I have worked hard enough on the robot for my brain to fry out. Time for me to
sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep sleep
Looks like I am the only one.
Boohoo.
Although I did get 3.5 weeks of vacation, so I guess the tradeoff is OK.
I have returned triumphant from Nelson!
Or maybe just alive. I will be at the RantRadio Meeting tonight.
I am on vacation, and have been for a week nearly now. The food rules, the riding rules, and I am loving life.
I even have a COP (no kidding) house-sitting for me. I hope the same bastards that broke into my place last year try it again. Heh -> lead justice.
I am back at Pacbrake post Defcon. We had a great time, and I am really happy with how everything went. Many thanks to everybody there who helped us make it out.
There will be more back-dated photos up soon.
(delayed, but still accurate. I am writing this on Saturday the 31st)
We left our hotel outside of San-Fran, and drove over the golden gate bridge.
![](/vegas/day3/IMG_0363.800X600.JPG border="1")
It was foggy and surprisingly cold, even colder than back at home in Vancouver on a foggy day. SF gets pretty windy I guess, and is exposed out on the water. There are also quite a few "interesting" people in SF...
We ate in a deadly little italian restaurant, and then headed NE to sacramento, where we met up with some fans. Computer geeks all, and pretty proficient to boot.
CS12 in the states teaches Java. Cool huh? One of the listeners there was busting ass to finish a project in time, and another had finished a video game and earned a presidential commendation for it. I love meeting smart people (especially smart teenagers). I really need to offset my continuous disappointment with most kids I run into. It is good to see that the future is not hopeless.
As a footnote, one of these guys had just bought a new emachines Athlon notebook. Don't. We googled for his problem (overheating during normal operation), and came up with a huge number of hits, and the news that the problem was unrepairable.
(Written on the 25th of July, 2004)
Cimm and I woke up stiff, tired, and shivering. It was 5:30 in the morning and I felt alert, but physically more tired than when I went to sleep. It was hard to believe that the temperature had dropped 25 degrees C over the night. In retrospect, a ranger blanket would have been a good idea.
I poured myself out of the car to meet with an enviably chipper Sean, who seems to be happy in inverse proportion to the comfort level of his sleeping arrangements. He was outside in the cold mist for 6 hours, looked well rested, and was smiling like a cheshire cat.
Bastard.
We drove south for a couple more hours before stopping at a surprisingly busy diner, which served food which was made entirely out of plastic. Breakfast contained several items made entirely from petroleum products. Although probably highly carcinogenic, the meal revived us, and we were able to drive south to gold beach, Oregon.
A photo and video shoot ensued. Winds were whipping the sand into a fast moving wall of knives, and any footsteps were quickly erased. Cyclopean rocks (props to HPL) jutted from the water. We took film of both Sean and Cimm, and I climbed a huge rock (and then wondered how to get down again). Cimm once again proved himself remarkably photogenic. We ran 150 photos, and then headed out in the hopes of making San Francisco by nightfall.
Pics in extended...
We are currently holding some RR fans hostage in order to get access to the internet. I am posting a LARGE number of photos on my here.
Pics in extended:
Here are some pix of the trip down through Washington and Oregon
Sean, Cimm, and I left Candada today for our trip down to Vegas. Cimm picked me up about 9:30am, and we picked Sean up not long after that. As Murphy would have predicted, the border lineup was insane. It took until 1:20pm to get through customs. They opened every single bag in our trunk, even rifling through our underwear. Glad I didn't pack any thongs. We made it across just in time to pick up the camera equipment from the mail drop.
We picked up some truly vile alcomohol at the gas station (Green Apple Twist, by Smirnoff), and began the drive...
The drive down was fairly uneventful, although Sean ended up socially engineering his way onto the backoffice server in an office depot in *deleted* WA, basically for the hell of it. We met up with Wog of War and his fiancee, and he was good enough to spring for a meal at the Mongolie Grill. We traded a bit of information, and then headed south, eventually sleeping in the car on the edge of of the water in Oregon. Sean broke out his bivy sack, and slept in the rain. Cimm and I attempted to sleep in the car, and failed.
Thank god for espresso.
Defcon, here I come. I can hardly wait to drive for three days in the desert.
Those mai-tais better r0x0r.
Websites that is. I am spending all of my time on this: wxWidgets 2.5.2: A portable C and Python GUI toolkit. I may start writing some documentation, coz there are many changes from the previous version.
I have also sworn not to read any entertainment related websites anymore, since they take up an inordinate amount of my time.
We found a new car to buy on Wednesday.
Finally, I think I just got given a CNC machine. Crazy huh?
Need sleep.
Looks like I'll be leaving a week before Defcon. Scary. Now I haveta go get the extra days from my boss.
Also, they are going to spring for the baluns. Whee.
