He bases this belief on a statue found at the site that he believes bears a similarity to the Egyptian emperor:



Regardless I had a good time running up and down the ruins and generally messing about.





The following day we found ourselfs at a small town called Meridia. We spent just a single night at this small colonial town. We didnt do a whole lot, though our hotel did have an inside jungle..



.. and apparently it had a possum somewhere ..



The next day we hit the very wet Chicken Pizza (Chichen Itza)



Despite the rain we tried to keep spirits up in front of one of the 7 wonders of the ancient world



We were all kind of wet and miserable after Chicken Pizza but all was not lost as we knew that the next stop on our adventure was going to be the sun, sand and fiesta at Playa del Carma!

Inputtie History - The Beginning

I promised in a previous post to post to talk about the Inputtie development process a little, the various challenges encountered and how I attempted to solve them.

In this post im going to talk about the very beginning of the project and what I knew I wanted to have in the final version. Subsequent posts will elaborate on the various technical hurdles and my attempts to solve them.

The Problem

[caption id="attachment_1372" align="alignright" width="229" caption="Various Inputtie Attempts"][/caption]

I have already talked about the problem in my previous post but ill recap.

About a year ago I was doing a lot of work at home that involved working both on my desktop PC and my MacbookPro. Often I would find myself using my mouse and keyboard on my PC then having to lean accross to use the trackpad and keyboard on my MBP. Now, I hate trackpads so what I started doing was unplugging my keyboard and mouse from my desktop then plugging back into my MBP when I wanted to use it.

This situation was obviously less than ideal, so I started looking around for other solutions. I had heard of hardware you can buy that involves flipping a switch when you want to change which device you want your input to go to. I considered this but thought there must be a more elegant software solution. I had an idea in my head where I wanted you to simply move my mouse pointer off my desktop monitor and it would then magically appear on the laptop screen.

It was at this point I found out about Synergy. I took a good look at it but for the life of me could not get it to work no matter how hard I tried. It also involved lots of fiddley messing around with IP addresses / hostnames and command line parameters (it has improved in a year, but more on that later). So I thought to myself surely there is a better way of doing this, surely its not a tough technical problem to solve!?

Technical Hurdles

So starting back in October 2009 I decided to undertake the problem, it shouldn't take more than a few evenings to put something together surely?

First I tried to identify the core features I knew I wanted the tool to have:

1. Work on the three major operating systems, Windows, OSX, Linux.


2. Be appealing and simple to use without any fiddly configuration file editing.


3. Without any effort on the part of the user detect other available devices on the network.


4. Capture low-level input, mouse & keyboard.


5. Transfer the input to the other device and have it applied.

With the core features roughly sketched out I could now start thinking about the various technologies I would need to implement them.

My initial thoughts were that Java should be the ideal language to do this in. I could capture the input from one device (somehow) then I could send it to another device and use the Robot class in Java to simulate the input. Because its Java it will work across all operating systems seamlessly so people using it on windows / mac / linux would all get exactly the same experience and I wouldn't have to lift an extra coding finger as Java would take care of all the nasties for me.

It also helped that I was very familiar with Java having worked on severl personal and professional projects in the language. From my Chain Reaction project I knew it was possible to create relatively nice user interfaces probably it would take some work to make them look as good as I wanted but surely it wouldn't be too hard.

So with some confidence I decided to get cracking on development.

Edit: I am breaking this up into several posts as this was getting to be rather large and difficult to read ;) So check out the posts in the coming weeks for more.