balls out

My Travels

2010-02-18T06:10:00.002-05:00

It is 11:10 AM in London Heathrow Airport. My plane from JFK landed at 7:30 AM, but my next flight to Johannesburg, South Africa takes off at 5:40 PM. I will have yet another (2.5 hour) lay-over in Johannesburg before taking off to Maputo, Mozambique. I will be traveling in Mozambique and South Africa until March 11, when I will head to Israel on an open-ended stay.

With all this lay-over time, I am reading travel guides and warnings about potential dangers in Mozambique. In addition to the risk of Malaria, some 2 to 3 million landmines were left in the ground after the civil war ended in 1992. This has been a major impediment to the development of the country's economy, since much of the arable land was covered in mines. According to a UN report (which seems to be from around 1997) about 20 people were victims of landmines in Mozambique every month. De-mining operations are slow and costly, but it seems that after many years of removal efforts there were still several hundred thousand landmines left in the ground as of 2000. A recent report indicates that the Mozambique government hopes to have the country landmine-free by 2014.

Last week in Israel, two children were injured by a landmine while hiking in the Golan heights: an 11 year old boy had his leg amputated and his 12 year old sister was injured by shrapnel from the explosion. Apparently, Benjamin Netanyahu called the boy to wish him well. During a Birthright trip to the Golan Heights in Israel, I remember taking a Jeep ride along a road on a hill spotted with what were formerly Syrian bunkers overlooking the Galilee. Along the sides of the road was a wire fence with a sign warning of landmines in the poppy fields beside the road (a twisted joke goes: the Arabic text reads "picnic area").

In other news (on the TV here in Heathrow), the BBC shows the Israeli Ambassador in London, Ron Prosor summoned to the Foreign Office over the recent assassination of Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai. The Dubai police recently revealed that the assassins used forged British passports with the names of six British ex-pats.

Israel, of course, does not confirm or deny anything, but this wouldn't be the first time Israeli spies used forged passports in an assassination. In 1997, two Mossad agents with orders from Netanyahu, entered Jordan with forged Canadian passports and were caught after injecting a neuro-toxin into the ear of Khaled Mashal. After the botched attack, Canada recalled its Israeli ambassador.

In order to secure the release of the two captured Mossad Agents, Israel released Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin from prison. In 2003, after Yassin survived a F-16 bombing he made a statement: "Days will prove that the assassination policy will not finish the Hamas. Hamas leaders wish to be martyrs and are not scared of death. Jihad will continue and the resistance will continue until we have victory, or we will be martyrs."

Yassin was assassinated by a helicopter attack in 2004.

Moon-Base (A Poem for the Escalation of War)

2009-12-02T05:32:00.002-05:00

they throw rocks, and hurl rockets
they take the money from our pockets;
and pay for war.
they make bombs, and then explode them;
they shoot guns, and then reload them;
and they shoot more.

they build walls, and they destroy them;
they train men, and then deploy them
to bleed in war.
they will fight, and they will kill;
and they will die as they fulfill
the creed of war.

the human race
is running out of space
let's go to outer-space
and build a moon-base.

turn our missiles into spaceships;
we must start leaving soon.
turn our battlefields into gardens;
we will be hungry on the moon!

we can build cannons on the moon-ground
when we lose our moral high-ground;
we will have strategic high-ground,
to launch projectiles earth-bound.

ready, aim, fire!
leave it to gravity
to provide the energy
for sweet victory.

There is No State Solution; There is a No-State Solution

2009-01-27T02:32:00.013-05:00

Hi, I am Amir. I am 24 years old and I am a designer of electronic systems that control uranium fission reactions. I think there are controversial people in Iran who can copy these first two sentences, but I am not an Amir of Iran. I am Amir of the Desert, Negev, and I am an American: Ben Franklin is my homeboy. Happenstance allows this Amir to work on nuclear fission reactors without much fear of politically inspired death from above.

I'm going to Israel in two months. This year, I hope that I will not be attacked by rockets as I visit my grandparents.

