Tag Archives: programming

2009.08.12

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videos,paranoia

  • Here and here – videos from Prof. James Duane and Officer George Bruch about why talking to the police is almost never a good idea.

software

  • omploader – A place to upload files. It can also be done with a firefox extension or in a script.
  • Paperback, from the OllyDbg guy. This lets you store data on paper (about 500 KB for A4 at 600 DPI).

web

  • HTML5 Canvas Experiment – Perhaps good for comparing different Javascript engines. It chokes on Firefox 3.5 on my Atom 330, but works well on 3.6.
  • drop.io – A file sharing site which Wired mentioned because of its ability to set an expiration date on any file you upload. It also appears to have a collection of other, much cooler features for collaboration.

programming,linux

  • Bash cures cancer – Some helpful stuff for commandline Unix/Linux. It seems to have not been updated in about a year though.
  • Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! – My friend Lincoln showed me this. It’s a decent Haskell tutorial with some very oddball illustrations.
  • How to Design Programs – A book, freely available online, which teaches software design using Scheme (or is it DrScheme?)
    • How to Design Worlds: Interactive Programming in DrScheme – Another freely available book from the same guys that made HtDP, but this one is about writing interactive applications using pure functional programming.

games

  • Kongregate – A large collection of rather addictive online Flash games.

books

  • The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto; the full text is readable for free online. I haven’t read it, I just noted the link, so I can neither agree nor disagree with the contents of it.
  • Wishcraft by Barbara Sher; I came across this motivational book from Havi Brooks. I haven’t read this either, but I should at some point. It’s free as a series of PDFs.

food

hippie

something

2009.07.21

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local,links

  • Queen City Discovery – An interesting blog about urban exploration in Cincinnati that some guys in Hive13 told me about
  • Amidst a pile of other new-age and holistic bullshit in some free magazine, I miraculously discovered an ad for the “Uptown Farmer’s Market” at Garden Park – 3581 W. Galbraith Road, Fridays 12-7, Saturdays 10-2, 513-238-6616

programming

  • MapReduce – I don’t care what your opinion of MapReduce is or how much it might suck, I am just putting this here so I will encounter it later and remember that it exists.
  • Epigrams on Programming from Alan Perlis – Written in 1982 but still pretty true.

software

video,books

games

  • Balance of Power – A geopolitics game by Chris Crawford (also with his interesting essay/article here).

lit,historical

  • We the People Network – I was searching for an image of the Declaration of Independence here and discovered they have rather high-resolution scans (like, the Declaration is 63 megapixels) of that and many other historical documents too.

2009.06.14

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technobabble,links

apps,linux

editor,cheatsheet

programming,scheme

hack,wii

  • http://www.smoothboard.net/ – Interesting thing from my friend Lincoln. It uses a Wii remote, IR transmitter, and PC (with Bluetooth) to “Transform your screen into a user-friendly interactive whiteboard with Smoothboard.”

2008.09.26 – 2008.11.09, really overdue stuff

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Linux

Graphics

Networking

  • A Look at NoMachine NX – I discovered NX performs better for remote access than anything else I’ve tried (i.e. RDP, X11, VNC, and straight SSH+screen if you happen to need GUI), particularly over slow links. Unfortunately, it doesn’t handle links with 93% packet loss very well.
  • Quagga Routing Suite – GPLed routing software for IPv4/IPv6 that handles a number of routing-related protocols (a list of them is here)
  • Yersinia – network tool designed to take advantage of some weaknesses in different network protocols… I haven’t used this but the guys from cinci2600 did a presentation with it
  • Etherboot/gPXE booting – an open source network bootloader, providing a direct replacement for many proprietary PXE ROMs. I have yet to try this.
  • LTSP, Linux Terminal Server Project – adds thin-client support to Linux servers, so thin clients or dumpster PCs can be used for something useful within a school or business.

Programming/general computer stuff

  • “Roles Before Objects” by Doug Lea – some sort of pattern for software development, particularly for “organizing activities that separate object-independent from object-dependent matters”
  • “10 Amazingly Alternative Operating Systems etc.” – maybe overly prophetic and lofty, but a good article nonetheless
  • Twibright Optar – OPTical ARchiver, a codec for encoding data on paper; it gets about 200 KB per page at 200 DPI which is reliable for most paper, and contains some pretty heavy error correction. This might be neat for long-term archival purposes of smaller data.

