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ribulose biswahbphatase: enzymin' and two-timin'

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Mon, 31 Oct 2005

quality ringer material

I've always thought the best cell phone ringers were NES game songs (evidence: I've got a good couple dozen of 'em on my phone), and now the hotness gets hotter: the NES Sound Format is basically a wrapper around the 6502 code that drives the NES sound system; the result is a perfect facsimile of the original songs. The OCRemix website has a reasonable archive of NSFs, and you can find more laying around in various places. Moreover, Zophar has a (windows only) utility that converts them to MIDIs. Swoot.

Of course, that one isn't quite good enough, so I'm planning on writing my own soon enough...


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Sun, 30 Oct 2005

doom, doooom, DOOOOOOOOOOOOOM

It has the Rock and the BFG. What else does it need?

OK, it also has plot holes big enough to pass a chick with whom George might have slept after getting drunk, but you shouldn't attempt to pick apart the marvellous tapestry of plot placed in front of you. Instead, appreciate the hotness of the chick, watch the Rock discover "a big fucking gun," and note the altogether-too-long "first person shooter" homage scene.

Yeah, maybe you should see it in the theatres. Don't worry, once you tell people you went and saw Mortal Kombat with Christopher Lambert, they're not gonna bother making fun of you for this.

Also, go listen to the Doom Song. Edit: Alida points out, rightly, that I failed to mention that she's the one who finally sat me down and made me watch Invader Zim. It's hawsome.


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Fri, 28 Oct 2005

the ultimate song

Gonna be in Boston again. Getting in Wednesday night, leaving Sunday night.

Woot. SiLabs is paying for it.

If you understand the origin of the title of this entry (yes, it has a specific, semi-sensical meaning), one thousand bajillion ego points to you.


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Thu, 27 Oct 2005

late for a very important... rendezvous

The story goes something like this: Charles Lelouch, a French filmmaker, released a short film called C'Etait Un Rendezvous in 1976, apparently in an attempt to answer the question "what do you do when you want to see Paris and only have 9 minutes and a Ferrari?" There are apparently no special effects, and the speed of the film is not altered in any way.

Holy crap.


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Mon, 24 Oct 2005

now I get it, George

Remember when you were completely addicted to Project Gotham? Now I understand. As of Saturday, I'm hooked on Gran Turismo 4.

Also, Soul Calibur 3 is coming out tomorrow. My week is shot.


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Fri, 21 Oct 2005

Jeff Goldblum...

...is watching you poop.


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the interviewee has become the interviewer

Sweet! I did my first interview today. It was kind of cool.

Last night, while trying to come up with reasonable interview questions, I got to thinking about how an emitter follower can have a negative real input impedance when driving a capacitive load. In particular, I wanted to show that it was the case, so I busted out the small-signal model and started burning through some lead. It only took two pages of engineering paper, but I decided that it made an exceptionally poor interview question (because it was all math and no intuition).

Instead, I went with a simple question about BJT device physics and a basic switched-capacitor integrator.

The BJT question is cute and quick: say we have an NPN transistor. OK, now consider that a diode is just PN, so if I have two of them back-to-back, I have NP-PN—somewhat similar, but does it act like a transistor? No. Why? Ohmic contacts; more specifically, what we get is infinite recombination velocity in the base, which reduces β to 0. So what does that imply about the relationship between base doping and β? Lower doping gives higher beta, because it increases the time before the minority carriers we inject recombine. We could also change β by making the base region narrower.


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Thu, 20 Oct 2005

UNIX admin?

I hear tell that we're presently looking to hire a "very talented UNIX admin to help support the design engineering environment." UNIX, in this context, means a mix of Solaris and linux.

Anyone want a job in Austin?


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Wed, 19 Oct 2005

fully fluxified

Rodin, your wishes are coming true: there is a complete Aeon Flux collection slated for release on November 22.

Mine's already pre-ordered.

Yes, that's 3 Aeon Flux posts in 2 days. Shaddup.


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spammers, begone

I finally got sick enough of the comment spam to implement one of those authimage things. I just hacked it right into the writeback plugin (a 5ish-line change) and made a script to generate the images with PerlMagick. Simple. If you want to use my kludge in your blog, let me know and I'll help you get it set up.


