Monthly Archives: June 2008

Pizza Order…

A few days ago, I blogged about a Python program to monitor the status of your Domino’s pizza order. Last night found me at home by myself, with nothing desireable to eat in the house, so I ordered a pizza. And tried out the python script.

bash-3.2$ python dominos.py XXXXXXXXXX

Dominos (R) pizza tracker.
1 Large(14") Hand Tossed Pizza w/ Pepperoni, Mushrooms
1 10-piece Buffalo Hot Wings
2 20oz-Bottle Diet Coke

Your pizza is being made! 9:03pm
Your pizza is in the oven! 9:05pm
Your pizza is done and awaiting delivery! 9:12pm
Your pizza is on the way! 9:18pm
Your pizza was delivered! 9:27pm
bash-3.2$ 
Script done on Sat Jun 14 21:56:25 2008

Threefer of Satellites…

I’ve been trying to catch the SEEDS cubesat in SSTV/digitalker mode for a while. No dice. But I did record three of the cubesats as they marched across. Below is a 15 minute mp3 file. First up is COMPASS-1, which has a very squirrelly sounding morse signal. Next up is CUTE-1.7 APD II (honestly folks, next time pick a shorter name!) and finally is good old SEEDS II, beeping away.

COMPASS-1, CUTE-1.7 APD II, and SEEDS on June 13, 2008

Here’s my spectrogram of the audio. You can see that COMPASS-1 ramps up in frequency, making little hooks in the spectrogram. It’s followed by the CUTE telemetry, which is being Doppler corrected. When I quit tracking this, the frequency drops off the bottom. I then have a bit of an audio drop out as i accidently shifted to FM, and then began to track SEEDS II as it came from the north. I tracked it down to about 4 degrees elevation, where I could no longer hear the signal.

Audio Spectrogram of the Jun 13 Satellite Recording

Christie’s Auction of Interest

Okay, I’m not a gazillionaire, so all of this interest is (pardon the expression) purely academic, but check out the 347 lots available in this weeks Christie’s auction of scientific books. A truly amazing collection of rare antique books on a wide variety of scientific topics.

IMPORTANT SCIENTIFIC BOOKS: THE RICHARD GREEN LIBRARY

There’s even an Enigma machine for sale.

And a Hooke’s Micrographia, which you can also get from Project Gutenberg if you don’t have 30 or 40 thousand dollars.

My Biased Coin: Cuckoo Hashing, Theory and Practice : Part 1

Various projects that I’ve worked on rely on building efficient hash tables for looking up, well, all sorts of stuff (wow, that was vague). Say, storing transposition table entries in my checkers program. Cuckoo hashing is a way of resolving hash table collisions.

Here are some references:

My Biased Coin: Cuckoo Hashing, Theory and Practice : Part 1
Wikipedia entry on Cuckoo Hashing

Brief Movie Review: Kung Fu Panda

What can I say? It’s really good family fare. Animation? Art Direction? Story? All really good! I enjoyed it a lot. So did the wife. And, if the laughter of children is any indication, so did the audience. It’s colorful, clever and fun. Take the kids!

Picture from CUTE-1.7

Click below for a color picture relayed back to earth from the CUTE-1.7 satellite. It is my understanding that CUTE is only capable of sending this kind of data back under command from its ground station in Japan, so I won’t be receiving these myself, but I’m fairly impressed. The camera on board is essentially a CMOS cell-phone camera, so this is basically a snapshot from an orbiting cell phone.

00_03ver5.jpg (JPEG Image, 640×540 pixels)

Punch & Judy: The Punch Page

To show just how much of a lunatic I am, today while surfing around, I was trying to remember what the gadget that caused the puppeteer’s voice (or, more properly, the Professor) of a Punch and Judy show to sound the way it is. A bit of searching reveals that the device was called a swazzle, and turned up this page of interesting links regarding Punch and Judy shows.

Punch & Judy: The Punch Page

Why was I thinking of this? To be honest, I have no idea. I can’t reconstruct the path of my thoughts that led me to think of this. Nor can I imagine why I would find this information useful. I’m one bizarre monkey.

SEEDS spectrogram

Last night I was redoing my Python script that did Doppler tracking. There was a very low (max elevation under fifteen degrees) pass of SEEDS II that came up while I was making changes, so I went ahead and used it to record some of its Morse telemetry. The signal was pretty weak and intermittent, but I was able to hear it pretty well. I keep hoping that I’ll catch it in SSTV/Digitalker mode, but so far, no dice. I did make a spectrogram of the pass, just to see that morse telemetry. Click the link below to get the (very wide) picture of the telemetry.

Morse Telemetry from SEEDS II

The signal was pretty weak and hard to hear, since I was recording it on a low pass, and from within my house to boot. Here’s the audio:

Seeds II Audio (.WAV file)