brainwagon

SCO is apparently the target of the MyDoom e-mail virus. Infected machines are supposed to take part in a denial of service attack against SCO beginning February 1st. Toward that end, SCO has offered a $250K reward for information which leads to the conviction of the miscreant who created the virus. It’s hard not to […]

How about a genetically modified flower that signals the presence of unexploded landmines by changing color based upon the presence of nitrogen dioxide? The plants grow quickly, and if their roots pass near buried ordnance they turn bright red. Now that’s thinking outside the box.

I ran across The case of the 500-mile email while reading Jef’s website. A great story.

While exploring the NOAA’s website, I noticed that they have a list of photos of weather and ocean related images that (being funded by your tax dollars) are mostly in the public domain. I suspect I’ll be spidering and looting this collection shortly.

While perusing the web, I sometimes encounter odd brain-related products. Today some random link took me to the Soda King, a purveyor of unusual soda pops. Brainwash Soda combines an unnatural blue color and a skull logo with a brain portruding. How cool is that? Or perhaps you need a brain shaped Jello mold? Or […]

Modern GPUs are interesting bits of silicon. They pack a huge number of relatively slow floating point processors in parallel to achieve large throughput. Because of this, GPU performance has vastly exceeded the Moore’s law style improvements for the last decade. Recently other application programmers have begun to try to use the huge amount of […]

If you haven’t seen NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day website, you should check it out. The most startling picture I’ve seen in quite some time is APOD: 2003 December 8 – An Antarctic Total Solar Eclipse. Simply awesome.

In a bit of synchronicity, today’s llinks have a decidedly crypto theme. Julian sent me a link to the Enigma-E, a modern electronic equivalent to the original Enigma machine. Unfortunately, these are apparently only available in the UK and the Netherlands (so far), otherwise my credit card would be debitted already. It just seems too […]

I wrote a weblog system in Python by stealing some ideas from blosxom. Today I found a great list of Python Software for Weblogs. Enjoy!

I spent the weekend in the company of other individuals of like (and considerably different) mind, and thought I’d provide some links to some interesting projects. Trevor Blackwell has built his own balancing scooter. I got to ride this little marvel, and it works rather well. It cost about $2000 to make, if you weren’t […]

Today’s Slashdot extravaganza sent me to deviceforge.com for a robot design using Via’s Mini-ITX motherboards. Thse motherboards are very capable and about 7″ square, they have an even smaller motherboard called Nano-ITX that will be a mere 5″ square. The robot itself doesn’t appear to be very clever, but it’s still a pretty nifty idea.

I didn’t attend this year’s SIGGRAPH, so I was pleased to find the following link to the SIGGRAPH 2003 Papers online. Perhaps the time for buying dead tree versions of these papers has passed.

While mucking around some more with maps, I encountered a somewhat useful website at the Census Bureau that can be used to draw maps from a URL. Check out this dynamic map of downtown San Francisco. Or perhaps a map of the area near Pixar Animation Studios.

A couple of years ago, Tom Duff approached me with the notion that he was going to write a simulator for the ancient PDP-1 so that he could run SpaceWar!, widely regarded as the first real video game. We both wrote simulators for the PDP-1, and enjoyed playing around with such a bizarre machine. Lately […]

RC-CAM: Amazing R/C model video system seems to have some interesting information about using video cameras aboard radio controlled models.