Category Archives: OldBlog

Retro Computing

Posted on 2009-03-02 by pappp

I saw retr0bright, a hobbyist produced restorer for antique plastics go by on the geek newses(first via /.) today. It probably does do a little bit of damage to the plastics when used, but I doubt it’s much worse than another year of aging. I love antique computing tech, and this provides a flimsy excuse to ramble about it a bit instead of working on all the things I should be.

I’m specifically interested in retr0bright for restoring the plastics on the Mac SE I yardsaled some years ago. I picked it up partly out of waning to poke around in a one-piece Mac, and partly because the case information indicates it is +/- a few months of my age, which makes it a nifty conversation piece. The machine is a fun project box as well; Mac SEs have bays for two drives, either two floppy drives or a floppy and a hard drive, I mounted a small spare SCSI hard drive into the internal frame with a little bit of EM shielding, and kept both floppies. Having grown up on Macs (the formative computer for me was a Macintosh Centris 660AV running OS 7.1. The machine is still in my parent’s attic, but I’m fairly certain its video board has died. The SE is sitting on a shelf in my old room in my parent’s house, and when last I tried it was still fully functioning. People who knew me in middle and high school will remember that one side of my room was covered in a selection of aging Apple hardware, it was a big part in making me the hacker I am today.

I am mostly unimpressed by modern Macs (although I wouldn’t mind a Mac or a hackintosh to play with), but still sometimes pine for awesome old mac software; this is what Basilisk][ is for. Coupled with an appropriate ROM image and disc or disc image (both of which I keep around), Basilisk][ can emulate a 68k mac on a Windows, Linux, OS X (and possibly others) host. This lets me reminisce, and play with old software from my childhood without having to bust out any finicky old hardware. A lot of the things I keep on the drive image are games I remember from childhood, especially a couple of old Ambrosia software titles like Barrack (a particularly awesome jezzball-like game) and the first two titles in the Escape Velocity series (which are perfect non-classical RPGs). I also keep a copy of Word 5.1, which is in some ways still the best thing Microsoft ever made, and some other productivity titles from the time. It’s always neat to see what changes and what stays the same.

In the same vein as Basilisk ][, one of my other formative experiences in geekry was learning about emulation, staring with the Super Nintendo and snes9x. The joy of “You can play all those awesome old games on your computer” has always been an almost irresistible motivator, both for myself and for passing on to others. Emulation also provides a great outlet for compulsive behavior for lots of people, especially when you start to look into the world of ROM collectors (ROM in this case refers to software copies of games, which were traditionally stored on ROMs). My interest in emulation waxes and wanes, but I always keep at least a distant eye on the scene, and have always sort of wanted a MAME Cabinet (a standup arcade cabinet with a computer that runs MAME to allow it to be all arcade games in one. Maybe now with the hacker space I can interest some others in putting one together, so that I don’t end up with a full-sized standup arcade cabinet that I have to worry about moving around with me, but can still build and play with one.

While talking about retro tech, it’s important to mention the other computer really important to my geek development the Winbook XL my parents bought me when I started middle school. It is a bog-standard, if slightly cankerous, Pentium MMX laptop (intel chipset, yamaha OPL3 sound, Chips&Tech graphics, etc.) with an awful, awful 12.1” passive matrix LCD. The machine was my first serious experience with windows, with hardware and software upgrades, with system administration, and, most importantly, with Linux. My first distro was SuSE 7.2, I then bounced around for a while, briefly settling on Slackware, and eventually finding my way to Arch, which has been my primary OS for years. As for the machine itself, some of the port covers fell off in its first few years, and the hinges failed after about 5 years. A few months ago the backlight(or backlight transformer) gave out… but the bulk of the machine still works, and has BeOS (a wonderful, beautiful OS that is a perfect example of computing that could have been) and Debian systems on it. I get it out from time to time when I need another beater box to try something on.

Obviously computer history is something I love, from the truly early stuff, (Babbage, Lovelace) and even more the World War 2 era (Mauchly, Eckert, Aiken, Von Neumenn, Turing, Zuse…) into the 70s, 80s and 90s when computing technology really began to permeate the world. The best book I know of on the topic is A History of Computing Technology, 2nd Edition, if anyone knows of something better, especially for more modern stuff, please tell me.

