Archive for category: Computer Science
May 17, 2011 | Computer Science | By: Mark VandeWettering
I’m going to be nostalgic for a few moments. If you are too young to have any sense of nostalgia, skip ahead to the bold text below. You were warned! A few days ago, I mentioned that I was having a bit of flashback, thinking of my first experience with time sharing computers back in […]
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May 11, 2011 | Computer Science, electronics, Hacking, Hardware | By: Mark VandeWettering
I may have mentioned before, I’m kind of old. One measure of how old I am is the fact that I’ve actually programmed machines that used core memory. Real core memory. Little ferrite donuts on arrays of wires. Some time ago, I remember running across this awesome blog post from “Wayne’s Tinkering Page” which showed […]
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May 4, 2011 | Computer Science, My Projects, Puzzles | By: Mark VandeWettering
I like to read the Programming Praxis website. Every post challenges you to write some simple programs to boost your skill, akin to finger exercises for a musical instrument. Today’s challenge was an interesting which intrigued Charles Babbage: creating word squares. I spent about 10 minutes writing one in Python that worked rather well: here […]
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May 1, 2011 | electronics, Hardware | By: Mark VandeWettering
I’m old. I learned to program as a teenager in the 1980s. Back then, we learned to program on small microcomputers. These machines weren’t very powerful, but they had a neat feature: they were self-hosted. In recent years, a large variety of small microcontrollers have become popular. Many of these have capabilities far in excess […]
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April 19, 2011 | Amateur Radio, Computer Graphics, Games and Diversions, My Projects, Video | By: Mark VandeWettering
I’ve received two requests for information about my “video production pipeline”, such as it is. As you can tell by my videos, I am shooting with pretty ugly hardware, in a pretty ugly way, with minimal (read “no”) editing. But I did figure out a pretty nice way to add some watermarks and overlays to […]
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April 12, 2011 | Computer Graphics, My Projects | By: Mark VandeWettering
Back in 2000, I was intrigued by the various demos that I saw which attempted to implement real time raytracing. I wondered just what could be done with the computers I had on hand, without using any real tricks, but just a straightforward implementation of ray/sphere and ray/patch intersection. As I recall, I got two […]
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April 11, 2011 | Computer Graphics, Link of the Day | By: Mark VandeWettering
The problem with working some place with lots of intelligent people is that it is increasingly hard to maintain one’s sense of superiority. Today, I tip my hat to Inigo. He has a very cool demo here, where he creates a program by creating and editing a small image in photoshop, saving it as a […]
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March 28, 2011 | Cryptography | By: Mark VandeWettering
William F. Friedman is a name that might not be familiar to you unless you are a bit of a cryptography nut. Of course, I am a bit of one: I have a couple of long technical notes that were authored by Friedman on the cracking of some complex WWI era ciphers. But I must […]
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March 15, 2011 | Amateur Radio, Cryptography, My Photos, My Projects | By: Mark VandeWettering
Carmen and I just got back from a trip to London, and we had a blast. One of the geekiest things we did while there was to take a day trip by train out to Bletchley Park to see the site of the codebreaking efforts by the British during WWII. As any long time reader […]
February 28, 2011 | Computer Graphics, My Projects | By: Mark VandeWettering
Nearly thirty years ago, I remember hacking together some simple code to display graphics on a WYSE 35 terminal. The terminals supported the TEK 4014 graphics commands to draw vectors, and I found the original “Hershey Fonts”, created by A.V. Hershey at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards, and placed in the public domain. I’ve […]
January 30, 2011 | Computer Science | By: Mark VandeWettering
Dan Piponi has a very cool article on nth degree quines on his blog. It’s much more understandable than his fascinating but mostly over-my-head postings which I read often, only to be struck by serious feelings of inadequacy. A Neighborhood of Infinity: Quine Central.
January 15, 2011 | Books I Read, Cryptography | By: Mark VandeWettering
As long time readers of my blog might remember, I’ve been fascinated by old cryptographic machines. I spent quite a bit of time tinkering around with them back when I was working on Simon Singh’s cipher challenge in his book. In particular, I spent a considerable amount of time reading up on the German Enigma […]
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December 2, 2010 | FPGA, Hardware, My Projects | By: Mark VandeWettering
Tom showed me a link to The J1 Forth CPU, a very small processor which is coded in Verilog (only 200 lines!) and can run very fast on existing FPGA boards. It is quite an intriguing design. Forth is an intriguing if somewhat archaic programming language. In the bygone ages of my youth, I experimented […]
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December 2, 2010 | electronics, FPGA, Hardware, My Projects | By: Mark VandeWettering
I’ve been playing with a BASYS2 FPGA development kit from digilentinc.com, and pondering the world of digital system design. I chose the BASYS2 because of its low price ($70) and because it included a reasonable number of LEDs, switches, a VGA interface and a connector for a PS/2 keyboard. Still, I’ve been looking for other […]
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November 1, 2010 | Amateur Science, Computer Graphics, Math, My Projects | By: Mark VandeWettering
A couple of months ago, I did some simple simulations of light refracting through raindrops in a hope to understand the details of precisely how rainbows form. The graphs I produced were kind of boring, but they did illustrate a few interesting features of rainbows: namely, the double rainbow, and the formation of Alexander’s band, […]
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I suspect the world would be better if that percentage were even greater.
Apparently 15% of all web traffic is cat related. There's no reason for Brainwagon be any different.
Thanks Mal! I'm trying to reclaim the time that I was using doom scrolling and writing pointless political diatribes on…
Brainwagons back! I can't help you with a job, not least because I'm on the other side of our little…
Congrats, glad to hear all is well.