brainwagon

I’ve been interested in compression technology of all kinds for what seems like forever. Saturday I did some informal testing of the Ogg Vorbis codec, and the new speech only codec Speex. I compress all my music (small collection that it is) using Ogg Vorbis. I’ve found that 96kbps Ogg is either indistinguishable or slightly […]

Well, I was working on some software to do panoramic image stitching over the weekend. Several hours of work yielded some phase correlation code that seems to work well about 50% of the time, and fail tragically 50% of the time. My brain wasn’t up to the task of further analysis, so I decided to […]

I’ve been interested in using digital cameras to capture panoramas, and yesterday I had my cheapy $50 digital camera with me, so I shot 19 handheld shots that whirled around me as I stood outside my place of business. This is the result: I deleted the applet, it made loading my main page too slow. […]

I’m fairly happy with Movable Type, but I am constantly on the lookout for new weblogging software. During one of my surf sessions, I ran accross blosxom, a very simple weblog written in seven pages of perl. It’s a very cute system, and has some terrific ideas. Inspired by its brevity and power, I’ve set […]

I’ve scanned and created another document, an article from the Gleanings for the ATM column that ran for years in the magazine Sky and Telescope. This article is by Dick Buchroeder and discusses the plans for a Catadioptric Herschelian Telescope, an interesting telescope design with tilted optics. If you aren’t interested in telescope making, you […]

I did a bit more research on djvu, and have done some more experiments. Long ago, I rescued a huge number of old Scientific American magazines from the dumpster of our local library. I grew up reading the Amateur Scientist column conducted by C. L. Stong, and of course Martin Gardner’s superb Mathematical Games. I […]

After our day of enjoying fine art, we decided to go out and get some delicious Thai food from Thai Spice which is located just south of Golden Gate Park, and then went to the Marin Headlands for a bit of a drive near Point Bonito. The remnants of many old gun emplacements are still […]

I have a bunch of papers that are not valuable, but are rare and hard to find. Some I have only as faded Xeroxes, such as a copy of Anton Kutter’s treatise on Schiefspiegler telescopes, and Arnold Leonard’s work on Yolo telescopes. Others are in collections which are out of print, such as Tom Duff’s […]

Just for kicks, I tried creating a simple shockwave animation. I generated this with ming via php. Bindings are also available for Python and Ruby. Okay, it’s pretty boring. But if it works, perhaps something better will be forthcoming.

This is just a potpourri of FPGA related items. I’m fairly interested in hardware design (although have not really done very much of it). I’ve been looking for some cheap programmable hardware, and found out about Digilent. They have boards based upon the Xilinx Spartan II FPGAs for around $100, and the Coolrunner CPLD for […]

Carmen noticed some interesting raptors perched on our back fence and asked me where my binoculars were. I have a pair of nice Celestron 7×50 binos that I use for astronomy, but I also have a nice tripod mounted set of WWII 10×50 spotting binoculars. We spied on the bird for a while, and I […]

Modern motherboards kick ass. They have all sorts of temperature sensors that can tell you what the current temperatures, fans and voltages are. I’ve had a simple monitoring gadget in the FreeBSD ports collection called healthd installed for a while, and finally got down to making a tiny PHP program that inserted the relevant info […]

While surfing around for Christmas ideas, I landed upon a link to L. Frank Baum (author of The Wizard of Oz) and his classic story The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. Amazon.com has a printed version of this book for over a hundred dollars, but the story itself is now in the public domain […]

I’ve been goofing around a bit with trying to acquire environment maps from real environments for use in computer graphics. The usual method (quite old, but recently made more popular by Paul Debevec) is to photograph a reflecting sphere in the environment of interest. You can see this happening all the time in the extra […]

In an afternoon of goofing around, I added some RSS feeds to my website. Check them out on the right.