brainwagon

Well, my venerable Motorola mpx220 has been acting unreliably lately, and after over two years of service, I figured it would be a good time to upgrade. I did a bit of scanning around, and settled on upgrading to the new LG CU500, which is equipped with Cingular’s new HSDPA networking stuff, enabling them to […]

I’ve had lots of fun playing with the UM virtual machine described in the last ICFP contest, and found this page by Michael Weber detailing his work on creating the virtual machine in Common LISP. My own virtual machine is written in C and is about three hundred very verbose lines long, with plenty of […]

I think I’ve been watching too much CSI, but I’ve become interested in some of the science of forensics. That’s why I’ve found this to be interesting: The Science of Fingerprints published by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. An interesting basic look into forensics. [tags]Fingerprints,Forensics,CSI,Public Domain[/tags]

Not perfect, but kind of fun.

Picking up the newspaper this morning, it reminded me tonight is the peak of the annual Perseid meteor showers. You can look on skytonight.com to find out details. It’s expected to be not the most amazing show, as many of the fainter meteors will be drowned out by the light of the full moon, but […]

I’ve been wanting to do some GPU programming for quite some time, and tried to take a step in the right direction. I picked up a fairly inexpensive nVidia 7300GS card for my HP Pavilion a1310n, thinking that would be a good way to get started, but when I use the binary drivers that nVidia […]

Here’s an inspiring little project: The Time Fountain on cre.ations.net. Basically it is a tiny fountain which drops small drops of water tinted with a flourescent dye. A PIC microcontroller controls flashing of some UV leds to illuminate the drops, resulting in all sorts of neat stroboscopic effects. Very cool, check out the video.

Every year since time immemorial, the Springfield Telescope Makers hold a telescope making event called Stellafane. People get together to show off their telescope projects, some of which are very neat. Sean Graham posted this cool photoset on Flickr, check ’em out. [tags]Telescope Making, Astronomy, Stellafane[/tags]

Posting has been a bit light lately, mostly because I was off in Boston for SIGGRAPH. I’ll try to post a summary of some of the good stuff that I saw in the next day or two when I recover sufficiently. In the mean time, you can check out my pictures of Fenway. Addendum: In […]

Yesterday I saw my first game at legendary Boston’s legendary Fenway Park. One of my fellow SIGGRAPH Sketch jurors, Daniel Maskit, had a spare ticket and was kind enough to let me tag along. If you saw Monday’s game, you know that the game was fabulous, but I’m going to hold off telling the larger […]

Tom reminded me that the ICFP Programming Contest, 2006 was last weekend. I didn’t notice, nor did I have time to compete, but I really like this years challenge, and after an hour of programming and two hours of debugging (which should have only been ten minutes at the outside) I have a working virtual […]

Somebody at work pointed me at the California ISO System Status page, which points out how many megawatts of power that California is consuming, and how close we are to maximum capacity. Note: we’re close. Really close. Save running your washer and dryer till later.

Yesterday the mercury crossed over 100 degrees here, so to stay out of the heat, we ended up going to the San Francisco Zoo. Mission mostly accomplished: the temperature was a balmy eighty degrees or so, and it was marvelous. I hadn’t been to the SF zoo since they completed their new Africa exhibit, so […]

Last night, I finally reached a breaking point. I have an aging 1.6ghz Sempron laptop that I was using to run Windows XP. I use the term “run” somewhat loosely. It was more like a hobbling walk. On a clean reboot, it took fully seven minutes and thirty seconds to reach a state where I […]

Josh Bancroft decided to post My Top 5 Must Read Blogs, and I realized something: I hate blogs about blogging. And public relations. And the Cluetrain Manifesto. They bore me. They are populated entirely by pundits who like to talk about how revolutionary blogging is, how companies can use it to sell products and improve […]