Category Archives: General

Pacman Brownies!

Posted on 2011-01-22 by pappp

I’ve had the idea of icing classic video games onto brownies rattling around in the expanse between my ears for a while. I haven’t tried to pipe ice anything in quite some time, and it never has come out terribly well, but it’s fun tedium damn it…
I made a measurement mistake somewhere, so it compressed toward the bottom, and I forgot some flanges on the edging, but for a roll of parchment paper, a tub of white icing, and a pack of food dye, it worked out pretty well. I suspect in two or three tries I could make it look good instead of merely fun.
pacmanbrownies_sm.jpg

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Spiffchorder rides again

Posted on 2011-01-19 by pappp

I’ve been putting a couple hours every evening into the long, long list of hobby projects that haven’t been touched for the last 10 or so weeks. One of the successes on this front is getting to touch the Spiffchorder I was working on.

I had to pull the reusable parts (always socket your uC…) and trash the one I assembled on perfboard; after all the modifications and false starts it was a non-functioning mass of solder balls and lifted pads. I then threw one down on a breadboard, as other had reported sucess starting that way even though breadboarding something with a 12Mhz clock is a little bit electrically dubious.
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I got this version working on the second try, and second only because the version of the code I modified to work with a (generally drop-in compatible and easier to source) ATMega 328p, instead of the 168 or 8 recommended by the original design is still not working properly. I suspect it is more of the issues with V-USB interrupt behavior on -p type chips, but haven’t attached it to anything that can trace fast enough to watch USB. That said, the code works fine on the one 168 I have in the parts bin (I think it was stolen from an updated arduino diecimila?), and the crappy first-pass keyboard I made for testing is… good enough to feel out the chords on, but not much else. The chord-set is actually pretty easy to work with, and I can see how it would be a comfortable (particularly in terms of “not further accelerating the joint damage to my hands”), convenient and fast input system.
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Now to build a working board, a better keyer/keyboard[s], and fix the 328p code so I’m not tying up my only 168.

Posted in Computers, DIY, General, OldBlog | 3 Comments

Huh…

Posted on 2011-01-19 by pappp

Some time ago, a friend sent me this article about one of our high school class mates (first person, the one at the National Journal Group), mixed with some ruminations on the fucked up standards of the people I grew up with. Earlier today, I saw this on BoingBoing. It took me a minute to put the two together, but I’m pretty sure the business plan that made the Atlantic solvent again is the same one being discussed in the first article.

I don’t know if this is a classic “Credit travels up, blame travels down” situation, or merely a case of self-promoters doing their thing, but it’s interesting how our acquaintance is ever so involved in the first article, and completely absent from the second.

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Bus Pirate!

Posted on 2011-01-18 by pappp

I lost yesterday evening to the happy distraction that usually follows a little red box showing up in the mail – The Bus Pirate and cables I ordered from Sparkfun with my Free Day winnings arrived.
It is a very cool little tool, and the accessories all work nicely – with the slight caveat that the Sparkfun cable is the reverse of the seedlabs/adafruit layout. There is a handy guide, but there are references to the colors in the firmware which don’t match… neither layout has any intrinsic advantage, although I do like that the Sparkfun model has GND on the black conductor. The test hooks I got with it have EXCELLENT grabby little tips, and are small enough to attach to adjacent pins of an SOIC, but do have an occasional problem with the jacket/part you press to extend the tip sliding back too far. That said, they are overall better than the ones on the expensive old logic analyzers on campus, so no complaints.

As for set up, the BusPirate just presents itself as a 115200/8/n/1 USB serial device, with a simple textual interface, so it will work on any machine with a USB port and serial terminal software (I like gtkterm on Linux and PuTTY on Windows). The developers offer regular firmware upgrades, and the SparkFun model ships with woefully out of date firmware and bootloader, to the point that the upgrade process is now mildly nontrivial (follow the instructions carefully). I did end up booting a machine into Windows for the update because the python update script was being problematic, and I wasn’t especially keen on bricking brand new hardware, but I got up to the current v4.3 bootloader and 5.10 firmware without too much fuss.