Went for a bike ride, and worked on the robot, not in that order. I have also drawn up the new drawings for my next bot. 17mm high, with laser line scanner to detect enemy bots. Mini-sumo form factor.
The carbon bot (now named Ol' Blackie, after Jared Jesperson's liver) is only missing his backplane board before he can compete/retire.
I may very well have a problem... But it is so damned fun!
Seriously though, I learn so much, but it is hard to stop learning sometimes, and apply it.
My dog went for a bike ride with Helen and our friend Cam the other day (note that Emma went for the ride, and they went along, not the other way around). Cam took some awesome pictures (as usual), so here they are:
Nothing to see here. What. You didn't notice that we passed the resolution. You were there....
Oh well, I couldn't have stopped it if I wanted to, and I really just wanted to get the members to re-vote after the whole coercion debacle. I guess I have to just try and be positive and live with it...
I am on the strata council for my building, and we are in the process of receiving quotes for a building envelope inspection right now. Nobody has yet been approved, so why have we got people crawling around on the outside of the building pulling siding off, without strata approval!?
Something smells rotten. I am getting my digital camera back and taking photos of all of the denuded walls. I am also notifying other strata members immediately.
Went for a couple of bike rides. My back isn't hurting like it was last week, and I got a boat-load of work done.
Looks like rain this week, so the forest may even re-vivify itself. I am worried about that one. The entire GVRD area is starting to look disturbingly like kindling.
I even worked on a new site design for Pacbrake, as the old one (not made by us, so don't tell me about it) is looking a little dated.
One of my co-workers retired today. We'll miss the guy, but I am sure that he will come by to visit once in a while.
I was just sitting in newsbin looking for some software, and realized...
I am a warez hoarder.
This is one of the most pathetic of computer geek obsessions. Downloading dozens (or even hundreds) of applications from the Warez group, just on the outside chance that you may need it later on. This is despite the fact that the software is available every other week, usually in increasingly newer versions. There is no reason to hoard, since you always can get what you need.
Don't get me wrong, I am anal about properly licensing software. I spend well over 30 grand per year on software at one of my sites, and they only have 50 computers total. I just like to test stuff out before I purchase it. Most companies demos are crippled beyond usefulness, if they will even let you have one (Gibbscam, I am talking to you)! I have no compunctions about downloading stuff, and I am very motivated to pay for what I use (being a programmer myself).
I just wish I could control myself better with the warez scooping. Ah well.
Hey, is that the new Catia?
I was forced by some dev-tools that I needed to use, to up/down grade to Windows XP on my main work system. All told it is not so bad. This is my first time using XP as my personal workstation, but I have administered quite a few of them over the years.
The sheer amount of software available always amazes me, even if it is all pay stuff. I can't believe that more of it has not yet been ported to Linux though.
Wish me luck!
So this is a tough one.
I am very fond of Linux, and prefer it to all other operating systems. While other OS's are arguably orders of magnitude easier to use, I just plain get Linux, to the degree that I am far more productive on it than any other OS. Unfortunately, I am also very fond of some pieces of software. Either because I am used to them, or because I think that they are actually good packages.
The problem is that the two are not entirely overlapping domains.
Solidworks, Photoshop, Premiere, PICC, and many other of my favourite packages are Windows only. Furthermore, my employers dependence on Windows leaves me having to keep up to date, and programming on XP, when I could be done in half the time using Linux
Sometimes I just want to quit.
Dead items at work today:
Quoth and I are going to switch to an entirely organic diet on Monday. Pricier and harder work than eating from the local Supermarket, but I want to evaluate for my self whether a healthier diet has any effect.
As a disconcerting start to our attempt, we received a free copy of "Alive" magazine with our purchase. Full of a lot of half-assed pseudo science, along with some more respectible editorials as well. Anybody who didn't know better could be led to believe a lot of brainless crap.
We nearly had a workplace fatality earlier. One of my co-workers was hit in the melon with a driveshaft at 2500 rpm.
He is going to be OK though. Got lucky.
I am leaving for the DFW airport in a few minutes...
Quoth sent me this haiku:
internationalAin't she cute?!
outgoing flights, noisy lounge
he waits to see her
I am back in Dallas, and will be flying out of DFW tomorrow.
I miss home.
Both Quoth and Emma were injured when I left. Hope they are better when I get back. Only a full day in the airport between me and them.
I have finished the testing here in Texas, and am more than ready to come home. I am pretty impressed though with the quality of the network connections that are here for me. All of the hotels so far, as well as the airports, have had free wireless connections (or "Free" ones). I just wish that my wireless card was in better shape. I have my eye on the ndiswrapper project, but I may need to get a prism2.
Figures.
Maybe I should replace it with a Prism 54G card instead. Hopefully it'll still run Airsnort and whatnot.