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

IEEE Robot

Posted on 2009-03-01 by pappp

My extra timesink for the surrounding few weeks has been helping out with UK’s IEEE Southeastcon Competition Robot.
I spent a lot of time last semester making a never-quite-working (but very educational) vision system as a senior project; we opted not to use it (the “never-quite-working part) a few weeks ago, but the rest of the robot isn’t (wasn’t?) really in order to compete, so there have been lots of little things to take care of. This year’s robot “recycles,” it has 4 minutes to gather Coca-Cola empties (conference is in Atlanta, GA this year, of course its Coke) off of a 10×10 astroturf field, and sort them by material (glass, aluminum, plastic). Full rules are available here. The current state of the robot looks as follows, and has at least a rough software framework to drive the pictured hardware.
IEEERobot1.jpg
I don’t have an awful lot of time to dedicate to it, so I’ve been trying to take care of little things; soldering jobs, little pieces of glue code to make the software work, passing information around the group to make sure everyone stays synchronized. Hopefully it’s been useful. Indications are that there will be a reasonably competitive robot in a week, there has been a lot of a lot of people’s time and effort (not to mention a fair chunk of the UK IEEE Student Branch’s money) invested in this year’s robot, so I certainly hope so. I may even get all the OTHER things that the time spent on the robot and going to the conference proper is pulling time away from.

Posted in DIY, Electronics, General, Objects, OldBlog, School | Leave a comment

RIP Philip José Farmer

Posted on 2009-02-25 by pappp

Apparently Philip José Farmer died this morning (via boingboing). Farmer has been one of my favorite (Up there with William Gibson and Kim Stanely Robinson) SciFi authors for some time, his Riverworld series is arguably one of the best efforts in world building ever, and is a wonderful widely allusive piece in it’s own right.
I’ve heard it advanced in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way that people go to whatever afterlife they believe in; if so I’ll see you at the grailstone “Peter Jairus Frigate“

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Yay Synthpop!

Posted on 2009-02-23 by pappp

Somehow I missed that Electric Valentine put out an album last November. The album is The Friends With Benefits EP and it is quite good. I went on an Amazon mp3 binge and downloaded their entire catalog… for less than the price of a normal album, and its worth listening through.
Electric valentine is made up of Lauren Baird and Chris Qualls, who are the Singer and Programmer for A Kiss Could Be Deadly. A Kiss Could Be Deadly’s self titled album was probably my favorite album of last year, and everyone with the slightest inclination toward pop/electronic/punk should give it a listen.
Seriously. Right now. Go.
The Electric Valentine tracks are generally a little less dark (the title track *isn’t* about killing a lover’s competing interest) than the A Kiss Could Be Deadly tracks. They also tend to be a little more synthetic sounding (no guitar, more “unnatural” sounds, drum machine instead of drums) and distort the lyrics more (vocoder?). That said, the fucking impeccable pop sensibilities are still there, and Lauren’s voice still manages to be at once incredibly powerful and confident, and, to borrow a phrase, make you want to say “aw honey, It’s going to be OK.” I like. Not quite as much as A Kiss Could Be Deadly, but I like it, especially “Electric Ghosts” and “A Night With You”.
In other synthpop thoughts, I gave Lady GaGa’s extraordinarily popular debut album The Fame another listen and … it’s still mediocre. It has its high points, the first single “Just Dance” is definitely catchy, and “Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say)” is a good pop song, but all told the album is merely OK for the only really breakout hit from the genre recently. I end up having the same problem, although not to the same degree, with it as when listening to Kanye West — it’s not bad, but it isn’t as clever as it thinks it is, and its terribly self involved.

I have to say I’m fairly pleased with Pop lately, some reasonably Avant-garde interesting stuff is bubbling up into the public conscious, and the indie scene is producing a lot of good things. Examples arranged from the true mainstream to stuff I’d be a little surprised if anyone else had heard of.

* Katy Perry’s One Of The Boys is an absolutely impeccable pop album and far more interesting than the drivel that was passing for pop in the 90s. Definitely my favorite product of The Matrix, who are responsible for a shocking fraction of mainstream pop in the last decade.
* The Lady GaGa Example Above
* Hellogoodbye had their improbable 15 minutes in 2006.
* Vanessa Carlton is continual favorite of mine, and always hovers around on the edge of the mainstream. Heroes and Thieves was a consummate pop album.
* I only recently became aware of Tegan and Sara, a pair of lesbian twins from Canada who write excellent pop.
* The Modern, a fluidly named British Electropop band that finally put out an album in 2008 after years of producing a scattering of catchy individual tracks.
* The A Kiss Could Be Deadly/ Electric Valentine examples above

Links to pay for albums specifically mentioned in the above post (explaining my ethics system for paying for music would be as long as this post, do whatever you do):