For a quick test, I grabbed my wiimote nunchuck and connected it up to the BusPirate. Wii accessories just speak slightly-obfuscated I2C among themselves, and there is a handy example for the process of reading one with a bus pirate. That whole process only took maybe half an hour, including plenty of time to explore the bus pirate’s features. The only slight hangup was that the BusPirates’ pullup line needs to be EXTERNALLY connected to a power source, even though the resistors can be software enabled. It would be nice to be able to connect (jumper block style) it to the on-board Vregs without extra loops in the wire harness.

wiimote_i2c_sm.jpg

One of the first things I want to do with it is tinker with the PIONIER Button that I have lying around from a conference giveaway a few years ago. The hold-up on that little project was getting access to the 24c64-type EEPROM which (presumably) holds at least the written string it writes, and probably the code it runs. I’m hoping for obvious “string preceded by length in bytes” type encoding. The 24c64 speaks two wire serial (which *usually* means not-quite-compliant I2C) with some external address lines, and the address lines are pre-grounded on the board, so at least reading the thing out shouldn’t be too hard, even if I may have to lift pins to separate it from the uC and enable writes…

Posted in Computers, DIY, General, Objects, OldBlog | 1 Comment

Fall 2010 Semester Retrospective

Posted on 2011-01-14 by pappp

With trip to Hawaii immediately following the end of the semester, I didn’t get to posting my customary class Impressions/Retrospective post for the end of the Fall2010 semester, but I have remembered to do so now. The chain of such posts starts here, with the Fall2010 impressions post.

EE611
This course was a lot more unpleasant than I expected. I basically enrolled in it out of a distaste for leaving a class until my last semester, and the darling problem with our EE graduate program where the core courses are Semiconductors (EE661), Computer Architecture (EE686), Electromagnetics (EE685), Signals (EE640), and Signals (EE611), and the program isn’t big enough to offer all of them all the time.
I scraped through by hundreds of hours of work trying to make up for my grossly inadequate math background AND learn the new material that relied on the missing stuff, and I only got a C, but I made it, and now I’m done with coursework toward the MS. I’ve never been proud of a C before, but there it is.
I do have a reasonable conceptual model for most of the material … I just can’t actually do most of it without computational aid and a reference, which was a problem for tests. The obnoxious thing is, I genuinely spent at least as much time with my old signals, controls, and linear algebra books that I did on the course material, because what I remembered from the courses (and I THINK what we covered in them) wasn’t nearly adequate to prepare me for this course. I noticed that students from undergraduate programs with more of a “Math and Memorization” focus (read “programs in China”) had a lot better time in there than the rest of us.
Not a class I should have taken, or would take again, but not all together horrible. Certainly not recommended, unless it is your area of specialization.

EE281 TA
I really do like teaching, and especially this course. It is at just the level where students first get to design for themselves, the content is material I’m good at, and the actual labs are the kind of small-scale hardware projects I do for fun. Procedure wise, I made a couple new changes, the most interesting one discussed in EE281 Car: Mixed Success, but I also built up a semester-to-semester tracking course binder with rubrics and instructional notes (which still needs to be cleaned up once more and copied to pass off to the new TA…), and did a little more of lecturing/instruction than last time. All told, quite successful, with NO (still amazed at this part) students who were lost or not trying at the end.
The degree of “I put effort in and something good happened as a direct result” in teaching college courses is ridiculously rewarding, and the amplification of effort from working with a class just makes it better.
I’d love to do it again, but I don’t really have time to both satisfactorily finish my masters’ project and teach this semester, and in general I need to work on being careful about not letting teaching suck up too much of my time in the future.

Now, onward, to research!

Posted in General, OldBlog, School | 1 Comment

Aloha ʻoe

Posted on 2011-01-07 by pappp

hsunset_sm.jpg
Aloha ʻoe, aloha ʻoe
E ke onaona noho i ka lipo
One fond embrace,
A hoʻi aʻe au
Until we meet again

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Coffee Tour

Posted on 2010-12-30 by pappp

I’m on the dry side of the big island in Hawaii right now, and the Kona cost is an amazing place for coffee dorks; I took a tour of the Greenwell Farms Coffee Plantation, a 150 year old traditional (but not modern definition organic) coffee operation in the heart of the Kona coffee band today, and subsequently spent a ridiculous amount on coffee both for me and to spread around as gifts.