I got the first half of our testing at the San Angelo test track. Had to sign a mellow non-disclosure, bot nowhere near as bad as the one I rejected at work. If all goes according to plan, we will be done tomorrow morning some time.
I can't wait to come home.
Seems like everything gets fucked as soon as I leave town.
At least I don't have to "borrow" wireless here, for good reason: The military doesn't like competition.
Last time I went on a road trip, the filters in the server tower all jammed with dust (switched to compacted graphite on the machining floor), and the computers started overheating and crashing.
Then I went on vacation, and there was some sort of weird network crash, which I still can't track the cause of.
Now I go on another road trip, and the night before I leave, my computer, the VP of sales' computer, and one of the phone support guy's computers all get stolen. Luckily they can't use any of my archived SSH keys, since my hard drive crashed two days before the theft, wiping all of my data.
On my first day out of town, I accidentally remote-halted my home firewall, leaving Quoth in a tight spot. STUPID.
I think that this is the last time they will let me out of town (really this time).
For an additional hour at least while we wait for a new plane to arrive. Seems there was some kind of "environmental spill" on this one.
Ah well, I am still eating crazy Texas beef later
Note: The bastards here have firewalled the ICQ ports. Looking for a workaround.
Well, I leave for beautiful Dallas Texas tomorrow morning. Nothing I like better than being processed by U.S. Customs and Immigration again. Back in a week. I will be bringing the wireless card, "borrowing" bandwidth, and formatting hard drives at random (kidding) throughout my travels.
The dog (Emma) got her little paw infected somehow. I think she stepped on some glass or something, and now she has a pronounced limp. The vet didn't want to start exploring right away, since he figured that it might migrate out on it's own, so he just bandaged her up, and now she has a little club foot.
She hates it.
I have spent most of my day letting my subconscious do all of the work, while my forebrain sits in idle, reading crap on the internet. Every few seconds, the solution to the latest algortihmic problem I have been having, surfaces, and I tap it into Anjuta, and then go back to the browser.
I realized suddenly (prompted perhaps by thinking briefly about my previous Fark post), that most of all of my thoughts function in this way. I am gifted with an unusually active, and intelligent subconscious... Or am I?
Is it possible that everybody thinks this way? When I read a particularly brilliant quote from a particularly renowned (for his wittiness) author... I wonder how much of this is just bubbling up from some base of intellectual inuendo way down in our limbic system.
Earlier today I had an interesting encounter at the leading hamburger outlet:
Me: (to counter people, of whom there are many, waiting for customers) Who wants it?So it seems that the entire conversation occured (for them at least, and mostly for me as well), in our subconscious brains. Just coasting along giggling with the inuendo tossed up by our lower neurological functions.
Manager: (nudges tiny little counter girl) You want it?
Tiny Counter Girl: Oh yeah! I want it!
Both break down in giggles
Me: One McGrill meal please, supersized, no subtext on that.
Both counter girls: huh?
Maybe it is meant to be this way. Maybe Sterling was right in Our Neural Chernobyl where he posited that we have a primate stupidity barrier, where we have to be kept dumb enough that basic tasks like eating, washing, and avoiding predators are more interesting than whatever is going on in our own heads. It would certainly explain why people like Einstein have earned a reputation for being disconnected from the world they inhabit.
Well, here I sit back at work after a far too short two week vacation. Time passes at a rate proportional to the square of how much fun you are having.
Robot construction went surprisingly well, with the Blingwaytm progressing to a nearly completed state mechanically, and about 50% electronically. I have to do some more simulation of the control method before I run it live. Look for complete information here later on.
No riding, since Helen and I both had the flu.
RantMedia had it's 5 year anniversary, but nobody showed almost, since there was a snowstorm.
Helen and I have finally really started our vacation. The house is painted and looking mighty fine. I have some electronics open in front of me, and ready to do development work on my new robot. Now I just need to (re)learn some vector calculus, and I will be good to go.
I unfortunately have to go in to work in the morning tomorrow to re-boot the server there, which seems to have crashed due to hardware problems (dust clog) again.
Well, Here I am again. Back from a long X-mas absence. I got a few nice things for Xploitation Day this year, including some cool ass mugs from my sis (they rule. Thanks), some nice gloves, and some ca$h.
I used some of the cash to buy a new Dremel tool (thanks to the punks who stole my last one, alongwith my computer, printer, and most of my other personal belongings) to replace the one that I "lost" last August. It is a no go, right from the factory. Don't they even test? Not wet, no drop damage, just DOA.
I also have a computer again, since the last one died late November (bad 512 Meg Samsung RAM DIMM).
I had a wireless-G firewall from Linksys, which I got early December to replace my computer (which also worked as a firewall, router, etc). It (the router, not the previous computer) was also DOA, with spontaneous reboots, crashes, and configuration lobotomies.
