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2004.03.10 18.09 Grad school rejection count++ 3/5 |
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2004.03.10 10.34 Electrostatics So, I was getting upset at the fact that I couldn't adjust the convergence of my monitor correctly. If I got the top portion to look nice, text at the bottom would get blurred by some nasty fringes, and vice versa. My monitor hasn't been turned off in at least 2 months, and never goes into power save mode. So, it stands to reason that there might be some pretty big static charges that have built up, which would definitely cause nonuniform convergence. I'm sitting here with my nose practically touching the screen from trying to adjust the convergence, and I think "hm, maybe I should degauss this thing." So, I hit the button, and... KAPOW! I almost pooped myself. This thing went crazy; it's definitely the biggest effect I've ever seen from degaussing a monitor. I probably degaussed every monitor in a 5 cubicle radius. |
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2004.03.09 21.16 Grad school rejection count++ 2 of 5 |
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2004.03.07 18.10 We're going to need a really big jar of jam  I love toast. I hate toastThe Toaster is a large picture, 5 meter wide and 4.5 meter high, totally made from slices of bread toasted in different lengths of time to reach the nuances between black and white, ochre and rust. It took several days of work and several friends and their toasters to prepare the 2.500 pieces of toast necessary to build the gigantic mosaic, which reproduce a photograph of a toaster. |
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2004.03.05 13.00 I, for one, welcome our new three-headed frog masters BBC News: 'Warning' over three-headed frog  Children in a nursery were shocked when they spotted a three-headed frog hopping in their garden.Also, you know you've spent too much time online when innocuous astronomy photos make you think of goatse man. Shudder. |
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2004.03.03 08.44 Grad school rejection count One down, four to go. |
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2004.03.03 08.35 Damn kids "We need 850 million dollars." "Why?" "So that we can  |
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2004.02.27 09.05 Beating around the Bush I didn't read the article, but the ny times has a great headline: Kerry and Edwards Clash Over Who Can Beat Bush |
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2004.02.04 14.32 ut cs/ham guy: http://www.kenharker.com/ look at his antenna sim software & links to antenna stuff. mail unt transcript request mail texas 4000 check? or just give it to chris? |
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2004.01.25 15.10 I noticed some entries from the firewall at work in my HTTP access log, and I was worried because I couldn't remember loading those particular images. Somehow, someone at work had the URL for a bunch of files that I would really rather not share with the people who I work with. I quickly added an apache DENY rule for that IP. I just realized that the pictures were linked in my Livejournal and I had loaded the LJ page while at work. Phew. |
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2004.01.22 16.15 Here's my Perl Geek Code. My apologies. -----BEGIN PERL GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 0.01 P++$c-P6-R+M+O++MA++E PU BD C+D+S++X-WP+MO PP!n CO--PO-o+++G A-OL!Ee Ev----Eon-Eot!Eob!Eoa!uL++uB uS!uH!uo!w---m!osA!osBE! ------END PERL GEEK CODE BLOCK------ |
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2004.01.21 17.55 US Presidents have a pretty stressful job, and it seems that most of them start to look pretty haggard towards the end of their term in office. It would be interesting to compile some before-and-after pictures, or perhaps even a set of pictures, for each president: before the campaign, at inauguration, at the end of the term, and five years after the end of the term. My theory is that they would look the worst at the end of the term. I'm posting this in hopes that someone else will take the time to find some images, or maybe I'll read this post later and get motivated enough to do it myself. (hah, I just typed 'mysql' instead of 'myself') |
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2004.01.21 17.42 Time to hate Linux again I compiled a new 2.6.1 kernel last week. I knew this was a bad idea, since a .1 version is likely to have some major problems, but I decided to throw caution to the wind. Sure enough, my system has randomly hung about 4 times, requiring a hard reset and the subsequent fscking of my 80 gig drive, which takes 5-10 minutes. I always forget to check some important option in the convoluted kernel configuration. This time, I managed to lose support for my TV tuner card. My printer is probably broken too, because EVERY time I recompile a kernel, I break the printer support. The rest of my system has been acting funny as well. In another stupid move, I upgraded my libc a while back so that I could build some program which I've forgotten the name of; this always breaks EVERYTHING. Random programs start complaining about random things, stuff won't compile, and basically nothing is happy. This also may be a factor in the system crashes. I was running out of debian stable, but I often find myself wanting more bleeding-edge packages. Now that I'm back on a decently fast internet connection, I decided to switch over to unstable and run an apt-get dist-upgrade. This is another Linux no-no which will probably make my entire system go to hell, and everything will stop working. If stuff gets really screwed up, I'll just go to Fry's and buy a bigger hard drive and start over from scratch. I need more disk space anyways. |
