Category Archives: General

DX Crap: Part 1

Posted on 2010-03-16 by pappp

Most of the load of crap I ordered from DealExtreme about a month ago has arrived, and it is all fun. This is the second time I’ve ordered things form there, and I’ve always set my expectations low enough to be quite pleased; it takes forever, and the stuff you get is shoddy, but it’s all cheap enough to make great toys, especially with things that wouldn’t be worth buying at normal prices.

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This shipment (including one Bluetooth dongle that arrived earlier because I botched the quantities when I ordered) includes:
A – 3 USB Wallwarts (to use as regulated 5V power supplies.. these things can pump out 1A)
B – Brass Sponge(for soldering iron cleaning)
C – 3 LED/Laser Pointer doodads
D – 50 LR44 Batteries (C lied, they take LR41 batteries, but there are plenty of LR44 things around)
E – 2 of The Quadboob Pen, a serious contender for the strangest manufactured object in the world.
F – A nice spudger set (for opening consumer electronics without damaging them)
G – Some Heat proof sponges (also for soldering iron cleaning)
H – 2 Cigarette-shaped lighters
I – 3 USB Bluetooth Dongles — all of which at least losely work after a little prodding
J – 10 Keychain LEDs
K – 20 UV LEDs — There are lots of cool projects with UV, and the electronics places charge a fortune for the things.

To explain a couple of the items:
I’ve been carrying one of the lighters from a previous batch in the side of my Leatherman’s sheath; it has come in handy a couple times for sealing off shoelaces and the like. Mine is falling apart, so I figured at $1.50 a pop, I may as well get two more.
The quadboob pen…
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Well, some frineds and I spotted the quadboob pen while drunkenly contemplating the interent one night, and I had to order some. They are truly bizarre, the breast pods are clacky hard plastic, and the tentacle/stalk things are an unpleasnt rubbery texture… At least one of them is to be gifted.

And the LED keychains. I have a single nice one that cost about 30x as much as each of these, and it’s incredibly handy, so they seemed like a good thing to have. Also, I have lots of 5mm LEDs of various colors around from projects, and it’s easy to mod them to make cool colorful LED keychains:
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The extra “Blue” one at the bottom is one of the UV LEDs; It’s not far UV, but it’s enough to light up the security strips in IDs and currency and such, which makes for a pretty cool toy.
I have a couple other things that shipped separately in that order coming; most significantly, a knockoff Wiimote, which in combination with the Bluetooth dongles and some IR LEDs should make a great toy.
Hurray for cheap crap from China.

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last.fm

Posted on 2010-03-13 by pappp

As I’ve been telling myself I would for a while, I set up a last.fm account and attached most of my media playing devices to it:

http://www.last.fm/user/PAPPPmAc

The update behavior is …quirky… but I’m not sure if that is a symptom of my usage or the service. I had a bunch of tracks go from “now playing” to “yesterday evening” (apparently because it is confused about time zones), and a few tracks have been randomly excluded/doubled up/etc. (I think it excludes tracks it doesn’t know?), but I’m reasonably willing to call it working server-side. Client side, maemoscrobbler on the n810 is being twitchy, probably because I’ve replaced a bunch of OS pieces it interacts with with patched versions, but basically seems to work. The last.fm plugin in Rhythmbox on my media machine is much better behaved. I wonder if the squirrelyness is just because I had different clients from the same IP in rapid succession.

There are a couple behaviors that seem natural to me and don’t seem to be integrated: I’d really like to be able to export my whole music library into their connection service, and let it feed back selections to the media player via some protocol; It’s the first thing I’ve come across that even competes with my old Rio Karma’s “Rio DJ” features, and I want to be able to do the unattended “play similar music” stunt with my own music library.

Now to see how long until I leave an album muted on repeat for an entire weekend and poison the account’s history/suggestion engine.

Is anyone else scrobbling?