Posted in Entertainment, General, Music, OldBlog | Leave a comment

USBTinyISP

Posted on 2009-02-21 by pappp

I got my Adafruit USBTinyISP AVR programmer/SPI Interface/USB Bitbang Device kit today, and was compelled to immediately assemble and test it. The USBTinyISP is an excellent product; it is considerably cheaper than the official Atmel AVR programmer, just as functional, and supports a fellow qualified hobbyist. I’ve been meaning to pick up my own AVR programmer for a while, as having a programmer and a stock of cheap microcontrollers (I also recently picked up half a dozen adorable ATTiny13 chips to use with it to give my SmartLEDs idea a shot) enables all kinds of cool projects, that do not involve “find one of the programmers on campus” or “Use the department’s Arduino Dieciemilia that I haven’t returned.”
The USBTinyISP comes as a very nice kit, which includes all the component parts including a nice case and well-made PCB.
usbtinyispparts_small.jpg
In the picture, in addition to the included parts, you can see my trusty Xytronic 379 Soldering Station, for which I have nothing but praise (if you think you need one of those classic blue Weller WES51 stations, you really need one of these, its a better station and costs half as much). In the left of the frame you can see my Leatherman Wave, which I cooed about a few days ago. It just happened to be in the picture, I use an ancient pair of thin-profile pliers (now sold as the Xcelite 378, highly, highly recommended) I inherited from my mother when I am working on electronics at home.
usbtinyispalmostdone_small.JPG
I consider myself reasonably competent with a soldering iron, and it took me a little under an hour to go from holding a mailer pouch to programming a chip, with no fuckups in between, which speaks well for the quality of the instructions, the kit, and the thinking that went into them. There are a few interesting quirks in the design; several resistors mount vertically to the PCB, the large electrolytic capacitor is intentionally mounted so it rests on top of the TTL buffer. These are both space-saving measures, and anyone who has ever seen most of the things I throw together on perfboard knows I have a high esteem for nifty tight designs.
Using the completed programmer is just the same as all the other models of AVR programmer. For software I use AVRDude, since it is well-supported on all common platforms. Below is a shot of my first successful program (or actually, readout) of a chip.
attiny13prog_small.JPG
(closeup)
attiny13bread_small.jpg
That tiny black thing on the breadboard surrounded by the brightly colored wires is one of the aforementioned ATTiny13 chips; I paid $1.95ea for those, and it really is an entirely capable little microcontroller. The incessant march of technological progress never ceases to amaze me. Sometime soon I’ll need to make a little target board that can socket the ATTiny13s and has a plug for the 6-pin connector so I don’t have to muck about with loose wires every time.

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

Collexion

Posted on 2009-02-20 by pappp

EDIT: Never mind, voting has been extended until Friday 2008-02-28

By a vote-with-pledge-for-appropriate-membership-fee, the Lexington hacker space and associated community is now known as Collexion. This was my second choice after LexCapacitor (a double pun on flux capacitor and NYC Resistor, beyond the obvious “storing creative energy”). I agree that this is probably more friendly to the non electronics-dorks in the potential community, and am perfectly satisfied with the outcome. It also sounds like we have a space; will be moving in to a portion of the very large, very nice space recently leased by Awesome Inc., who are working to start as a reasonably compatibly aimed technology business incubator/coworking space. So long as there are no further incidents with people from Awesome (cap = Awesome Inc.) speaking for us, and the slimy MBA feel of the Awesome people doesn’t interfere with our hacker flair, it seems like a great arrangement for all involved.