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2004.01.21 15.16 debugging code that fork()'s is a bitch. |
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2004.01.14 09.33 Another idea Any new-ish bike with Shimano levers has built-in support for the Flight Deck bike computer. There are two little buttons inside the brake hoods, so they're within thumb-reach if you're in a normal riding position. I haven't been able to figure out whether the actual buttons are in the handlebars, or if you install them when you buy the Flight Deck kit. I would suspect the latter. Either way, it would be reasonable to expect that they could be hacked and used for other things. So here's the idea: Wear a headset + boom mic that is connected to both the Rino and ham unit (switch it back and forth somehow). Left hand button is the Rino Push To Talk (PTT) button. Right hand button is the ham PTT button. |
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2004.01.13 23.58 More GPS/APRS rambling I'm going to elaborate some more on my GPS tracking idea, since I seem to love talking about it lately (even though I haven't actually DONE anything yet - but that's just because I don't have the hardware). First, some background. The Garmin Rino is a GPS receiver with an integrated radio. The radio operates on the Family Radio Service (FRS) band, which is allocated for unlicensed use (it's the same band that those little Motorola walkie-talkies use). The cool thing about the Rino is that in addition to voice communications, it can send data packets containing its position over FRS to other Rino units, so you can track your friends' locations. The second piece of the pie is the Automatic Position/Packet Relay Service (APRS). APRS is an amateur radio network that allows you to broadcast a data packet (which typically contains your GPS coordinates) over the radio, and that packet will get relayed until it hits a radio station that is connected to the internet (an "igate"). The igate uploads the packet, and from there it gets transmitted to any computer that is connected to the network. It's already possible to use a Rino in conjunction with APRS, just like you would use any other GPS to transmit your position over APRS, but my goal is to provide a gateway that will allow a single Rino to act as a gateway between a whole group of Rino users and the APRS network. So, one Rino would receive position updates from any other Rino that's within range, and it would subsequently upload their positions to the internet via APRS. The gateway Rino could also receive messages via APRS, and retransmit them to the local Rino users. There are two guys, Steve Bragg and Bob Bruninga who have done some work with integrating the Rino with APRS, but neither have finished the project. Hopefully I can get the thing to work, and my basic plan is outlined below: Phase 1: Learning about microcontrollers Ordered a TI MSP430F1121 microcontroller prototype board from Spark Fun Electronics. Settled on the MSP430 uC because it's low power (obviously important for battery consumption), it has a well-supported and stable port of the GCC toolchain, and there is a decent online community that can be turned to for support. Phase 1 involves getting microcontroller development board and software to work, and writing some simple test programs to figure out how the thing works. This is a big challenge by itself, but I can't tell how hard it will be without just diving in. Phase 2: Bring in the Rino I'll need to write a program to communicate with the Rino over the PC's serial port. Normally, a GPS is able to communicate with the APRS network by way of the NMEA serial data standard, which is implemented on most GPS receivers. However, it might not be possible to do everything I want to do using NMEA, in which case I would have to use Garmin's proprietary protocol. The Garmin protocol is documented, but it's not entirely clear to me whether the Rino uses that same implementation, or if there have been changes. Phase 3: uC + Rino + TNC The obvious next step is to port this program to the microcontroller so that it can take control of the Rino without having a PC in the middle. The microcontroller acts as a middleman between the Rino and a ham radio, and the interface to the ham radio is called a Terminal Node Controller (TNC). So, the microcontroller program will also have to comprehend how to talk to the TNC. Phase 4: Antenna and Mounting At this point, the thing works, and I'm ecstatic for having more or less completed the project. The question that will remain is the ham radio setup. I can envision two possible scenarios. In the first scenario, the only ham radio that we carry will be a fairly powerful unit, the TM-D700 (which will be gracefully provided by my dad) mounted in one of our support vans. This radio will be connected to a Rino using The Device, and I will carry another Rino on my bike. This is ideal because I can just buy the Garmin handlebar mount, strap the Rino to my bike, and go. The van-based Rino is the gateway between the FRS Rino network and the APRS network. The problem here is that the Rinos have a very short range, no more than a mile, due to the fact that they have a small antenna and FCC regulations limit power output on the FRS band to 500mW. It's also against regulations to attach an external antenna to a FRS radio. The second option is to carry a portable ham radio, probably the TH-D7A(G) on my bike and have it connected to the Rino. The TH-D7A(g) will have much better range than the Rino, and the APRS packets that it sends out will be relayed by the even more powerful TM-D700 radio in the van. The downside here is that I have to mount the radio (which isn't huge, but it's not tiny either) on my bike somehow, and I will also need to mount an external antenna if I want to get decent range from it. You can probably picture it now, the ultimate nerdmobile. Anyways, I have to get up for work in the morning so I should probably stop my rambling here. |