Some pictures from the tour:

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A grove of coffee trees, of Guatemalan ancestry, grafted onto hardier Tanzanian root stock. Picture is taken down one of the idled rows that was chopped short last season to encourage fruiting instead of growing the tree
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A nice close up of some unripe (green) and (roughly) ripe (red) coffee cherries.

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A dissected cherry in-hand. Whole cherry has a texture and appearance sort of like a cranberry. The skin is very firm and a bit bitter, the greenish pulpy flesh is very similar to a pomegranate kernel in texture and flavor, with the hard coffee bean inside. Coffee cherries have a shelf-life measured in hours, and virtually no meat, so you can’t get them away from the farm, but apparently in addition to being delicious, possess a variety of healthy properties – So much so that a company has finally figured out how to stabilize a juice product, and are marketing it as KonaRed, as some kind of super-dose antioxidant. Greenwell happens to be the sole source for cherries for manufacturing the stuff. I bought a bottle, and a couple packets of dehydrated, but haven’t tried it yet. I have high hopes for deliciousness.

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A bed of green coffee, in a hoshidana (sliding roof) to protect it from the daily rain, drying in the sun.

The tasting on the tour is the most effective sales pitch imaginable, as several of their products are absolutely delicious. I found the single-source estate coffee to be a little earthier than I like, but their Peaberry is spectacular, and the classic for Kona medium roast is exemplary. The fun specialty is roasted chocolate coated peaberry beans that make normal chocolate covered beans seem unpleasant, and are about 4-5 beans to the cup of coffee in terms of caffiene content, making them a significant threat to my continued wellbeing.
One of the big things I hoped to get to here, and a great way to spend an afternoon.

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Douche of the year?

Posted on 2010-12-15 by pappp

TIME magizine chose Mark Zuckerberg as person of the year, despite a reader poll that put Zukerberg in 10th place, and Julian Assange in first, by a large margin. More importantly, Assange has done something in 2010, while Zukerberg is just riding out the natural life-cycle of a not particularly novel technological fad. In a few years, the social networking totem pole will iterate again, and we’ll be making friendster jokes about myspace, myspace jokes about facebook, and facebook jokes about the next social network service to gain precedence, even though they all provide roughly the same functionality as a web page and XMPP. I can only hope the next iteration will be open, decentralized, user controlled, and generally managed in a less repulsive manner, so I don’t find it too objectionable to participate in again.

In contrast, Assange has overseen (and taken the heat for) the release of documentation exposing large scale governmental misbehavior and deceit regarding the wars the US initiated in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now a large swatch of our International Diplomacy. The information itself isn’t even the important factor; the game changer is the way in which it propagated. The business of secrecy is going to be permanently changed by the large scale demonstration of the reality that a single point source of information can now be amplified and propagated indefinitely, outside the control of any entity. This means it no longer requires a conspiracy to reveal secrets;one individual with access to a secret making the decision to release it is adequate. This is a paradigm shift for secrecy, with ramifications years down the line as large organizations with secrets they wish to defend are forced to make a move toward least privlige systems (in a broader sense, also note from the article “In practice, true least privilege is neither definable nor possible to enforce.”), and work with the knowledge that any single individual with access to a secret can make it public, a threat which can not reasonably be secured against.

Also note that this position doesn’t make a value judgement on WikiLeaks’ actions; it isn’t necessary for their significance. This also leaves aside arguments about Assange and Zukerberg as individuals – they both seem to be rather horrible people personally, and being a decent person is in no way necessary to change the world.

I understand that it would be politically charged to select Assange, particularly with polls indicating that most Americans have chosen a “Head in the sand” approach to hearing about the shitty behavior of our government, but there were eight more interesting choices on the top 10 reader voted, and about 6.8 billion others.