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Another TED Talk

Posted on 2009-02-20 by pappp

One of the newly posted Ted09 talks Barry Schwartz: The real crisis? We stopped being wise (person) – Barry Schwartz articulates something that I often hear friends attempting to articulate, and often try to articulate myself; that we need to apply humanistic common sense to our lives. He uses a word I don’t like “Morals” for the topic. I prefer the word “Ethics, it (at least in part) avoids the implications of innate valuation (good v. bad), normative synchronization, and external enforcement(higher power). That said, he has an excellent point; that people do ridiculous things because they follow rules instead of reasoning. He uses my one of my favorite examples for the topic, education; that the highly “scripted, lock-step curriculum” is set to stave off disaster, but at the same time enforces mediocrity. I have heard from friends that the remedial curriculum designed by the woman who taught me 9th grade advanced English, who apparently only teaches people at least 2σ out from the norm in either direction, has been adopted as the STANDARD curriculum. Aside from the problems with the idea that a curriculum aimed at abnormal people will work well for “normal” people, and the concrete evidence of lowered standards, prevents teachers from tailoring to the individuals they are teaching. It implies a lack of trust in teachers which, while sadly often well founded, is demoralizing to the exceptional people, driving them out of education, perpetuating the system’s decline. There are several other good topics packed into his 20 minutes as well, its well worth the time to watch.
On a related note, I HATE his 2006 TED talk Barry Schwartz: The paradox of choice, which basically argues that people are too stupid and petty to handle choice. Especially irritating is the idea that raised expectations and individual responsibility (from selection) lead to disappointment and dissatisfaction with objectively better outcomes; the thesis in general that, and I quote, “The secret to happiness is low expectations” is awful and defeatist; to me real pleasure comes from meeting high expectations, there is less satisfaction in meeting low(er) expectations. Then again, I am, for lack of a better schema, a Myers-Briggs INTJ (groups in to “Green” in the pyramid-scheme looking but easier to handle TrueColors system), and he does make reasonably compelling arguments that his thesis IS the case for a great many people, so perhaps it is just me being an outlier.

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Statistics

Posted on 2009-02-19 by pappp

I installed the FPStats plugin a few days ago to indulge my curiosity about visitors to this blog. It automatically collects generic statistics (IP address, user agent, etc.) from visitors, and has some nice display features for figuring out how many are unique, or search bots or what have you. A couple cool things are already visible:

  • * This is now a “Real” webite, the Google and MSN bots have paid me a visit, making me the 9th hit for “PAPPP” on google (the 3rd and 4th are my user pages various places), and the 2nd on MSN. This means I am findable to ~80% (ref)of the search market(!). It is not indexed high for any permutation of Paul Selegue Eberhart on either engine, but definitely a start (come little bot, see the full name in the post and make me “notable”…)
  • * I get a very diverse set of readers in terms of platform; Win32/Firefox, OS X/Safari, Win32/Opera, Linux/unofficial Firefox.. and no Internet Explorer hits to date.
  • * I haven’t “Taken off”; I can, with a little thinking, devise who is most likely responsible for each hit still.
  • * The N810 has a really, really funky user agent string “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux armv6l; en-US; rv:1.9a6pre) Gecko/20080828 Firefox/3.0a1 Tablet browser 0.3.7 RX-34+RX-44+RX-48_DIABLO_5.2008.43-7”, which explains why some sites with ugly non-standards render paths choke on it. I could spoof something else, but I like making my platform visible.
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Distractability

Posted on 2009-02-19 by pappp

Lately I’ve been quite distractable. I partly blame a rescaled sense of urgency from what I tried (and, surprisingly, succeeded) to take on last semester, I partly blame my every-other day class schedule. The fact of the matter is, the problem is nothing new; because I am curious, I tend to find the things I am exposed to interesting, and, as a result, follow up on them far more than I really have time for.
Eugen Roth (1897-1976) wrote a wonderful passage on this problem in Ein Mensch(1935) “Das Hilfsbuch” (titles tentative; my German is weak, in German because it is poetry; English follows):

Ein Mensch, nichts wissend von “Mormone”
Schaut deshalb nach im Lexikone
Und hätt´ es dort auch rasch gefunden –
Jedoch er weiß, nach drei, vier Stunden
Von den Mormonen keine Silbe –
Dafür fast alles von der Milbe,
Von Missisippi, Mohr und Maus:
Im ganzen “M” kennt er sich aus.
Auch was ihn sonst gekümmert nie,
Physik zum Beispiel und Chemin,
Liest er jetzt nach, es fesselt ihn:
Was ist das: Monochloramin?
“Such unter Hydrazin”, steht da.
Schon greift der Mensch zum Bande “H”
Und schlägt so eine neue Brücke
Zu ungeahntem Wissensglücke.
Jäh fällt ihm ein bei den Hormonen
Er sucht ja eigentlich: Mormonen!
Er blättert müd und überwacht:
Mann, Morpheus, Mohn und Mitternacht …
Hätt´ weiter noch geschmökert gern,
Kam bloß noch bis zum Morgenstern
Und da verneigte er sich tieg
Noch vor dem Dichter – und – entschlief.