This is a nearly universal human sentiment. Nearly, for I do not doubt the existence of those who yearn for their chance to explode. And despite the persistence of those exceptions, all humans should protest the notion that it is acceptable to cause violence for other humans. The rational voice must also contradict the voice of those who equivocate for violence. It is unacceptable to transform people into meat, numbers or rhetorical devices like "collateral damage," "human shields," "friendly fire," and especially "intended targets" for it is the intent of violence we should seek to subvert with utmost urgency.

When empathy is lost, we divide ourselves into us and them and ignore justice. I read about "us versus them" and how that plays out: those who do not study the Bible are doomed to repeat it.

Before I was a teenager (before the Second Intifada and before Oslo) there were Palestinians from Gaza working among Jews in the Negev Kibbutzim, but now the Arabs are not let out of Gaza. A Thai woman now milks the cows on my grandfather's kibbutz. When you hear about traumatized workers after a Qassam attack turns a cow into hamburger, there is a 60% chance those workers were from Thailand.

There is nothing quite like sitting in your grandmother's kitchen and hearing explosions in the background. When you hear the boom, everyone's eyes look somewhere else. It's a somewhere that is not a place in the room, but a place in your head where you are calculating how far away that was.

I am usually in America, and I cannot hear the explosions.

When I am in the Negev, I hear the booms and I realize that I am an intended target of the TNT. I start thinking about how to mix enough sugar and potassium nitrate to send the pieces of the rocket back. Trebuchet is the sport of engineers, after all. And I recycle. At MIT, I met people who build guidance systems, fly remote control aircraft, fabricate semiconductors, set off large redox reactions (for entertainment value), and program robots that visually approximate Terminator. I could be a much more prolific terrorist than the people attacking me.

And then I remember Isaiah. Lo Yisa Goy. Rockets don't have a good plough-share-esque poetic substitute and we should probably research the use of scramjets to reach orbital velocity with higher specific impulse, but I digress. If the fates conspire for me to die in a rocket explosion, let it be in pursuit of the lunar surface, and not from the lunacy of my neighbours.

In America, Arabs and Israelis celebrate together the "weirdness" of their ethnic names. I love that America has a president named Barrack Hussein Obama (though I wrote in Ron Paul). Perhaps our new King will comprehend that drawing lines for Israel and Palestine will not solve the racial divide between Jews and Arabs. There is folly in forging state solutions to racism problems. The Western powers that toot the horns of a two-state solution are like the Chinese observing the 1992 riots in LA and suggesting to segregate California so that the Black people and the White people have their own separate (but equal) states. There is no state solution to racism.

There is a no-state solution: we have to stop segregating our populations as though the separation will breed peace and not resentment. We need to form joint-ventures to establish our interconnectedness and courts to provide equality before common law. We are sojourners of the ground on which we stand. We must muzzle the dogs of war that claim to own the dirt upon which they leave their droppings. A righteous man once built a raft to survive the wrath of the Creator, indeed we need to build much bigger rockets if we are to become as numerous as the stars.

Access Control to Scholarly Articles

2008-11-26T23:51:00.004-05:00

I get really annoyed when I search Google for something and find abstracts and titles of articles in scientific journals and then find that the actual document sits behind access controls.

Since I'm an MITer, I can usually access these documents by pushing a few extra buttons. Certainly, I always know someone who has access to the document and can probably explain it to me.

It occurs to me that anyone interested in reading these types of articles can probably access it anyway.

Why are we so obnoxious about putting passwords and payments in the way? Won't it just be more productive for everyone if we removed these access controls?

And what about the people who can't access these articles for lack of money? Why should we deprive those without means something which would cost nothing to give freely?

