brainwagon

Well, a couple more hours of debugging has made the basics of my Atari 2600 project work. Have I mentioned what it is yet? No? Well, it’s an implementation of the German World War II three rotor crypto machine commonly known as the Enigma. I wrote a simulator of the machine in C a few […]

For reasons which actually remain entirely unclear, my wife has been muttering about renting a boat at the nearby San Pablo Dam and taking it for a cruise. This morning she bounded up cheerfully and said that today would be the day. I dragged my sleepy body and bursitis pained shoulder into a hot shower, […]

From the York Daily Record: The attorney for the Dover Area School Board calls his client’s decision to include intelligent design into the biology curriculum a “modest proposal.” There have been equally modest proposals of similar merit proposed in the past. Unfortunately, this is no satire.

Today’s podcast mostly concerns my confusion on why eBay purchased Internet phone company Skype. Well, not so much why they bought it as why they paid 2.8 billion dollars for it. I present some of my skepticism about the Web services marketplace as well. Addendum: Jeff Pulver has an interesting perspective.

Last night, I attended an event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View entitled “The History of Computer Chess”. It was a panel discussion by some of the pioneers in the field: Monty Newborn, Murray Campbell, John McCarthy, Ed Feigenbaum and David Levy. My daily podcast gives some of my brief impressions. I didn’t […]

Top of the eighth.

Scientific American published this article back in 2001. A major hurricane could swamp New Orleans under 20 feet of water, killing thousands. Human activities along the Mississippi River have dramatically increased the risk, and now only massive reengineering of southeastern Louisiana can save the city Sigh.

Well, the destruction (and hopefully, eventual replacement) of my old rotting redwood retaining wall has begun. The guys really tore it up good today, hopefully, nice bricks will be soon replacing the crappy old wood. Whew. That will be one bit off my mind. I know nobody but me cares, but I’ll put pictures here.

I received an email a couple of days ago from someone who thoughtfully noted that someone was stealing bandwidth from my by hotlinking to images in my /images directory. Effectively these people use your webserver to serve images for their websites. It’s tacky: kind of like filling your pockets with napkins and packets of ketchup […]

Those sharp guys over at Engadget have the skinny on Intel’s upcoming processors. My brother and I were discussing how it seemed like a bad time to upgrade: next year will be chock-a-block full of dual core, low power goodness.

Most of the time when I bother to blog about things that are going on in my life, I tend to do it in the form of an impromptu podcast. Today my wife woke me up and said that we should go out to Infineon Raceway and catch the qualifying for tomorrow’s Indy Racing League […]

Fun toy of the day: a gadget to make phony magazine covers from Flickr Photos. Yeah, I know, every blog in the universe has linked to this already. Sue me, it’s kind of cute.

I haven’t laughed this hard in a while. …if you are in the San Diego area, do me this favor: Go to Sea World, walk into the emperor-penguin exhibit, and punch one those fuckers right in the face. Tell ’em Michael Bay sent ya. Thanks for pointing this out, Tom.

For the second day in a row, the A’s pull out a come from behind victory over their rivals in the AL West, the Somewhere Angels from Some Other Place. The A’s trailed 0-4 going into the bottom of the 7th, but scored four times to tie the game. Then, in the bottom of the […]

Courtesy of the Make blog, here is a nice article on using Photoshop to make better digital black and white photographs. The tutorial is written from a Photoshop perspective. I’ve tried to use GIMP (since I’m too cheap to buy real photoshop) but the lack of adjustment layers in GIMP really make for a less […]