Other projects

  • MAgtALo (MultiAgent Argumentation, Logic and Opinion) – a prototype tool for virtual round-table meetings. I don’t really know much about this. I just read about it in some IEEE publication I found on the ground.
  • LibriVox – free audiobooks from the public domain
  • Geographic British Isles – a project aiming to collect geographically representative photographs of every square kilometer of Great Britain and Ireland

Electricity

  • “High Voltage Sparks and Arcs” – My friend Mark found this, and it has a collection of videos and photos of some pretty spectacular incidents at high voltages. The only casualties are machines, if you are worried.
  • How Transistors REALLY Work, from William Beaty who is annoyed at the way many textbooks teach transistors to students

Music

  • Lunar – an artist Jeremy likes, self-described as “An eclectic blend of electronica, rock, dance, ambient, drum ‘n’ bass and classical.” They have two albums available for free download as of now.

Tinfoil hat stuff

  • Money Masters: How International Bankers Gained Control of America (Google Video link)… I don’t know what to think of this, but I did watch it.
  • Maltego: “Maltego is an open source intelligence and forensics application. It allows for the mining and gathering of information as well as the representation of this information in a meaningful way.”

Economics of the non-tinfoil-hat variety

  • “Where to put your money if it’s just sitting in a checking account”
  • ABSEL – Association for Business Simulation and Experiential Learning; “professional association whose purpose is to develop and promote the use of experiential techniques and simulations in the field of business education and development”
  • M.U.L.E. – an early video game that was praised for its elements of economic simulation
  • The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse, by Gregg Easterbrook (Amazon link)

Other stuff

  • Anti-pattern – something that distinguishes itself from a conventional bad idea or bad practice in a particular way; “Some repeated pattern of action, process or structure that initially appears to be beneficial, but ultimately produces more bad consequences than beneficial results.”

Continue reading →

2008.07.26 – 2008.08.03 stuff

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Music

Food

  • The Black Beast – my friend Jessica made this flourless cake and it’s pretty supremely awesome

Research

Political & hippie stuff

Programming & computerish crap

  • Papers about Self and OO – I haven’t read any of these, but I should
  • Bad Mojo – some pretty well-reviewed adventure/puzzle game from 1996 which happens to run on DOS/Windows/Mac
  • The not-so-short introduction to LaTeX 2e – PDF about LaTeX
  • Kile – integrated LaTeX environment
  • XeTeX – a merging of TeX with Unicode and modern font technologies
  • Apache FOP – “print formatter driven by XSL formatting objects (XSL-FO) and an output independent formatter.” from the Apache XML Graphics Project
  • Hercules 390 – The Hercules System/370, ESA/390, and z/Architecture Emulator… incidentally, TRON Guy is in charge of the project
  • The LiveCD List from FrozenTech – Table of info about Linux distros available as LiveCDs
  • INSERT – the Inside Security Rescue Toolkit, a Linux distro that comes with various tools for rescue and recovery; it’s a 60 MB download so it works well as a LiveCD or USB-stick
  • Open64 – the Open Research Compiler, used originally on Itanium and now on Nvidia CUDA; it is under GPL
  • BrookGPU – “Brook for GPUs is a compiler and runtime implementation of the Brook stream program language for modern graphics hardware.”
  • OpenCL – “a language for programming heterogeneous data and task parallel computing across GPUs and CPUs.”; initial implementation is on LLVM (Low Level Virtual Machine) and clang

Electronics

  • LM317 – According to Cowclops, this variable linear voltage regulator can be a good way to limit current and voltage for charging an SLA.
  • JOP: A Tiny Java Processor – A hardware implementation of the Java Virtual Machine; it can be put onto a low-cost FPGA, so the site claims, with the VHDL source (which is GPLed)
  • OpenPCD – Open RFID Reader for 13.56 MHz; site provides the schematic, PCB layout, Gerber files, bill of material, and some software
  • OPEX – A “Unique Operating System” for the AVR microcontroller
  • Use, Abuse, and Misuse of Amplifiers by Bob Pease – online seminar from National Semiconductor (or “webinar” if you prefer… which I don’t); beware, page is quite large
  • Operational amplifier usage (also from National Semiconductor)… handy for stuff to do with op amps.