There is something greatly broken in modern culture.

compile python 2.5 cjson 1.0.5 in Windows XP

2008-10-22T12:41:00.003-04:00

If you're trying to build cjson in Windows XP you might have seen this bug (in addition to the usual setuptools package, you'll need the mingw compiler):

C:\Python25\python-cjson-1.0.5>python setup.py build
running build
running build_ext
building 'cjson' extension
creating build\temp.win32-2.5
creating build\temp.win32-2.5\Release
c:\mingw\bin\gcc.exe -mno-cygwin -mdll -O -Wall -DMODULE_VERSION="1.0.5" -IC:\Py
thon25\include -IC:\Python25\PC -c cjson.c -o build\temp.win32-2.5\Release\cjson
.o
cjson.c:1153:50: too many decimal points in number
error: command 'gcc' failed with exit status 1

I worked around this bug by changing the MODULE_VERSION token on line 1153 of cjson.c to "1.0.5" (in quotes). Now "python setup.py install" works and the resulting modules passes the jsontests.py

X-Prize Alternative Energy Forum at MIT

2008-09-12T12:17:00.003-04:00

On Wednesday, I went to the X Prize Alternative Energy Forum at MIT to hear Ray Kurzweil, George Church, and Saul Griffith present on "What I Would Advise the Next President" with respect to alternative energy policy. After the discussion, a $25,000 X-Prize was announced for making a 2 minute YouTube video with your "Crazy Green Idea."

Videos and slides of the presentation will be posted on the X-Prize blog-site soon.

Dr. Kurzweil presented the law of accelerating returns and demonstrated that solar power is a similar technology. He presented an interesting argument that when technologies becoming "information technologies" they switch from a process of linear growth one of geometric growth. Linear technological process is usually the result of trial and error (hypothesize and test) whereas a geometric information technology growth is fueled by simulation and process optimization. He observes that nanotechnology and genetics are pushing medicine into the realm of "information technology" in the same way that advanced material processes and software simulation and optimizations have enabled Moore's law.

Dr. Kurzweil suggested that at current growth rates, solar power technology will cross a critical economic boundary (making it not just feasible, but pragmatic) in 5 years that will trigger massive solar power adoption electricity generation. I think that accelerated returns are largely demand-driven: sale quantities drive down marginal costs and provides capital for research and improved manufacturing infrastructure so that even lower cost items can further increase sale quantities in a feedback loop.

George Church discussed biofuels and that the problem of transporting and storing electricity needs to be considered in addition simply generating it. The benefits of biofuels is the energy per weight capacity of combustible chemical storage an order of magnitde higher than solid state capacitors or chemical electric batteries. Thus despite the lower percentage yield in transforming sunlight into stored power, biofuels make more sense in applications like airplane fuel or automobiles where weight is a primary factor of efficiency.

Dr. Griffith made an important point that "economic practicality" is not the same thing as "technically necessary." His presentation was focused on the technical scale of the problem: In order to practically generate enough electricity to supply humanity we would have to fill an area the size of Wyoming with Solar panels. Transforming the area of Wyoming into a solar farm would require a 1000 square meters a second for 8 years (Google for Wyoming Area to get 97818). He also mentioned that the practical energy plan needs to consider that manufacturing and distributing a solar panel can consume several months of the output that it generates. For example: it is not energetically practical to manufacture small wind turbine.

After the talks X-Prize co-founder Peter Diamandis announced a $25,000 prize for presenting your "Crazy Green Idea" on YouTube. My crazy green idea is to develop a green-power von Neumann machine that is capable of forging a copy of itself and providing power from the sun: a fresnel lens solar forge that is capable of making fresnel lenses for solar forges... A fully green power self-replicator will reduce the environmental impact of developing green power systems and enable low-cost geometric expansion.

solar energy and tax incentives

2008-07-30T17:25:00.003-04:00

As a libertarian I oppose subsidies, tax incentives and economic protectionism in general.

I also live in a reality with oil and coal subsidies, massive credit bailouts, trillion-dollar wars and mathematically disinclined policy-makers in generally. I recognize the fundamental difficulty in achieving returns to scale in a market dominated by monopolized energy providers and I understand the risk model associated with solar investments.