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A Week’s Worth of Interesting News

Posted on 2010-03-13 by pappp

I’ve built up a week or so of news blurbs I was meaning to comment on/ draw attention to, and never got to posting, so I’m just going to link dump:

The Entourage Edge really is an interesting concept. It sounds like it’s still half baked from the review, and I think the low-power translative screens are probably more promising than e-ink for that sort of application, but I’d love a carry-able device with enough, responsive enough pixels to be decent computer AND the contrast behavior for a decent e-reader. I’d be more impressed if the input and battery life looked better on this one.

The G-Tec Intendix is a $12,250 “consumer” EEG toy. Most of the headband “Brain Computer Interfaces” on the market in the <$250 range are really using secondary indicators (skin potentials, muscle twitches, etc.), this is the first consumer packaged EEG I’m aware of, which is a good step toward getting BCIs into real user applications. Now it just needs to become more usable and cost about two orders of magnitude less…

I’m still hunting for something that is actually equal or better than my N810 (which is slowly falling behind the curve) in every way, so the news that there will be at lest 50 new tablets by the end of the year is pretty encouraging. I haven’t seen anything with an ~4” 800×480 touchscreen, hardware keyboard, open *nix-like OS, and WiFi. Phone is optional; I’d pay for real cellular service if the platform were compelling enough.

In a non-tech bent, This makes me almost incoherently angry. In conjunction with the problems with constantly revising educational standards (which is a topic of The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, one of the recent additions to my ever-expanding reading list that I don’t have time for), this is infuriating because it is going to widely alter school curriculum to suit the bizarre beliefs of some unqualified assholes, in disagreement with qualified experts and reality. Genuinely believing the experts on various topics (and/or reality) are “biased” because they don’t agree with your beliefs is psychotic, and should be treated as such.

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QNX 30th Anniversary

Posted on 2010-03-09 by pappp

QNX Software Systems, makers of the QNX operating system, one of the more awesome and under-appreciated operating systems, is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the QNX platform with a series of posts about the history of the company and OS.

I love weird OSes. I love computer history. I’m all over this one.

QNX/Neutrino is a pretty nifty OS, which is a semi-open platform, with ports available for almost every common architecture. It is UNIX-like, so the environment is familiar, and is so small, lean, and cleanly interfaced that you can simply plug/unplug everything above the mircrokernel with their modules or your own code. It is noticeably a real time OS, and has a reputation for high reliability/availability, which is (thanks to it’s small, elegant codebase) certifiable, the combination meaning it is in all kinds of “critical control systems:” stuff like medical equipment and nuclear reactors, but is flexible enough to present a workstation-like environment as well.

There is a famous (among OS nerds) demo QNX used to offer, which provided a complete environment, including windowing environment, networking, browser, and some useful programs, on a 1.44mb floppy, with incredibly tiny system requirements. It is still available from the wayback machine. A commentary on the demo disc is here. It’s fun to bring up and fiddle with on a virtual machine (qemu, bochs, whatever; it isn’t demanding), but isn’t quite as impressive as it used to be since the demo hasn’t been updated in roughly a decade, and the UI looks very dated.

Sometime in the imaginary future where I have time for such things I’d love to sign up for the non-commercial source access and wallow in it for a while, it’s always struck me as beautiful and ahead of it’s time in the same way as BeOS, but without all the tragedy.

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Asian Salmon

Posted on 2010-03-04 by pappp

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I was in the mood for something light and asian after eating mostly southern deep-fried things today. Dinner was edamame, baked salmon, white rice, and a dipping sauce made from rice vinegar, shoyu, fresh grated ginger, garlic, pepper flakes, brown sugar, and a splash of sesame oil. Traditionally I think the fish and edamame would have been steamed over the cooking rice, but I was using frozen edamame, and didn’t feel like scrubbing stuck salmon out of the steamer basket, so the edamame was zapped, and the salmon was baked on a foil-lined tray in the toaster oven.

