brainwagon

With the release of our movie just a couple of weeks away, you might be asking yourself “what is Ratatouille, anyway?” It’s not a very common dish anymore, I’d never had it before. But never fear! Here’s a recipe from Cooking for Engineers. I’m not a huge eggplant fan myself, but this sounds pretty good […]

It’s been a while since I posted a link to anythng about making annoying sounds music, but it’s Friday, so this link is for Tom. » Quad NAND Gate – synth, the Nandsynth [tags]Homebrew,Computer Music[/tags]

I didn’t know how this worked. Now I do. Interesting.

Scanning my list of baseball birthday’s at the right, I see that today is the birthday of Don Newcombe. Newcombe was the subject of one of my previous postings, and was the 1956 Cy Young and MVP winner, as well as a 4 time All Star. Happy Birthday Don! [tags]Baseball[/tags]

In an effort to try to continue to claim that I know something about computer science, I’ve been trying to find some good blogs in computer science and mathematics, and see what people who don’t spend all their time making pixels turn the right color do. The My Biased Coin blog has an interesting introduction […]

Dijkstra once famously claimed (well, perhaps not anymore, since fewer and fewer learn BASIC): It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. The question that I asked myself last night: “Was Dijkstra right?” I […]

I was reading the article linked below about why WiFi enabled cameras or cards aren’t a good idea. » Wi-Fi-enabled digital cameras: Five reasons why you couldn’t care less | IP Telephony, VoIP, Broadband | ZDNet.com I think the author misses the mark on this. His reasons are: You already have a camera phone. Well, […]

Well, it is a few days later, but here is a picture of me and the missus at the Pixar Ratatouille Wrap party. The picture simply does not convey how beautiful she was, or how goofy looking I am. Nevertheless….

Modern Device Company has an Arduino like microcontroller board for only $15 in kit form, $22 assembled. That’s just too cheap for words. Maybe my aborted robotics project will someday start again, and I’ll want this link.

It’s no secret that I believe that primary and secondary education in this country is basically abysmal, with minor pockets of competency and occasional bright flashes. We do a terrible job of educating children, particularly in mathematics and science. In my bleaker, more skeptical moments, I believe that primary and secondary schools may in fact […]

Okay, since I went to the trouble of actually doing a bit of panorama stitching on Linux, I thought I’d go ahead and make a 360 degree panorama (not a spherical one, I didn’t have the patience). So, as I walked out the door at Pixar Animation Studios, I snapped fourteen handheld images using my […]

Yesterday, we had our group wrap-up-party excursion. We settled on a leisurely bikeride around Angel Island, accompanied by barbecued ribs and chicken. It was a stupendously nice day, warm, but not hot, and while I was feeling a bit under the weather during the first bit, I had a lot of fun. I snapped some […]

One of the mailing lists I was on suggested that the best way to provide network access to a neighborhood was to use a mesh architecture based upon the Meraki nodes. I seemed to have vaguely recalled seeing them before, so I went to peek. They look really interesting, and quite competitive pricewise ($99 for […]

Well, we wrapped up Ratatouille production (well, almost) with a wrap party on Saturday at the Masonic auditorium in San Francisco. Carmen had a lovely dress (REALLY lovely), I had a tux, and we had a screening followed by eating, drinking and dancing. I’ll try to get some pictures up sometime, but off the top […]

I was engaging in a little computer archaelogy this morning, looking up some historical information, and discovered this page chock-a-block full of interesting reading. Lots of really good stuff. Interesting Documents According to MC