So when the senate votes against extending tax incentives for solar and wind power investments a little piece of me has a moral conflict. I think local policy decisions born from city and state governments will be more effective at spawning a market for solar installations, but the federal government has demonstrated a decided lack of leadership in sane energy policy. I cringe as I hear the call for more drilling. I guess to a screwdriver everything looks like a screw, only it's all of us who are getting screwed. Continuing at a 30% CAGR, solar panel production will generate around $150B between now and 2012. Unless the Senate wants this production capacity to be developed in China, they aught to reconsider the tax incentives on capital investment.

I've done a ton of data analysis on solar output, panel production and energy price data provided by DOE and NREL. I know that solar panels need to have a 1.5x-4x multiplier to make it an attractive investment as a 12 year bond (depending on where you live).

What produces this multiplier? Tax incentives for putting your roof to solar power and for the bank for giving you a mortgage on the panel. Panel production at lower price. Panels with greater efficiency. Grid energy costs rising. The combination of these factors will produce the perfect storm for solar technology. The great thing is that all of these things are happening. It is possible to achieve this multiplier in the short run with policy incentives and in the long run when returns to scale reach the most efficient thin-film technologies.

Lower cost panel production is the big one. This is where returns to scale matter. Nanosolar is investing in prodution plants to produce 1 Giga-watts of panel capacity per year. They recently closed $75M in funding matched by $25M in government incentives. They haven't reported the conversion efficiency and cost per watt at their claimed production capacity, but the ink-jet deposition methods they are promoting will be a major factor behind the solar boom.

According to the DOE. the US consumed 3.3 Terawatt-years last year so it will take 3300 years at 1 GW of panels per year production rate to get to where we need to be. Luckily, low cost solar power is going to be massively profitable, so we should be able to replicate 1 GW production capacity 256 times over in 8 years if we double it every year. It should be possible to achieve a majority solar infrastructure by 2020 if we start going balls out now.

the rising price of oil -- the falling value of the dollar

2008-06-18T17:19:00.003-04:00

To the casual observer, the price of oil has climbed ridiculously over the past couple years.

Barrack Obama is calling for "windfall profit taxes" on the oil companies. By some magic of microeconomics, he believes increasing the costs of the oil companies will decrease oil prices. At the same time giving that money to congress and hence "back to the people" will somehow offset the burden these high prices of oil have had on the American public.

It's exactly this sort of economic nonsense that epitomizes the Democratic wealth-transfer mindset. If the profit margins of the oil companies are to remain fixed at 7.5%, then increasing their tax burdens will only drive up the price of gasoline.

The really sad thing is people think that gas is getting more expensive instead of realizing that the dollar is losing value.

Chairman of Intel at MIT

2008-02-21T10:36:00.002-05:00

Craig Barrett, former CEO and current Chairman of Intel came to talk to MIT yesterday.

Perhaps his most memorable line went something like: "whenever i say petaflop i feel like i'm talking about pornography"

Considering the room was full of nerds, I think his talk wasn't technical enough. It's reassuring to know that Intel expects MOS structures to scale down to 32 nm and below and that they use hafnium for gate dielectrics. But he mentioned that some new switching technology will be necessary to take us beyond where Intel's current vision takes us. He also seemed enthusiastic about photonic circuits using optical waveguides for signal transmission.

I would have liked to ask him about how Intel responded to AMD's open bus standards and whether Intel sees tighter integration with co-processors as a key part of the future of computing. Perhaps some other time.

Someone asked what we could do to improve Washington to direct national resources towards science education and technology development. He said engineers need to run for office. I think no one would vote for us because we're too nerdy.

superbowl

2008-02-04T12:19:00.000-05:00

patriots lost. i know. i'm at a loss for words too.

Google Docs still doesn't support OOXML?

2007-09-25T14:13:00.000-04:00

Dear Google,

It's hard to believe that with billions of dollars in your accounts you still can't pay someone to write a 10 line converter for your online docs to load the new MS docx file format.

