brainwagon

Lately, Intel has been trying to promote the idea that with the advent of multiple processor cores on their machines, raytracing computer graphics scene in real time will not only become feasible, but perhaps the preferred way of rendering graphics for applications such as games. I must admit, I’ve found some of their work to […]

Today’s gem from Project Gutenberg is the Banbury Chap Books by Edwin Pearson, which contains a huge number of kind of cool woodcuts that I’m sure somebody can find some creative uses for. [tags]Public Domain,Project Gutenberg,Gutenberg Gem[/tags]

I’ll admit it, I was giving Oakland Athletics pitcher Esteban Loaiza a hard time. I can’t say it was totally undeserved. In the month of July, Loiaza pitched 22.4 innings, and allowed 20 earned runs, for an ERA around 8.0. But in August, he’s a new man! He’s pitched 34.4 innings, and allowed only 7 […]

I was reminded recently of the existance of LibriVox: a site in which volunteeers read books and shorter works and creates public domain audio books out of them. There are now 117 completed books in their catalog, including one of my childhood favorites, The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, in no less than […]

From the Ubuntu Blog: First Ubuntu Billboard spotted I really like Ubuntu. Might even lure me away from FreeBSD. [tags]Ubuntu,Linux,Open Source Operating Systems[/tags]

While putting in a dozen miles on the stationary bike, I was reading my blogs on my LG CU500, and found Robert Scoble’s post on the startup sound in Microsoft Vista. Apparently the plan for Vista is to have a mandatory, unchanging startup sound to greet you whenever you power on your computer. All I […]

I’ve been trying to get back into exercising at the gym more, which is always a time of intense boredom. I’ve brought my Axim x50v to the gym and used it to listen to podcasts, and my relatively new LG CU500 also works as a pretty good MP3 player, but I thought it might be […]

Yesterday I wrote a simple program in C to compute pi to a useless number of decimal positions. A few minutes of thought told me that I could use the bignum support in Python to write an even simpler program. It was true: it took me maybe three minutes write the program to spit out […]

I mostly like my new LG CU500, although, like many gadgets, it’s not without its annoyances. For instance, the builtin WAP web browser is just, well, pathetic. It isn’t very powerful, and crashes horribly when loading larger pages. Yuck. Luckily, it’s got Java, so you can just download the minibrowser from Opera.com and you are […]

Every once in a while, I get the urge to write a program for the sheer fun of it. I wrote my first (and second, and third) raytracer just for fun. I’d like to write a chess playing program just for fun. I’ve written some chunks of programs that have to do with evolutionary computation […]

Rats, I missed the zombie attack that happened in San Francisco yesterday. I was gonna go down there and snap some pictures, but life intervened, and my documentation of the existance of the undead got pushed back behind the mundane acts of exercising, mowing the lawn, and doing grocery shopping. Man, am I lame. Oh […]

I was doing a bit of web research about quines, and came up with this link on Wolfram’s MathWorld website about this rather unusual formula: Click on the link above to find out what’s so amazing about it. [tags]Mathematics,Quine[/tags]

I have a pretty keen interest in programming languages, and sometimes this leads me to esoteric or even perverse extremes. For instance, I had fun with brainfuck for a while, even writing a compiler for the language that fit in my .signature file: #define P(C,X)case C:printf(#X);break; /* bftoc.c by markv@pixar.com */ main(){int c;printf(“char a[9999];main(){char*p=a;”);while((c=getchar())>=0) {switch(c){P(62,p++;)P(60,p–;)P(43,++*p;)P(45,–*p;)P(46,putchar(*p);)P(44, […]

I admit that I was spoiled to a certain degree by my old Motorola mpx220 smartphone: it would play windows media files, and with the addition of the TCPMP media player, many other formats as well. My new LG phone only plays 3gp video, and I hadn’t ever bothered trying to rip video to that […]

Josh wanted to know how fast the HSDPA networking built into my new LG CU500 is, and recommended going to http://www.dslreports.com/mspeed to check it out. The default WAP-based browser wasn’t up to the task, so I loaded Opera Mini onto the phone and gave it a try by testing it with the 1M file size […]