Why does everything suck so hard these days? Would it be so bad to have products that just WORK?!?! I know that the DIMM and the firewall were cheap, but shouldn't a cheap thing also work? I can understand fewer features, or a less sexy case, or more power consumption, or less range, or some other drawback like that for the lower price. I just can't understand shipping total crap. I would never do it (and have personally prevented the release of products that I have designed that I thought were not ready for prime time), so why should I have to accept drastically lower standards from other people?
Isn't it funny how geeks change their OS of choice as often as their underware?
Todays (potential) change comes from the need to run commercial developer tools for micro-controllers. It seems that very few of these chip fabs sell dev kits that run on Linux (wierd I think, since Linux in many ways is the tool of choice for embedded programmers). Since I want to run some of these tools, I am forced back to XP, which I hate, but am also pretty familiar with.
I'll letcha know what happens.
So.... Do I take a nap and then stay up all night to watch it? Decisions decisions.
Once again, I get to work with the greatest of plans, and then everybody needs something. I have gotten exactly 0 done today (except for helping other people).
Seems like the train of new systems never ends. I wish we had purchased real computers instead of surplus crap a couple of years ago, since then I wouldn't have to keep re-doing this effort.
At least this rotation is making sure that our licenses stay compliant for all of our operating systems.
There are some reasons (which should be obvious) that I hate leaving for more than a couple of days.
Keep in mind that I have already spam-scanned this email.
I think I am going to start hunting spammer servers for fun and profit. Maybe planting logic bombs, or spam advertising illegal services, and addresses to senators, or something like that.
Kidding.
... caused by a faulty UPS controlller (I think) have caused me repeated failures in the file server here at Pacbrake. I hate that.
Anybody know of a nice (Linux friendly) UPS? Gotta run at least 3 servers, and probably more.
Looks like I might have to spend an extra day in Montreal. No promises though. Got a few more hundreds of lines written on DIRT too, and it now packetizes correctly.
And I will be traveling on a plane on Sunday to Montreal. Do you think anybody is going to get mad at me? Will I get quarantined for suspected SARS? Will I decide not to go?
More details to follow.
The Sean Kennedy TV show.... GALLERY!
(This old entry has been deprecated in preference to this new link: http://gallery.cthuugle.com/SKTFM-Show-Nov-17-2003).
I hate this crap. I leave for Montreal on the 23rd of November. Normally I would be ecstatic about a visit to Quebec, but this time, I get on the plane, fly to Montreal, work on some truck electronics, test them, get back on the plane and fly home. two working days in Montreal, boxed in by two days on a plane (at least it is WestJet, arguably the least crappy airline in a crappy field).
I have so many things I need to do, and so little time to do them in. I am going to have to end these trips somehow.
Just got back to Toronto from Jamestown New York. We went to the top secret Valeo dynamometer testing facility...
Holy crap high tech for 1989! This place was one of the most amazing industrial installations I have yet to work in. The place is still cutting edge, although limited to only 500 hp. This place has 50000 gallons of amazingly nasty heat sink fluid, a massive driving and/or driven electric motor powered dyno, and this old but still useful computer data acquisition system.
There were a lot of seriously smart dudes working there (smart enough to not go drinking with us crazy canucks anyway). Lot's of pix on the wall of new vehicles getting tested too (some that won't even be released for a few years). Can't say which ones or anything out of respect for their secrecy. Very cool though.
The town was a little on the slow side though. Asking about high speed internet access got people to look at me like I was an alien, and although I saw schools around town, I saw nobody else under the age of 40 there. Wierd. Don't visit unless you get to go to Valeo I guess. The town looked seriously depressed economically as well, with many dark storefronts, and a couple of dead malls. Makes me realize how lucky I am to be working in a big town with lot's of opportunity.
Anyhoo, here I sit in the hotel, after l33t h4x0r1ng their high speed wireless data system. Quick analysis of their crappy little broadband router shows no logging facilities, and no security either (not even WEP, so I guess that l33tness part was a fat lie). Flying back 6 hours tomorrow, and I miss Quoth a ton.
Neato hack eh? Here is the secret.....
First, upload all of the images into a directory on your server, and remember the url path that is needed to view it.
Next, run the following bash script one liner inside of that directory:
for IMAGES in `ls | grep IMG`;do
TTL=`echo $IMAGES| sed "s/IMG/THM/i"`;
convert -geometry 120x120 $IMAGES $TTL;
echo "<a href='http://your.site.com/path/to/images/$IMAGES'><img src='http://your.site.com/path/to/images/$TTL' border=1></a>" >> index.php;
done
Finally, add the following line in the entry in your blog (have to have php, and php extensions working on your blog):
<?php include ("http://your.site.com/path/to/images/index.php"); ?>
I am starting to realize that I care less about how little work I do on the blog, only that everything is automated in some way. This is an example that shows how hard I am willing to work to get some cute trivial little result.