Here's the simple Python code you need to convert a file from MS Word 2007 to the old doc format. You must run this on a server that has Word and can load the docx format. Please get someone to do this soon.

from win32com.client import Dispatch
infilename = "C:\\foobar.docx"
outfilename = "C:\\foobar.doc"
word = Dispatch("Word.Application")
file = word.Documents.Open(infilename)
file.SaveAs(FileName=outfilename,FileFormat=0)

#the output file can now be imported into Google docs
#FileFormat = 0 is from the 'wdFormatDocument' entry win32com.client.constants

Blinking LEDs

2007-09-24T02:06:00.000-04:00

An Israeli said to me that the US as a nation is two points stupider as a result of the incident at Logan Airport involving a sophomore at MIT who went to Logan wearing a circuit-board with blinking-LED name tag and got arrested for carrying a hoax device. Anyway, this past week was "everyone make fun of the nerds" week across the media--Boston area especially. Last year I read about a Harvard student getting arrested for running around naked on acid last year (and why you shouldn't sell to Harvard kids). They must have better media control over there.

As the voice of MIT, Phillip Clay is quoted in the Tech:

“We all have a responsibility not to cause alarm and to be mindful of security requirements.”

This sounds straight out of 1984. The problem with security in America is that we are creating annoyances instead of security requirements and they are marginally effective at thwarting any seriously willing attacker. The reflection we should have to towards this incident is that our security measures suffer from false positives. A system suffering from false positives generally means the sample data is under-fit and so is the case in the newly created TSA.

Anyhow, to emphasize my point: we of MIT should be more than mindful of security requirements. As engineers we should be critical of them and design meaningful security systems that disallow the potential catastrophe that could arise even when security officials roam our airports with machine guns with the best intentions.

In this particular incident, in the process of managing a perceived risk, the agents actually generated an increased risk to an innocent party. Unfortunately as a young government monopoly the TSA and Homeland Security in general have not settled in to best practices in risk avertment. With virtually no competition to encourage exploration of effective operational changes, we have arbitrary and annoying security practices that remain in place and are not even an effective means of averting a determined attacker.

In Israel, where suicide bombing have actually occurred with enough regularity for them to develop what we might consider "best practices," the overwhelming tendancy is to bomb markets, bars and nightclubs and so nearly all locations have armed security detail to inspect bags prior to entry. Despite the relative infrequency of airport events, airport security is not a laughing matter either (perhaps the infrequency is due to the tight security). In Tel Aviv you must stop to be inspected by security officers with M16s on the highway off-ramp leading to the airport. In the US, I have yet to experience an airport with this sort of defensive perimeter, but I assure you that the forces employed for this sort of thing, will create a means and mandate for its existence. It will not be worth its cost to liberty if this becomes the employment of our federation, despite it's effectiveness.

The current US approach to airport security is haphazard at best. If we maintain this illusion of security in exchange for pragmatic and straightforward procedures, we will find ourselves shocked that someone can manage a bomb onto a plane. The concept of federal security forces to protect us from terrorists causes my friend Ben to have a revolution in his grave.

Does this mean that MIT will now disallow blinking LED name tags at high-density public gatherings such as career fairs? What makes an airport so special?

I must be nuts because I leave a constitution in my luggage and I always bring a rubber snake when I travel! Snakes on a plane!

Microsoft's New Product Boxes

2007-08-24T04:18:00.001-04:00

I've spent the past half-hour trying to figure out how to open the box that Office 2007 came in.

Apparently I'm not the first person to have trouble with this. So if you're in the same boat as me, don't feel bad, in fact, tell the person laughing at you that a Math and EECS student at MIT just broke the packaging with a swift stomp of the foot (and yes they're laughing at me here).

The Vista Team over at Microsoft is apparently proud of this achievement. I found a "patent pending" written on the box too---microsoft probably loves printing that on their boxes. What isn't printed on the box is directions on how to open it though (apart from a sticker with the word "peel" and some useless graphic).