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2004.01.13 11.18 find is one of my least favorite unix commands. It's very useful, and fairly powerful, but the syntax is horrible. Let's say that I want to find all of the perl scripts that belong to me under the current directory. I might just start off by looking for files that I own: find . -user apirkle OK, that works, but I get a bunch of non-perl files too. So I modify the command: find . -user apirkle -a -exec sh -c 'file $0 | grep "perl script"' {} \; That works OK, but we use a Veritas filesystem that creates a bunch of directories in ./.snapshot/ which contain periodic backups of every file; hence, find will return about 5-8 copies of the list of files, and it takes forever to run. So we want to exclude everything in the .snapshot directory. find . -name .snapshot -prune -o -user apirkle -a -exec sh -c 'file $0 | grep "perl script"' {} \; That almost does it. The last thing remaining is that 'file' only detects that something is a perl script if it starts with #!/usr/bin/perl or something like that. That means that it doesn't recognize perl modules, which don't call the interpreter. So we would like for find to also pick up files with the .pm extension (I didn't look for .pl files as opposed to using 'file' because not all of my perl scripts have a file extension). I can't figure out how to do the last part. Obviously I need to tack on -name "*.pm" somehow, but I can't figure out how to do it with their stupid -a and -o (AND and OR) logic flags. Damn you, find. |
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2004.01.06 16.42 My descent into mediocrity, in graph form This is the most concise summary of the last 4.5 years of my life available:  |
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2004.01.06 14.41 Acronyms ahoy I'm hatching a new scheme related to the bike ride. I'm going to get my amateur radio license, a GPS unit, a portable radio, and another radio that is more powerful and will go in one of our vans. The GPS will interface with the portable radio using the NMEA protocol. The radio will translate the NMEA information into an APRS packet, which is an amateur radio standard. The APRS packet will be received by the unit in the van, which has about a 50 mile range (the handheld radio is more like 5 miles) and the van radio will relay the packet on to any nearby radio stations. Eventually, the APRS packet will make its way through an APRS station onto an internet uplink, and will get sucked into the online APRS database. Then, visitors to my website will be able to see my GPS coordinates (and perhaps velocity, altitude, etc) in real time, along with a map of my position. |
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2003.12.31 13.33 Cool trick of the day: Using a pair of named pipes (blocking FIFOs) to take control of the execution of a macro script in a 3rd-party application that we use. |
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2003.12.29 17.39 Holy crap. I have internet access at home. |
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2003.12.24 11.33 Diggity damn, gri kicks ass. I wrote a perl module to control it, with an interface that's basically a drop-in replacement for the Chart::Graph::Gnuplot module, so all I have to do is change the name of 1 function and everything works. Hooray! If I ever get around to adding a few more features to the module, I'll probably upload it to the CPAN... Chart::Gri, Chart::Graph::Gri, or something. |
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2003.12.23 13.40 I need a source for historical weather data... i.e. mean high/low temperature, average precipitation, etc, for arbitrary locations in the US, and if possible, Canada. Weather.com is a good starting point, I guess I'll just write a script to scrape data off their pages. The idea is that I would like to make some estimate as to what weather we can expect on the Texas 4000 ride. I'm also in need of a decent data plotting tool, and one of the requirements is that it be free and open source. Matlab is great but it's obviously not free, and the ability to interface with it from the command line is severly limited by Mathworks' incredibly stupid decision to tie all graphics plotting capablities into calls to the X server (meaning that you MUST have an available X display to make a plot). The windows version is, I believe, similarly stupid (but who writes scripts for windows anyways?). All plots ever created by gnuplot look like ass. It works, but that's about it, unless there's a secret 'unset looks_like_ass_graphics_mode' command that I'm unaware of. I just found Gri, a language for creating plots that seems to be somewhat akin to LaTeX. Which means a nice steep learning curve, coupled with the inability to have other people work on your code because they don't care to work through the learning curve. I guess I'm going to go slog through the Gri docs, assuming that the download is done (sourceforge's servers seem to be really slow today...) |
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2003.12.18 17.34 Hm. It looks like 867mhz 12" powerbooks are going for $1200-1500 on ebay, depending on the options. TEMPTING! |
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2003.12.17 12.14 I'm all settled in Dallas. Might be a while before I have internet access at home. Email or call if you want to do something. |
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