WTF?

2008.06.18 – 2008.07.09, really overdue notes

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Hardware

  • http://www.ucapps.de/ – “Non-commercial DIY Projects for MIDI Hardware Geeks”
  • http://midibox.org/ – Looks like a blog about various other MIDI-related DIY projects
  • Nvidia Tegra -  “features a GPU, media processor, system memory, peripherals and a CPU all in one ultra-low power chip, smaller than a US dime (10-cent piece).”
  • Ethernet Mini Board

Geek Articles/Software

Hippie Stuff

  • MoBo Bicycle Coop – “The MoBo Bicycle Co-op is a non-profit, volunteer-run collective dedicated to providing every member of the Tri-State area access to bicycles, maintenance, and education.” (also Myspace site)
  • AskWish -
  • Hegelian dialectic – remind me to read this in detail and find why it pertains to politics

Hippie Geek Stuff

  • Owner-free Filesystem – “distributed filesystem in which everything is stored in reference to randomized data blocks” and bound to be soon pissing off a legal system near you
  • What Colour are your bits? – relevant to intellectual property somehow but I haven’t read it yet.
  • Traffic Waves – “sometimes one driver can vastly improve traffic.”
  • “Big and Bad” – Malcolm Gladwell’s opinions of SUVs and their marketing. (same Malcolm Gladwell who wrote Tipping Point though I didn’t make this connection when I read the article)

Food

2008.06.07 – 2008.06.17, yay notes

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Potentially political

  • Meetup – find groups of a given topic or interest, near whatever location you give… or “Get on the Internet to get off the Internet
  • Legal Rights of Photographers by Andrew Kantor  (or this PDF) – very informative and helpful to know
  • The Photographer’s Right flyer by Bert P. Krages II, which is actually what I was trying to find when I found the link from Andrew Kanto
  • “The Sum of Our Days: A Memoir” by Isabel Allende (Amazon)
  • Local indie band, “Bad Veins” – my friend Carolyn wrote their name down a few years ago and told me to check the band out, and I stuck the piece of paper in a folder and forgot about it… then coincidentally when I finally looked them up online, realized I had already read an article about them months prior in Citybeat

Pretty obviously political

  • The Ruckus Society – “provides environmental, human rights, and social justice organizers with the tools, training, and support needed to achieve their goals.”
  • Free Press – nonpartisan organization working for media reform
  • “The New Media Monopoly” by Ben H. Bagdikian (Amazon)
  • Daily Kos – “State of the Nation”,

Technology/electronics

  • Arduino – “an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software.” Can be purchased pre-assembled or built by hand; software and CAD files are available at the site.
  • FreeIO – “Free Hardware Design Resources for the Free Software Community” though looks slightly dead
  • Gallium3D – “Tungsten Graphics’ new architecture for building 3D graphics drivers.”; only interesting to me because it might mean better Linux drivers for 3D graphics cards.
  • BAZIX One Chip MSX – apparently implements some computer called the MSX, and does it using an Altera FPGA… I don’t know
  • Hypercomputing HC-62 – just some ridiculously fast computer with 36 GB of RAM and eleven FPGAs
  • Holografika – true 3D holographic display, visible with naked eye, so the site claims (and has videos to show)
  • Astak Mentor ebook reader – epaper-based, claimed to get 8000 pages per charge, support TXT, PDF, RTF, HTML, on a WinCE-based OS, with SD expansion card and wireless; there is a 5″ version (800×600) should be $200, 9.7″ (1280×825) for $350. Should be available Real Soon Now(tm).
  • iRex iLiad looks to have better specs and it is Linux-based, however it’s also $600-$700 (but it’s actually for sale)
  • Graphics Gems by Andrew Glassner – a set of books I should probably read eventually so I stop reinventing the wheel every time I program anything