From the Vista blog: "Designed to be user-friendly, the new packaging is a small, hard, plastic container that’s designed to protect the software inside for life-long use." The only accurate statement in this quote is "hard, plastic container" since it's definitely not user-friendly, much larger than the a simple Jewel case, and Microsoft almost certainly isn't expecting users to receive life-long use out of any piece of their software. Life-long use cuts down on upgrade revenue when Microsoft Vista XP with Office 2011 comes out.

Once upon a time I wrote my college admission essay about my experience working at Trader Joe's watching customer after customer, day after day screw up the self-swiped credit card machines. Unlike the MS Office 2007 box, that thing actually had instructions written on the screen to explain how to use it. Though the engineer who designed it could have left it at "hello world" and it would have been equivalent.

Of course a three-year-old can use an iPhone.

I'm sure the dudes at MS probably worked hard to get this out the door, but you really need to take down your blog page praising the user-friendliness of the packaging--you're practically making Mac commercials for them. Good job on the new texture sets in Word!

Is YouTube really worth $1.65B

2006-10-16T03:45:00.000-04:00

The Google guys went and bought YouTube for $1.65B and I gotta wonder what they were thinking.

A googol is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes. Search got them that 1, will everything else hereafter be a whole bunch of zeroes? In the 90s the web boom was driven by "net business" with things like Amazon and eBay surviving the bust on their merits while ePets disappeared like a sock puppet in the dryer. The second web boom is driven by "net media" phenomena such as blogging, video and image sharing and social networking. There are more eyeballs with broadband connections and online marketting has had its rennessaince with Google leading the way.

The problem with the new media fads is that they only have value based in their popularity. Popularity is transient. There have been fads on the internet before. Google should know better than to pay a premium for control of a fad, especially in the post-apocalypse of the net-boom.

kayaks!

2006-07-07T14:29:00.000-04:00

my friend's father has built some pretty awesome kayaks. when i was down in miami over winter break, we went exploring between miami and miami beach on the prototypes. now that they've been manufactured you can purchase them off the SunFin Kayak website. they are definitely the best recreational sit-on-top kayaks on the market; great value for the price ($600).

bombs in israel

2006-07-03T14:32:00.000-04:00

both of my parents are from Israel and much of my family is there. some assholes in gaza regularly (multiple times daily) shoot rockets into the region where my grandparents live. a few rockets hit sderot when i was in the region last summer. i've been concerned about the recent escalation of violence in the area. everyone really needs to stop bombing eachother. it really doesn't accomplish much. just incites fear, hate and violence. it's not like you can bomb people into liking you. it's tactless, shitty diplomacy. Frankly every time we kill someone's father, a whole new generation will grow up with animosity. I dunno how to fix the situation, but we really need to start some communication among all the people of the region.

Ubuntu 6.06 working on Toshiba Satellite R10 Tablet PC

2006-06-29T05:33:00.000-04:00

Ubuntu 6.06 is the most functional Linux I have managed to install on my Toshiba Satellite R10 tablet PC. Wireless ethernet is working, it can read my NTFS partition (phew, since Windows doesn't want to work) and I've got the pen working as the mouse as well. I don't really have an application to test the various features of the tablet such as pressure sensitivity, the button on the pen and the eraser. I'd like to be able to read the accelerometer and the screen interrupt that gets fired when I change from laptop mode to tablet mode. The only thing I had to do to get the pen working was modify xorg.cong to change the device to /dev/ttyS4 ... it actually recognized that I had a pen device though. email me if you're trying to do this.

Before I start mucking around and writing software for a tablet (oh and I will just you wait) I'll have to figure out why Windows dies when it attempts to load Mup.sys.

Linux on a Tablet PC

2006-06-27T01:16:00.000-04:00

I live in Santa Cruz until September. Commuting every day to Xilinx in San Jose, not so bad... fun ride... wish I had a fun car :I I'm putting off my ramblings about the FPGA OS until start the term starts up again.

