Categories:
Administration
Saturday, June 23. 2007
As of yesterday this site is now hosted at Media Temple on my own "Dedicated Virtual" server. It's not exactly a true dedicated server, but it appears as such to me - I get a root login and the ability to reboot the "machine". I get statistics based on Apache logs (something my old service, csoft.net, did not provide for shared hosting). I'm a good deal more insulated from all the other users than I would be on a shared service, which is good for application performance, reliability, database security, etc. But best of all, regular users of this site will notice load times have shortened by a factor of 5!
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Categories:
Inventions
Wednesday, May 30. 2007
I would like to bring to the attention of my readers an impressive
technological advance made by one David Worden, lately graduated
from the University of Wisconsin with a well-deserved degree in
Electrical Engineering. Mr. Worden enlivened his graduation ceremony
with a light
show built into his mortarboard: 64 LEDs driven by a
microcontroller programmed to produce a variety of animated
effects. Let me be the first to congratulate Mr. Worden on his
splendid achievement in Mad Science—but as a Mad Scientist myself,
let me also remind the young upstart that he was not the first to have
this idea!
In the long-past days of my miss-spent youth
(err … 2004), I also graduated with a degree in Electrical
Engineering, and sported a light-show hat of my own at the ceremony. The mortarboard had
four diagonal lines of 8 white LEDs each, controlled by a central PIC
microcontroller; all five circuit boards were painted black and
atttached to the top of the hat with velcro. Though I must admit,
Mr. Worden's design is rather more complex, with twice as many LEDs as
mine and a fully-concealed circuit.
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Categories:
Inventions
Sunday, April 15. 2007
As a small project for my Inventive Thinking class, I worked on a simulation of creatures avoiding each other or performing tasks like crossing a street or forming a swarm. The creatures navigate by choosing simple actions (like turning right or left) based on the "Looming" principle of obstacle avoidance studied by my thesis advisor, among others. The simulation runs in your web browser (Firefox or recent IE have been tested, but probably others as well). You can view it (fun to watch) and play with the parameters to your heart's content at this link: Looming Simulation
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Categories:
Administration
Friday, March 23. 2007
Not long ago I began writing my Master's thesis, and fortunately
took a moment to consider what might be formatting 'best practice'
before I got too deep into what will probably be the longest text I've
ever written. Of course, most students these days write reports,
theses, dissertations, and everything else in Microsoft Word, or (if
the student is poor or motivated by hatred toward Microsoft) one of
the free clones of the same. But I decided instead to try something
I've long been meaning to try: the TeX typesetting
system, or to be more precise, the LaTeX language
built on top of TeX. I learned some important lessons from this.
To use (tongue only somewhat in cheek) my new favorite metaphor,
Microsoft Word is like the Persian Empire: decadent, soft, corrupt,
encouraging of mysticism and lazy thinking. Whereas LaTeX is like
Sparta: cold, clean, hard, disciplined, rational. And outnumbered 2000
to 1.
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Categories:
Inventions
Wednesday, March 7. 2007
Our desalination project was profiled in FAU's engineering recruitment newsletter, The Pinnacle. Many thanks to them for the recognition.
Also, two conference papers were submitted and accepted, one in Portugal and one by the Conference on Desalination and the Environment in Greece. Should be fun.
As for my desalination thesis, it crawls inexorably toward completion. Call it done by this summer.
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Categories:
Inventions
Wednesday, November 29. 2006
Another newspaper generously and quite unexpectedly weighed in on our desalination project. The City Link, one of South Florida's A&E weeklies, gave us this Resounding Endorsement:
Say it with me, readers: there ain't no such thing as bad publicity.
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Categories:
Inventions
Friday, October 13. 2006
Two new items made it into my geek resume lately:
My own page on freshpatents.com, due to a recently published patent application on the desalination device I've been working on for nearly two years.
Fellow student Brandon Moore and I have been announced as finalists in this year's Collegiate Inventor's Competition, one of the fine programs offered by the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, for the same invention. Many thanks to the NIHF!
Check this space to see how I do—I'll update in a week after the competition.
UPDATE—October 27:
Unfortunately, we didn't win the CIC, although simply being one of the eleven was victory enough. Many congratulations and good luck to the winners and other finalists, especially to dedicated inventor and all-around nice guy Dr. Haugland for his grand prize winning nighttime temperature prediction model.
And thanks again to the NIHF and the USPTO for so generously hosting this event, and for treating all of us humble students in a manner we are definitely NOT accustomed to—I've never been met at the airport by my own limo before!
UPDATE—November 20:
Thanks are due also to the Palm Beach Post, for running a story about this project in their Monday edition today.
UPDATE—November 23:
Last update—I swear I'll start a new post if anything else happens. Another one of our local newspapers, The Boca Raton News, picked up the story: "FAU grad students team up to develop low-cost desalination process".
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Categories:
Inventions
Tuesday, August 22. 2006
Finally I am resisting temptation no longer. I did what I always knew I would do and opened up a Cafepress store. My first product: the Defend Lighthouse Point t-shirt!
Why "Defend Lighthouse Point"? Why the carefully rendered silhouette of an AK-47? It's partly a homage to a shirt that Adam Savage wore on Mythbusters that read "Defend Brooklyn". It's partly a reference to tongue-in-cheek orders I gave my roommate when I was in California during our last hurricane. And partly a ha-ha-only-serious nod to the idea that maybe our little corner of suburbia is worth defending, dammit. Anyway, if you have to ask, it ain't for you!
Check this space for more exciting products allowing you too to "Live the Eiki Martinson Lifestyle"!