English (tweaked machine translation):

A man, not knowing about mormon,
looks into an encyclopedia,
and would have found it there pretty soon –
but after three, four hours he knows
not a syllable about the Mormons,
but nearly everything about the Mite,
about Mississippi, Blackamoor and Mouse:
He knows about the whole “M”.
Even something he never cared about,
for instance Physics or Chemistry,
now he reads about it, and it absorbs him:
What’s that: Monochloramine?
“See also Hydracine” stands there.
The man is already grabbing for Volume “H”,
and so he creates a new bridge
to undreamt Happiness of Knowledge.
But by the “Hormones”, he remembers:
He was looking for the “Mormons”!
He shuffles the page, tired and overwaked:
Man, Morpheus, Poppy Seed, Midnight…
He would have liked to read on,
arrived only at the Morning Star,
and bowed deep
before the Poet – and – died.

I have heard this referred to as the “Wikipedia Problem” but clearly it is much, much older and more universal than that.

Posted in Navel Gazing, OldBlog | 1 Comment

TED and the Interesting People

Posted on 2009-02-17 by pappp

I’ve been watching TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talks in the background lately, and it really is inspiring to hear truly brilliant people sharing with each other. The concept of the conference (which has been meeting since 1984) is to gather the brightest people in the three named fields, and have them share their ideas in 18 minute talks. CC-Licenced recordings of the best of the talks are released online on a weekly basis after the conference for the public to watch, this year’s are just starting to pop up.

Some of the standouts this year:
David Merrill: Siftables, the toy blocks that think – (person) I love physical computing, I love interesting UI design, I love embedded systems, and I love this talk. Reconfigurable smart little widgets that are aware of one another and able to interact in a natural way. This, and the other cool people it produces, makes me really think about trying to get into The MIT Media Lab for a Ph.D when the time comes. I had a promising conversation with a faculty member here at UK that knows people there, and it sounds believable that I would have a chance. (To self-plug, over on my Ideas Page, one of the works in progress is a dumber, simpler, hobbyist-accessible version of the same idea.)

Elizabeth Gilbert: A different way to think about creative genius — (person) I like her thesis that our culture has trouble dealing with genius, exhibited in the classic image of the tortured artist; I don’t like her idea that we should go back to the Greco-Roman idea that inspiration is external to the individual as a means to cope. As a writer, she is unsurprisingly an EXCELLENT speaker.

Some old favorites:
Anderson (Wired): Technology’s Long Tail – A good overview of the normal life-cycle of tech.

Mark Bittman: What’s wrong with what we eat — Seriously, the standard western diet is awful, and the way it got that way is evil. I’m not a vegetarian, I don’t even eat an especially great diet (mmm meat), but I always try to THINK about what I eat, and be aware of it, top down, which includes preparing a large fraction of my own food. I also like his notes that the current wash of “organic” and “local” is bullshit. The only thing I object to is that he seems opposed to the industrialization of food production, rather than the details of our industrial system (I like the idea of a future of vat-grown animal tissue and such). The thesis “eat real food” is really hard to object to.

Richard Baraniuk: Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning — He is an AWFUL speaker, both voice and style, and his particular instance Connexions is not exactly a shining example of success here, but the idea absolutely rings true to me. Old media is, or should be, dead or dying, especially in education. To modify a cliche, the medium changes the message; the use of, and expectation for the use of media, be it music, video, or text, is fundamentally different when it is distributed in a different medium. People expect to be able to interact with electronic media, to modify it, extend, and distribute it. One of my favorite things about electronic media is that it is instantaneously, interactively searchable. To make it even better, the cost of replicating digital copies, and the physical volume of those copies, approaches zero. The only impediment to all this good stuff is the old IP system. As an exemplifying anecdote, I had to ILL the article from 2005 referenced in my last post, because the journal it was in has a 5-year embargo on full-text databases. There is no technical impediment; only “oldschool” publishers not “getting it”. This is offensive to me. The situation that know exists with “piracy” of audio and video is creeping into textbooks; hit major BitTorrent trackers and you will see lots of digitized textbooks being traded now. At the same time, the situation is largely being avoided; watch people look for information, and they no longer look to old fashioned texts, they look at projects like connexions and Wikipedia that are built to embrace the new reality instead of trying to cling to the old.

This all jives very well with my personal anecdotal theory that “Interesting People are Interesting”: that is, that in general, anyone exceptional enough to be interesting in one way, will generally be interesting (and likely exceptional) in a variety of ways. It will usually be hard to articulate exactly HOW someone is interesting in a variety of ways; interesting people will find ways to interrelate and integrate their interests until they begin to appear seamless. Try to think of the neat people you know, I bet you’ll have trouble coming up with counterexamples.

Posted in Entertainment, General, Navel Gazing, OldBlog | Tagged | 2 Comments