brainwagon

Very, very geeky. Q: What’s an anagram of ‘Banach-Tarski’? A: ‘Banach-Tarski Banach-Tarski’. Don’t get it? This might help. Or, it might not.

I haven’t blogged much about my Softrock 40 since I finished its construction. I knew that it basically “worked”, but I was pretty sure that the opposite sideband cancellation was quite poor, and I wasn’t thrilled with the various software options that I had available, so it sat on my dining room table for a [...]

I’ve run across this page a couple of times, but keep forgetting to bookmark it. Pask has written a great deal about checkers, and these are very nice free references for the aspiring checkers player to have on hand. In particular, his Key Openings is of particular interest to me at the moment. Electronic Publications [...]

I was reminded that the CQ WW WPX contest is coming up this weekend. I’m not much of a contester, but perhaps it would be a good opportunity to get my Softrock receiver for 40m online and to record a few hours of activity as the basis for future DSP experiments. Activity is always high [...]

Some people have been using the CHDK firmware to do motion detection and capture pictures of lightning strikes. Despite the fact that lightning has been hitting Tampa all week, I didn’t get around to trying this until last night. I wasn’t entirely successful, but I did capture these two exposures: This lightning strike hit almost [...]

This morning, I woke up and was trying to resolve a problem: why is Milhouse (my checkers program) so slow? The answer didn’t seem entirely obvious, so I pondered it some more. I refined it to “why is Milhouse so slow when it accesses the endgame database files?” I think I know why, but unfortunately, [...]

No, this isn’t the sequel to the movie “The Castle of Fu Manchu”. It’s a very interesting bit of computer science that deals with the construction of interpreters, compilers, and specializers. I’m dashing out the door with the family this morning, but check it out, courtesy of the “A Neighborhood of Infinity” blog. Unlike most [...]

I have a little Canon SD1100 that I picked up a while ago. One of its cool features is its ability to run the alternative CHDK firmware. It includes many interesting features, such as scripting, improved time lapse photography and such, but it also includes the ability to do really fast shutter speeds. I was [...]

Last year, I noticed that Google had changed their search page to a Sherlock Holmes inspired theme in honor of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s birthday. This year, I see that they have chosen to honor Mary Cassatt instead. Well, fine, happy birthday to all, even to Naomi Campbell. But I’ll be listening to some of [...]

While debugging some more challenging positions from The Checker Maven, I encountered the following position which seemed to be giving Milhouse fits. In debugging the preferred line, it seems to be stuck in a short repeating cycle which it views to be best. In reality, the repeated positions should be viewed as draws, which should [...]

I started working through my analysis of Gould Puzzle #516, which my previous scan using the Cake 8 piece database, and revealed to be a loss for white, instead of the draw that Gould listed. Here’s the position: The database reports this position as lost, but Gould thinks it is a draw. Let’s see where [...]

I was scanning through the recent additions to Project Gutenberg, and found that Volume I of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, dating back to 1666 had been converted and uploaded. It’s got a lot of interesting stuff in it (as well as some uninteresting) but the thing which caught my eye was this [...]

Earlier, I blogged about the historic book available from Google Books called Gould’s The Game of Draughts. While surveying a few problems, I noticed that my play was significantly different, and included a number of different outcomes for a couple of tested positions. So, I decided to use the newly added 8 piece Cake endgame [...]

I’ve been C programming for… (quick arithmetic) roughly 25 years now, and yet, there are still things to learn. For instance, I decided to move my code for Milhouse back from my AMD64 Linux box to my Macbook for a little “mobile hacking” over the next week. I quickly found that unlike gcc on the [...]

I was goofing around with my program, and had loaded a problem that was supposedly a win for Red, and set it searching. After searching to thirty or so ply, Milhouse was still convinced the position was drawn. I then tried examining it in Cake to 10 ply deeper, and it was still looking like [...]