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Dr. H.J. Siegel Talk

Posted on 2010-02-26 by pappp

Dr. H.J. Siegel, an old colleague of my advisor and a leading figure in multiprocessing, will be at UK to give a talk next Monday. Abstract:

Title: An Introduction to Research Issues in Heterogeneous Parallel and Distributed Computing

Time: 10AM, Monday, March 1, 2010

Room: 112 RMB

Abstract:

In heterogeneous parallel and distributed computing environments, a suite of different machines is interconnected to provide a variety of computational capabilities. These capabilities are used to execute a collection of tasks with diverse computational requirements. The execution times of a task may vary from one machine to the next, and tasks must share the computing and communication resources of the system. An important research problem for heterogeneous computing is how assign tasks to machines and schedule the order of their execution to maximize some given performance criterion. An overview of a conceptual model of what this involves will be given. An example of resource allocation research will be presented. The example involves an ad hoc grid environment, with energy constrained mobile computing devices that could be used in a disaster management scenario. Open problems in the field of heterogeneous parallel and distributed computing will be discussed.
“Alligators” that make heterogeneous computing challenging will be shown.

To give a little background on Dr. Siegel, tweaked from a discussion with a friend and former group-mate who went to do his PhD under Dr. Siegel:
“There is a threshold, somewhere around tenure in academia, at which you are no longer effectively discouraged from cultivating eccentricities.” This is true for most tenured faculty, but the cowboy + leading figure in multiprocessing combination is a winner among winners.

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Gettin’ my Buildycrunk On

Posted on 2010-02-20 by pappp

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I’m getting my Buildycrunk on, so are all these people. You should be too.
I’ve seen coding, grading, knitting, antenna fabrication, card games, board games, and all kinds of awesomeness.

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Kevin Rudd is an Ignorant Yokel

Posted on 2010-02-16 by pappp

From a thread at the excellent phdcomics phorum where I frequently lurk and occasionally post, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said something awe-inspiringly ignorant about reproduction and higher ed.
It’s simultaneously comforting and distressing to know that the US isn’t alone in having ignorant yokels running things.

From the article, narrator is female:

At that point one of my friends introduced me, dropping in that I am completing a PhD. At this, [Australian Prime Minister Kevin] Rudd rolled his eyes and in a terse voice lacking any sense of irony remarked that is the “excuse” that “all” young women are using nowadays to avoid starting families.

Why is this an incredibly ignorant thing to say? Let us count the ways…
1. There are well established positive correlations between parent’s education level and almost every indicator of success for children. (and a corresponding inverse correlation between education level an fertility…the “only stupid people are breeding” argument.)
2. I don’t know the numbers from Australia, but in the US 5.587% of the population over 15 has a Master’s degree, and 1.066% has a PhD, around 60% and 40% female respectively. (src, pdf) — “all” the young women? really?
3. There are too damn many of us anyway.
4. What the hell would posses someone to say that? Really? Is it the 1930s?

In a totally unrelated matter, one of the three people sharing the Nobel Prize in Medicine last year was a female Aussie PhD…

This is not to say the US is doing any better on looking bad right now. We have this shit, where a bunch of assholes are trying to pull an Intelligent Design (nomenclature swap to hide the fact they don’t have a leg to stand on) to shove their religious bullshit into the social sciences curriculum.

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Google Buzz

Posted on 2010-02-16 by pappp

I’ve started using google’s new status message/message into the void, pleading for attention/twitter-like system, Buzz. Between being resigned to the fact that google already knows everything they possibly can about me, and the fact that the system is reasonably open and transparent (unlike, say, facebook), I’ve decided it is sufficiently un-creepy to use.

Stuff posted here will (FINALLY, it took 3 days to index my rel=”me” link) start cross-posting to Buzz. Things posted to buzz won’t show up here, but my buzz feed can be followed by non-google-users at My google profile.

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Beef and Broccoli

Posted on 2010-02-13 by pappp

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This is sort of the simplest expression of halfassed asian food, and it looks reasonably distinguished for how simple and easy it is. One of those things that is nice to make when I’m not feeling any particular inclination toward any variety of food, but need to cook and eat something. This particular batch had a little problem, in that I forgot to add any garlic until it was done. I just fried some garlic in oil (mostly “vegetable” oil (which is mostly soybean), with a little sesame for smokiness) with a dash of shoyu and topped with it to fix, and it turned out edible.

Because it is such a simple, ubiquitous dish, I tend to use it for judging asian restaurants. It is almost as easy to make nasty as it is to make, and shows technique and ingredient quality clearly because of its simplicity.

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