Well my garage rewiring task is completed. This was a critical pre-requisite to insulating and finishing my garage. I had the following requirements for Garage 2.0:
– An external permanently mounted photocell for 110V
– A set of outlets inside and outside that had always-on and switched on at night plug. This would be used for Holiday lighting and landscape lighting.
– A night light in the garage controlled by the outside photocell.
– Switch my carriage lights to being controlled by the master photocell rather than a switch so the carriage lights come on with the landscape lights and holiday lights.
– Add a switched flood light on the eves covering the front yard and driveway
– Move me landscape light transformer into the garage – again controlled by the master photocell.
Overall, the ideal also was to put in enough boxes that someone could re-configure which lights did which for a new owner of the house. For example, if they wanted the carriage lights to be switched again – it should be possible – if they want to switch the flood to be motion sensitive – it should be possible.
So there were extra runs of 14-3 and extra junction boxes to allow for re-configuration of where the hot, switched hot, and photocell hot were made available for easy reconfiguration.
It all went well. I am happy how it turned out. It took longer than I thought because my wiring design skills were a bit rusty. I made 9 trips to Menards and took back as much stuff as I bought. I found that I had to design iteratively – one wire run/junction box at a time.
But it worked out well.
Next steps are to insulate and drywall the garage – that will be a multi-person job and I will probably enlist my brother Scott in the effort.
After that it is on to Basement 2.0 – that will entail plumbing electricity, walls, – a bathroom, the whole shebang. But it will be fun and the last major fixup of the house.

I have started building the JSR-168 IMSTI portlet. The first challenge was getting a file uploaded in through JSR-168. I was nervous because I had never tested it in the Sakai JSR-168 and the first google searches of “JSR-168 portlet file upload” seemed to indicate problems and kept talking about Apache commons, etc – all stuff that felt rather non-portable.
The solution was found here:
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/portals-pluto-dev/200501.mbox/%3C41F67158.3080809@TheJavaThinkTank.org%3E
I will soon check this into SVN in contrib. On to the next thing – parsing the IMS TI descriptor with some code tha Anthony wrote.