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Categories:
Vittles and Libations
Friday, June 16. 2006
Tonight was the first dinner of our second Culinary Adventure Week. The theme: Google recipes!
Simply type two ingredients into google, plus the word "recipe", like so: "chicken bacon recipe". Then hit the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button and cook whatever comes up! You really place your stomach in the hands of fate with this one - but so far with good results. Even unusual test cases like "italian sausage mussels recipe" came up looking tasty.
Sheraz wasn't home tonight, so we feasted on forbidden fruit: pork and tomatoes. Google came up with "Pork Chops with Fresh Tomato, Onion, Garlic, and Feta", which worried us somewhat but turned out to be really very good.
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Categories:
Vittles and Libations
Thursday, June 8. 2006
My roommate Sheraz and I suffer from a certain indecision about what to eat; nothing seems good to us anymore, and this results in discussions of the "What do you want to eat? I dunno, what do YOU want to eat?" kind and in disastrous expeditions like today's, in which we drove around aimlessly for an hour looking for something that would hit the elusive "spot". I have no illusions; this is a mark of decadence, one more of the minor pyschological problems that comes of limitless opportunities and a complete lack of survival pressure. But to hell with that - we decided to solve our problem by turning it into an amusing adventure, applying our favorite tool for doing so: eccentric wagering.
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Categories:
Exploits
Wednesday, April 12. 2006
Mr. Mark Miller, true friend, pipe-crawling engineer, vagabond musician, gentleman-scholar, got married this weekend to his girlfriend Nicole in a lovely ceremony followed by a crazy party and supported by three days of various other entertainments. Per request, I am providing here a copy of my toast:
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Categories:
Exploits
Monday, February 27. 2006
I was woken one day by my father, who had been visiting my house. He asked me about my tomato crop. I am no gardener and went outside, mystified, to see what he was talking about. Sure enough, growing in a line on a patch of sandy dirt outside were 10 or so tomato plants, many with small green fruit already in evidence.
We stood around scratching our heads until one of us spotted the obvious. The long narrow barren patch in the middle of my lawn had been caused by our sewer pipe rebuild of a month or two previous, in which we replaced with PVC an ancient tar-paper pipe, ruined by tree roots and leaking torrents of sewage into the ground. We turned this fertile soil over with shovels in the course of digging out the pipe and refilling the ditch, and the current theory holds that this brought close to the surface tomato seeds planted there by the old method that fruits of all kinds evolved to exploit.
That's right! WE planted them, every time we ate tomatoes and flushed the remains. Although some members of my family have expressed uneasiness at the history of this harvest, I'm sure that they'll taste far better than the supermarket product, cruel suggestions of the flavorful terroir coming through notwithstanding.
UPDATE: April 7, 2006
Fruits are being harvested and indeed they do taste better than commercial ones, like a typical tomato but more. Apparently we "planted" no less than three varieties: cherry tomatoes, nice mid-size round ones, and some kind of lobed Ugly-Ripe looking tomato.
Unfortunately, maybe 10% of my produce has been lost to boring fruitworm. Infuriating! Lecture me all you want on Organic Gardening, you lose your harvest and you'll be just as ready as I am to gas em' all and let God sort em' out! For now I've settled for moving the plants to the backyard (away from the sewer pipe insect-incubator) and tying them up higher to a plastic fence which I've installed (also keeping out marauding possums).
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Monday, February 27. 2006
Watching the closing ceremonies of the 2006 Torino games last night, I was struck by an observation on my own mental state, which must have been bubbling to the surface over the last two weeks: the periodic nature of the Olympics has fractured my personal flow of time. Every four years, more or less the same athletes come back and resume their stories; during the opening ceremony, I see some of the old faces and hear their names, and it all comes rushing back. Then for the next two weeks I experience time as running on a track parallel to the main, day-to-day chain of events - the Winter Olympic track. This train started at Calgary '88 or so, but it makes slower progress than the train of normal time, as it runs for only two weeks every four years. The Summer Olympics run on another parallel track because the characters involved are usually different.
I think this is why watching the games is so beautifully comforting; when I jump into Olympic time I'm able to reach back with ease to 8 or 12 or 14 years ago, to a time when I was a child or an adolescent. Each of those two week Olympic periods gets appended onto the end of the last one, so all the great events of Lillehammer '94 (and whatever I was doing at the time) are as though they happened only six weeks past.
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Categories:
Design
Wednesday, December 7. 2005
Silver was the New Black, but black is the New Silver. It's true. The pendulum has swung back. Portents of it are everywhere in the consumer electronics industry.
Black lost out years ago because it looked plastic, despite the fact that plastic really looks best in black. So the mainstream started to emulate the high-end brushed aluminum thing, and it worked, for a while. Respectable mid-market home theater gear HAD to be silver. But turnabout was inevitable, really, once you could buy a shiny silver DVD player for $29.99 at Walmart. Then it was obvious that the sexy new silver was mostly the same plastic as ever, tarted up with what amounts to chrome - in some cases even actual chrome. And chrome is the sort of thing that seems like a good idea for about ten minutes. As soon as everybody and their third grade teacher owned a cell phone that looked like it fell out of the Tin Man's ass, we were bound to be back in black again.
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Friday, October 7. 2005
Last Sunday my cousin Torm and I were invited to a Car & Driver / Road & Track "Editor for a Day" event at the Homestead Speedway. After a wild ride from Boca Raton to Homestead in record time, we had the chance to drive some interesting cars for comparison purposes; some of our comments might even be published in the magazines! Two courses had been laid out with cones on a large parking lot there - they wouldn't let us go out on the NASCAR oval for some hot laps no matter how much we begged.
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