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Last class at UK

Posted on 2010-12-11 by pappp

I realized that yesterday I probably sat in my last normal lecture at UK, AND signed off my last lab as TA. It is kind of an odd feeling. My last class as long as I make it through my EE611 final anyway…

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SC10 Review

Posted on 2010-11-20 by pappp

A quick review of my observations from SC10.

The two takeaway messages from the show floor this year:
1. “We’ve all bought these damn GPUs, now how do we make them work?”
2. “Everyone should want the shiny flash storage devices, even though their capacity, price, and especially lifespan are still kind of dubious.”

As for my experience, I had some excellent discussions with people from The Portland Group, AMD, ARM, and various universities, and the always interesting opportunity to meet many of the advisor’s former gradstudents. We also had the yearly Burton Smith update, which provided excellent food for thought, as you might expect from anyone who is in the “Microsoft Fellow, paid to do whatever they feel like as long as Microsoft gets dibs on the results” phase of life.

The aggregate.org/University of Kentucky booth was pretty successful, with the usual handmade look, with the lighted sign tower/print on demand system as last year, a new hexagonal structure with three large rear projection screens, and the MOG Maze. We were kind of worried about being next to nVidia on the show floor, but it turned out to be a good thing, in that it attracted lots of the right kind of people to be interested in our research, and allowed us to hear the 5 minutes of technical content from each of their 30-minute talks.

I should also mention that we learned that Under NO CIRCUMSTANCES should anyone, ever ship with YRC, who managed to not only damage our packed booth, starting with damage to the pallet before it even left Lexington, but delivered it on a different, crappier pallet than it left on.

We were also given a hacked router set up for MIT’s RoofNet mesh system, which we ran in our booth during the show as part of an experiment Kurt Keville was running to test Roofnet under congested conditions (10,000 geeks VS Wifi Network is a special opportunity), which is pretty cool and I hope to get to play with later.

One of the most impressive displays on the floor was Hardcore Computer’s incredibly well polished liquid immersion cooling systems. A base price of $5k for a desktop system like that is not even unreasonable.

And now for the fun stuff, mostly to shout out vendors who gave me good crap:
Best Party: The Exhibitor Reception, which, among other things, had excellent duck etouffee and a great hosting venue.
Runner up party: The FusionIO afterparty, which, while not very well attended, was directly across the street from the conference center, and had free food, free booze, and pushed the limits of good taste…
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(FusionIO Employee. “Mounting” a hard drive motif mechanical bull. In a skirt. Saints cheerleaders in the background.) They also had a reasonably neat shirt (top right below).
And from the swag:
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Best Bag: The Conference bag. It isn’t terribly well made, but it is a neat layout.
Best Shirt: Silicon Mechanics wins again. I wear their shirt from last year all the time, its just a great design.
Best Pin: Teradactyl’s little pewter-finish pterodactyl pins. They also get points because the advisor won a pterodactyl-shaped RC plane in a drawing.
Best Toy: Penguin Computing’s standard stuffed Tux, which has now joined the rookery on the back of my printer.
Best Pun: The TeraGrid PetaFlops flip-flop sandals.
Best Office Supply: Sandia National Lab’s little tape-flag/postit selection folders.

LinuxJournal and LinuxMagizine both gave out sample issues, and I may end up subscribing to one or the other, I haven’t had a paper user-centered computing magazine since I lost interest in Macs and dropped my MacAddict subscription in 2002 or so.

A couple vendors were giving out copies of their tools on CD, the most interesting to me was copies of the Open64 toolchain from AMD, which I’ve heard about but never had the opportunity to play with.

Overall, it wasn’t quite as awe-inspiring for me as last year, but I suspect that has as much to do with having seen it before as any difference in the show. There was certainly a lot of good personal networking going on both indivdually and for the research group, and there really is nothing else quite like Supercomputing, the mixture of research and industry creates an incredible intense experience, which is, as far as I know, completely unique.

Posted in Computers, Entertainment, General, OldBlog, School | 1 Comment