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Tue, 18 Oct 2005

greasemonkey to the rescue

Have you noticed that the Aeon Flux website is broken in Firefox? It is for me, anyway...

greasemonkey is an extension that lets you modify web pages using JavaScript. Until now I'd dismissed this as total crap, but it turned out to be useful here. Observe: 

(function () {
 t=document.getElementsByTagName("table");
 for(x=0;t[x];x++) {
                t[x].setAttribute("width",768);
  }
 t=document.getElementsByTagName("td");
 for(x=0;t[x];x++) {
                t[x].setAttribute("width",768);
 }
 t=document.getElementsByTagName("th");
 for(x=0;t[x];x++) {
                t[x].setAttribute("width",768);
 }
 t=document.getElementsByTagName("col");
 for(x=0;t[x];x++) {
                t[x].setAttribute("width",768);
 }
 t=document.getElementsByTagName("embed");
  for(x=0;t[x];x++) {
                t[x].setAttribute("width",768);
 }
t=document.getElementsByTagName("object");
 for(x=0;t[x];x++) {
                t[x].setAttribute("width",768);
 }
})();

The above is a large hammer for a small problem, I'll admit, but it does what it needs to do.


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flux capacitor

OK, not really. But I did find the entirety of "Aeon Flux 1995," a two-DVD set that came out in (you guessed it) 1995. It's encoded as divx, but it still tastes good to my palate.

If you want it, let me know. You can either download it from me (1.4 gigs, so it'll take a while) or I can do the old burn shuffle. Or, if you're in the Cambridge area, talk to George, who will have it shortly on account of torrenting it.

"What doesn't kill us makes us stranger."


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Sun, 16 Oct 2005

certainly no Samus Aran

A bunch of us went and saw Domino last night. Yeah, she's a bounty hunter, and yeah, she's pretty hot, but no, this movie wasn't as cool as I'd hoped it would be. Lessons learned: wait for video, and always trust the tomato.

All was not lost, however: the Aeon Flux trailer looked pretty friggin sweet. I also want to go see Serenity at some point; maybe I'll just wait for video...


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Thu, 13 Oct 2005

rally addenda

For those of you who are fans of a certain Xbox driving game, another car which is comparable to the STi and the Evo is the Nissan Skyline GT-R (though both my Subee and the Evo are somewhat faster). The GT-R is not, nor has it ever been available in America (and why the hell not!?), but it would appear that the Infinity G35 (the US-spec Skyline equivalent, after a fashion) might some day be made in GT-R trim. Wouldn't that be hot?

Take a gander over at rsportscars.com for more on these and other cars you can take off of totally sweet jumps.


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road rally

Dagny, as I've named my STi, belongs to a class of cars known as rally racers. On the US auto market, only two other cars, the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution and the Audi S4, are similarly classified. Of those two, the S4 is the much milder-looking, lacking the gigantic spoiler and bigass (yes, that's a technical term) hood scoop.

Last night (really, this morning) driving home from Mike's, I happened to spot on the road ahead of me a fellow rally car driver piloting his Mitsubishi Evo. By happenstance we both took the same exit, and the same turn onto Southwest Parkway, a several-mile stretch of mostly-straight road. Having spotted each other's telltale "shopping cart" wings, we had no choice in the matter: it was pedal to the metal "lessee whose rocket is faster." After hanging more or less neck-and-neck for a couple miles at 120+ MPH, we both slowed down and drew abreast for a "slow" 80ish MPH conversation through open windows. We exchanged thumbs ups, a bit of the old "sweet car" kind of stuff, then waved good-bye just before he came upon his turn.

A single-serving rally buddy. Cool.


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Wed, 12 Oct 2005

data heaven

Yesterday I happened to stumble across a couple bittorrents on isohunt which together comprised a nearly exhaustive collection of Shadowrun books. As Stormy would say, "Holy bejeezus!"

So yeah. If you want me to burn you a DVD of all of 'em (upwards of 4 Gb, all told), let me know. So far, one's on the way to George, and one will live over at the Man House (wow... can you believe manhouse.org wasn't taken? It is now...)


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Fri, 07 Oct 2005

such dynamic range!

Less than a week ago, it was over 105 degF here. Today, it's been around 52. A factor of two in a matter of days... wow.


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Wed, 05 Oct 2005

all you ever wanted to know about motor oil...

...can be found at Bob is the oil guy.

Wow.


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Tue, 04 Oct 2005

caffeine of the ottomans

Yesterday, Marissa gave me a superb birthday present: a Turkish coffee pot and some delicious coffee to go with it. I'll need practice to become a real pro, but I'd say my first try was a success.

My grandmother (on my father's side) used to make this stuff when I was little. I was still in the yummy phase (I owe you a dime, Hippo), so I didn't really appreciate it, but damn is it good stuff.


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