Software

  • serdisplib – library to drive serial displays with built-in controllers (like the Optrex LCDs I messed around with at work)
  • ACML (AMD Core Math Library) – heavily optimized routines for LAPACK, BLAS, FFT, transcendental & random number generation, utilizing SIMD instructions available on AMD CPU
  • Similar – SIMDx86 – optimized SIMD library for x86 (I don’t think it does x86-64)
  • FBReader – ebook reader for Linux/Windows, intended for portable devices. Handles Plucker which I found really useful on Palm
  • sdtcon – “Simple and secure remote access over SSH… provides easy to configure, easy to use, secure remote and out of band access to systems and devices inside a private LAN or management network.”; works via SSH and Java on Linux/Windows
  • FreeRTOS – free, portable, open source, mini realtime kernel for embedded systems, like ARM7, ARM9, Cortex-M3, MSP430, MicroBlaze
  • DjVu – digital document format with very high compression and quality for scanned documents or photographs… too bad it’s not nearly as well-supported as JPEG and other raster formats, lossy or otherwise
  • C optimisation tutorial – from 1998 but still pretty relevant
  • DSP DesignLine – lots of useful articles and technical papers about programming for DSPs (such as this one about Programming and Optimizing C Code)

Notes 2008.06.01 – 2008.06.07

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Technical stuff

  • Red Hill Technology – decent articles pertaining a lot to old x86 hardware
  • TRIPS (utexas again) – “developing a new class of technology-scalable, power efficient, high-performance microprocessor architectures called EDGE (Explicit Data Graph Execution) architectures.” and I’ve got at least one technical paper that’s been on my computer for over a year that I’ve put off reading somehow

Programs and stuff

  • Xournal – ” Xournal is an application for notetaking, sketching, keeping a journal using a stylus.”; open source, of course, and maybe I can make it run on my Jornada
  • OPIE - Open Palmtop Integrated Environment… some sort of interface for smaller devices; I tried it on my Jornada and found it uselessly slow, but kinda neat
  • GPE – GPE Palmtop Environment, which might be a better option than OPI
  • BlenderCAD – “a Blender script created with the aim of expand the functionality of Blender, so that it could be used for the Computer Aided Drawing.” …haven’t tried it but it might be worth it
  • GNU Radio – the GNU software radio; can be combined with minimal hardware (like the USRP) “allows the construction of radios where the actual waveforms transmitted and received are defined by software,” which is probably a good way to totally piss off the FCC

Books

  • “Tainting Evidence: Inside The Scandals At The FBI Crime Lab” by JF Kelly and PK Wearne (Amazon)
  • “Confessions of a Record Producer – How to Survive the Scams and Shams of the Music Business” by Moses Avalon (Amazon)
  • “Rainbow Painting: A Collection of Miscellaneous Aspects of Development and Completion” by Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche (Amazon) – was recommended very highly by a program I listened to, related to Buddhism and meditation

Political

  • The Memory Hole [rescuing knowledge, freeing information] – “The Memory Hole exists to preserve and spread material that is in danger of being lost, is hard to find, or is not widely known…. The emphasis is on material that exposes things that we’re not supposed to know (or that we’re supposed to forget).”
  • Cryptome – “Cryptome welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance – open, secret and classified documents — but not limited to those.”

Old-tattered-notebook-from-1999 notes

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So, these are probably more useful here than sitting in a dusty binder…

2003.07

  • “Common Lisp, Typing, and Mathematics” by Francis Sergereart – good (long) paper about one application of Common Lisp; Postscript here
  • “Getting Started With LaTeX”, David R. Wilkins – here

2004.07

  • AT&T Graphviz – very very useful program for visualization of directed and undirected graphs

2005.04

  • Croquet (from the Croquet Project, not to be confused with the Croquet Consortium) – by my description, an attempt to extend the original 2-dimensional paradigm for a GUI into 3 dimensions; by their description, “Croquet is a powerful new open source software development environment and software infrastructure for creating and deploying deeply collaborative multi-user online applications and metaverses on and across multiple operating systems and devices.”… I think it’s an interesting project, anyhow. Check out some of the papers Alan Kay helped write, and look at some of the videos.

2005.??