I'm trying to install GNU/Linux on a Toshiba Satellite R10 Tablet PC. I've run through 4 distrobutions--Debian, SuSE, Ubuntu, Fedora--in the past few days, and the closest I've come to full functionality is with Ubuntu 5.0.4. I've had trouble with the Intel PRO/Wireless 2200bg ethernet device in Fedora Core 5. I haven't been able to get any response from the pen in any distrobution, though I've discovered wacom. If you're reading this because you're trying to do something similar, pleae share your discoveries with me.

I also can't get Windows XP to load anymore--I really have no reason to want to go back, since I'd rather go forward though.

graphing application

2006-05-31T23:52:00.000-04:00

since i had the bitmap file stuff from the bifurcation diagram application i made yesterday and since i can't really move too well, i went and wrote my own function graphing application. i wrote this code in the past couple hours while watching the movie Dodgeball and doing leg excercises. i'm really amazed by Ben Stiller's versatility---i mean... Zoolander.

Here's sin(x) and sin(x)/x. It was only plotting points for a while, until i added the code to make the graphs continuous. maybe i'll add parametric equations tomorrow... it wouldn't be to much of stretch. I'd like to learn the AVI format next so I can make videos of math functions dancing around.

what i do when i'm bored

2006-05-31T01:20:00.000-04:00

so i'm really bored since my surgery. i haven't really got much of anything to do so i spend my time learning to code stuff. i've been learning to use the gimp toolkit which has been kinda fun and kinda tedious at the same time. i've gotten the hang of doing callbacks. i'll see if i can learn to do this from LISP, since i think in LISP.

i realized that GUI programming should be left to people who are good at GUI programming. i'm good at mathy theory kinda stuff so wrote some code which spits out bifurcation diagrams of a simulation of the logistic function. we model the logistic function's diffeq as x[n+1] = c*x[n]*(1 - x[n]) for various values of c the function can behave cyclically or chaotically. i am varying the value of c from 2 to 4 with x0 = .5. i darken the y coordinates (between 0 and 1) on each iteration. i iterate 50000 times on each x value or until a pixel has become entirely black (rgb=000). i put my code up here in case anyone wants to steal it. it puts out bitmap files (my code is probably a good demo of the bitmap file format for people who want to do that kind of thing. you'll notice some index swapping stuff to make the thing display correctly) feel free to email me if you've got questions. i compressed a 2000x2000 pixel version of the output and put it up here.

knee surgery

2006-05-22T22:11:00.000-04:00

I had surgery to repair my torn ACL in my right leg. A hamstring graft was used to put it back together. I'm going to be immobilized for the next few days and I'll be back on my feet soon enough. I graduate on June 9 and I move out to California on June 11. Totally psyched.

Morphware startup

2006-05-14T20:53:00.000-04:00

Morphware startup with their own platform.
QuickSilver Technology

It's always comforting to know there are others who share your vision of the future. It seems like a semiconductor company and not really a software company which means there may be room yet for some hackers to pump out the right kind of OS for these chips.

6.111 Woes

2006-05-14T05:46:00.000-04:00

"This shit is taking like 20 mins to synthesize though.. " - My friend in 6.111 in the lab at 2 am Saturday night before the lab is due.

Another Plunge

2006-05-07T22:40:00.000-04:00

I'm running Fedora Linux now because Joe said so. I installed VMware to run a Windows machine so that I could use my MIDI router (there is only a Windows driver) and my sequencing software, Unfortunately the latency from VMware makes this an unpleasant music creation environment, I will have to fix my disk partitions in order to install Windows again. I will probably just get another hard disk.

Still trying to finish up MIT. I don't have that much stuff left to do, I can't believe I'm almost there...

