I’m guessing professional EEs have better tools but in my hobbyist experience the power profiling kit II works well for analyzing low power (0-5v) circuits. The software tool provided by Nordic is fairly capable and easy to use. At $89 from DigiKey it’s sort of a no brainer to pick one up to play with.

That private API appears to be usbmux which iTunes uses to create tunnels to the device: http://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Usbmux

I've used it for a few iOS projects. It's strength is making multi-state things like buttons and automating different resolution images (i.e. Retina). The factories feature combined with "variables" makes it a powerful vector editor. I'm not affiliated with the developer, I just think it's a great app.

My guess is IE 9 doesn't supports the 'lighter' globalCompositeOperation on the canvas which is key to making the effect work. Without it I bet the lines look pretty dull.

As it turns out, it works pretty well with the latest IE9 Platform Preview, long as you switch IE's user-agent to one of the supported browsers. I think you're onto something though, because it does look less shiny in IE than in Chrome.

Which part of the API has ASCII as the default encoding? From the v0.2.0 docs it seems like Buffer objects default to utf8.

Request, response and streams default to ASCII, e.g. response.write(chunk, encoding='ascii')

That should really be in big red text in the docs considering it actually destroys bits. The api also seems inconsistent wrt net.Stream writes are encoded in ASCII but plain writable streams default to utf8: stream.write(string, encoding='utf8', [fd])

docs are wrong, it defaults to utf8

Could your instability be attributed to the fact that you might not be running the actual release version (or has been modified in some nefarious way)?

I should have mentioned that I also had the md5 of the release image. Needless to say, I verified it. There is no practical possibility that it is not bit-for-bit identical to the retail version.