  • JGraph – some sort of graphing and visualization software, open-source and written in Java
  • Ploticus – more graphing and visualization, not as shiny as JGraph, but not Java either; apparently good for on-the-fly graph generation, for websites and such
  • TeXmacs – ” GNU TeXmacs is a free wysiwyw (what you see is what you want) editing platform with special features for scientists.”… it puts Mathematica’s rendering to shame.

2005.08.23

  • Very useful link for using matrices in POV-Ray
  • Media and Particle Systems in POV-Ray, here
  • Photons & caustics in POV-Ray, here

2006.12.11

  • “Weaving the Web”, Tim Berners-Lee – “The original design and ultimate destiny of the World Wide Web, by its inventor.”

2006.12.15

  • Grasshopper Enterprises, “Borders of science, boundaries of imagination,” might be complete and total bullshit, but the page has some interesting things on lucid dreaming and other workings of the mind

2007.04.19

  • cachegrind – cache profiler, part of the valgrind suite, designed to pinpoint cache misses in code
  • I don’t know why, but I wrote down “BDI2000 JTAG”, maybe because the Abatron BDI-2000 can be used to debug the Linux kernel via JTAG?

2007.04.26

  • “The Grand Inquisitor” from “The Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor Dostoevsky  -  I think I’m supposed to read this because I don’t know why else I’d have written it down.

2007.11.02

2008.05.26

20 pages of scrap notes, 2008.05.19-05.23

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I astound myself by how many pages of scrap notes I accumulate over 5 days, just during my down time at work.

2008.05.19

  • “Exposing the Modern Racist Paradigm,” extremely long page here
  • Someone’s opinions on why the Amiga is awesome, here . . . meaningful to me because I haven’t used an Amiga
  • Simputer – “self-contained, open hardware handheld computer, designed for use in environments where computing devices such as personal computers are deemed inappropriate.” (quoth wikipedia)… this looks like a project that didn’t do as well as expected and is rather old right now, but it looks interesting anyhow.
  • Someone’s blog about the memristor, and why it’s the 4th circuit element, and why he thinks it’s useful/revolutionary.
  • Reversible computing . . . worthy of consideration

2008.05.20

  • Intel Atom D945GCLF motherboard from Tranquil PC Ltd. – $82 for motherboard with 1.60 GHz Atom 230; looks like a pretty good deal
  • OLPC XO 2.0 – new version of the XO, which “isn’t really a laptop at all but a double-screened, fold-up electronic book”, and which Negroponte has a goal of being producing for $75 each.
  • Pen Computing – good resource on mobile/handheld/rugged computing products

2008.05.21

  • Lulu – Self publishing service; allows you to publish (as in, actual physical books that can be purchased online) with no setup fees. You keep 80% of creator revenue on sales, and you keep the copyrights to the material.
  • Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy – because someone’s pissed about how people constantly mangle what Adam Smith said

2008.05.22

  • Digilent Inc. – Offers some inexpensive starter boards with Xilinx Spartan FPGAs or Atmel AVR microcontrollers
  • Xtreme Data, Inc. – “Database Analytics Appliance able to sustain 1TB/min of SQL processing”… well, that’s kinda boring, but I suppose it does live up to the name, and somehow accomplishes this with FPGAs.
  • DRC Computer Corporation – offers Reconfigurable Processor Unit which fits into an AMD Opteron socket on a multiway board, allowing it to directly connect to its bus and access memory, and offload CPU-intensive software routines to hardware; they use Xilinx FPGAs for this.
  • Project VGA – “Low Budget, Open Source, VGA Compatible video card”
  • FPGA Central – Good resource for FPGA links

2008.05.23

  • Llamasoft Blog – From the maker of one of my favorite games, Llamatron. He has written some interesting software.
  • JavaSpaces – distributed shared memory in Java, along with other stuff, and part of Jini from Sun. This could be neat if I actually used Java.
  • VX32 – “virtual extension environment” for x86; one can run x86 apps in this for a secure, isolated environment in which they are limited in what they are allowed to do.
  • ACL2 (Applicative Common Lisp) – “both a programming language in which you can model computer systems and a tool to help you prove properties of those models,” and part of the Boyer-Moore family of theorem provers