I've been talking with my friends about the prospects of forming a company to design a reconfigurable computer operating systems. I first have to believe that if I focus my energy on it, it could be a very successful adventure. Xilinx has started the ESL initiative to increase the transparency of targetting FPGA hardware. A proper operating system would definitely be of interest to this initiative. Heres a short-list of companies that are involved:

Xilinx - Design of FPGA chips. Also supplies EDA tools for FPGA design.
Nallatech - Supplier of FPGA hardware boards for high performance computing
Cray - The original supercomputing company. Their XD1 has FPGAs on board.
Mitrion - Platform for rapid development of FPGA computing applications
Impulse - Provider of tools to target applications written in C to FPGA
Celoxica - Provider of hardware and tools for C to FPGA
SystemCrafter - C++ to FPGA tools
BlueSpec - Boston area startup focusing on ESL tools for FPGA and ASIC design. Their system is being used by 6.375 this semester and I've heard some positive and negative grumbling from my friends in that class.

Took the Plunge

2006-05-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

After my computer was taken over by an intruder and converted into a pornography FTP, I asked my friend to make my computer run a Linux. I'm running Debian unstable and Xfce. Got dual display working on my Nvidia 5700. I'll have to figure out how to actually go through that install process on my own. I'll probably get some practice with VMware. Sadly I cannot run XP anymore, but I'll fix that up soon so that I can use my studio equipment and software again.

It's refreshing to use my computer like I know what's going on inside of it. Microsoft's operating system really does suck. It's obscene that it has such a strangle-hold on the entire world since I don't think people would have that much trouble using a free operating system.

It's been an interesting few weeks and I guess I'll note the major events for my own purposes. I finished my summer planning and I'm set to move into a place in Santa Cruz for the summer. It will be a bit of a commute to Xilinx, but it's closer to the beach. I was given a "Senior Legacy" award last week for my service to Theta Delta Chi. This evening I was initiated into Eta Kappa Nu honor society and became the "IAP chair" which means I'll have fun organizing the Project Expo next year.

Last week, I recorded a new song which is a departure from my usual trance music style. I also composed and wrote lyrics for another song, but I doubt I'll record it for a while. A voice from my youth tells me that I should abandon all my plans to develop FPGA applications and just be a musician. Maybe go on tour for a little while...

I'm going to start keeping a blog for my research. Ideally I'll read technical papers every week, write a summary and record my thoughts. If I write 5 pages a week for a year I'll have a thesis. I plan to write a good thesis that will pull together lots of ideas about reconfigurable hardware.

I definitely need to write more. I collect my thoughts when I write.

I was aware of a massive rally regarding the Sudanese genocide today. As the grandson of Holocaust survivors, I hear an extremely loud call to respond to murder and injustice and yet I feel powerless to do anything. But clearly I must be powerful enough to do something, because if I'm not then who is? Is typing in this blog doing something? I need to marinate on that one...

I like to use the vocabulary of memes as a tool to understand the way people and societies think.

I need to write more cohesive blog entries. I definitely need to sleep more.

Fun with WebApps

2006-04-11T04:08:00.001-04:00

I've been tinkering with various web programming stuff lately. It's been a while since I had worked on a web application and it was nice to get back to it. My server had become a bit outdated so I installed WAMP which is basically an easy way to install Apache, MySQL and PHP on a Windows machine.

I went and hacked out a shell by mimicking code from this site. The application there is called "WebConsole" and it got me to thinking that I should develop my FPGA development tools as WebApps. Naturally I'm working to implement the entire system in Scheme, so I looked back on the old XML-RPC server code I had worked on a few years ago. I'm hacking away at server and XML-RPC code now trying to make a system that can generate HTML pages complete with JavaScripts which use XML-RPC's to communicate with the server. Once I can get a shell to Scheme I'll be able to do all of my development from the comfort of my Firefox browser. The next logical step is to develop a system that can spawn new "WebApps" from the console and display them in the browser.

I've simultaneously been screwing around installing ucLinux on a MicroBlaze core on my
FPGA. First thing I did was run the web-server demo. Perhaps I can work on making the hardware platform optimize for fast, secure RPC. I imagine going to a website and the server's FPGA configures itself to optimally communicate with the browser for the given application.