The Adventures of Eiki Martinson

Tilt Sensor Demonstration Toy

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Thu, 03 May 2012 08:58:17 -0700

I've finally created a page for this fun little tilt-sensing toy I made using a MEMS accelerometer, some LEDs, and the LM3914 bar-graph driver. It was knocked together in an afternoon in 2002, so don't look too closely at the somewhat crude construction techniques in this one!

An Update on the Pipe Crawler

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 19:24:17 -0700

I'm thrilled that Make magazine has featured our 2003 senior design project, the Pipe Crawler, on its blog. I thank Sean Ragan for taking an interest and for writing the post; visitors from Make are very welcome indeed. I've taken this as prompting to update the site a bit; prior readers may notice that I've added links to an RSS feed of this blog; please subscribe if you're so inclined. Using my new and very precariously assembled light tent (details of which are for a later post); I've also updated some of the photos of the pipe crawler; and finally, I've restored the link to the original paper my team gave to our professors at the end of the class, although I cringe to read it today—hopefully I've learned a thing or two in the years since!

Javascript Syntax Highlighting

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 18:02:12 -0700

I occasionally post samples of source code in a handful of languages on this site; to present these in the most readable form I started looking for client-side syntax highlighting scripts, always with an eye towards matching the behavior of emacs and its major modes. I made attempts with the most popular choices in this area, but was disappointed with them for various reasons:

google-code-prettify did not highlight C correctly; it marked types (char, for example) as keywords sometimes, and it's not actually hosted on the google CDN, which I would think is one of the major reasons to use a google project for something like this.
highlight.js relies on a mysterious process of automatically "detecting" the language used in a particular code block, which failed in my test case when it mismarked C as perl. Despite that, it comes with some nice color themes and, unlike google-code-prettify, is hosted externally, although I would be more comfortable if it was hosted on a major CDN like google's.
SyntaxHighlighter has extensive language support and uses an autoloader to load only the scripts necessary for highlighting the languages contained in the current page, a significant point in its favor. However, the html produced by this script is heavy with non-semantic <div>'s (one for each line!) and wraps every highlighted token in its own <code> tags. I prefer client-side scripts not to throw semantics out the window when possible; one <span> with appropriate class names for each token should be sufficient.

But just as I was about to turn away from this project and put syntax highlighting on the shelf for awhile, I found another script: Rainbow, by Craig Campbell. This library makes heavy use of regular expressions, which I'm fond of, and seems to have been designed from the beginning for ease of extensibility. It's also hosted on GitHub, and I've already taken advantage of that to make some small contributions to the project. Rainbow is relatively young and doesn't support very many languages as yet, it's true, but this script is so easy to extend that I don't anticipate that will be much of a problem—I'll probably just write a new mode myself if I need one.

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Embedding Videos Elastically

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 20:26:01 -0700

I've meant to make and share more videos for some time now, ever since my first smartphone brought with it a decent video camera, in fact. This has meant diving deeply into technical subjects I had previously neglected, wrestling with various open-source video editors, and, of course, updating my blog theme so that I could properly embed YouTube iframes into posts. This last turned out to be surprisingly difficult.

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B-29 Superfortress “Fifi”

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 15:23:04 -0700

I had the pleasure this weekend of seeing the only presently flying example of the B-29 Superfortess, a salvaged plane named “Fifi” that was restored and is kept airworthy by the fine people of the Commerative Air Force. A recently restored P-51D Mustang, “The Brat III” was also on display, and the public could even fly in both planes. I couldn't afford that ($570 to $1395 for the B-29, depending on the seat, $1995 for the P-51) but was very happy taking a tour through the bomb-bay and cockpit.

By the way, I only became aware of Fifi's visit to Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport because I happened to be overflown at low altitude by it, heard a somewhat remarkable noise, and was surprised to find a B-29 overhead. A little google-searching revealed what was going on this week. Either the CAF might want to try to get the word out more effectively, or I need to be more plugged into the local aviation and warbird community, if such exists. Any suggestions to that end will be appreciated.

Postel's Prescription and Power Polarity

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 16:24:35 -0800

Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.

—Postel's Prescription, by Jon Postel

I have a day job as a hardware engineer for a telecommunications company, and in this capacity I'm often designing equipment to be installed in phone company Central Offices (COs). Unlike the designers of consumer electronics or data center hardware, I can rely on having DC available to power my devices; COs have “rectifier plants” that convert mains AC to 48-volt DC and distribute this power through the facility with giant copper or aluminum busbars over the racks.

Most CO equipment uses two-pin Phoenix-style connectors as power inlets. These come with a pluggable terminal block with screw-down style connectors that accept bare wire from the rack's fuse and power distribution panel. Because installers wire this plug on site and mistakes are easy to make, it's good sense (and company policy) for the hardware designer to put a bridge rectifier across the input leads so that this connection can be insensitive to polarity.

This is an application of the first part of Postel's Prescription, “be liberal in what you accept”, to power engineering. If the second part, “conservative in what you send”, has an analogue in this field, it could be this: make sure your power outputs, if any, have clearly defined polarity. Another possible analogue would be: keep the output to a tighter voltage range than the telecom standard 36-72 volts.

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Making Different Mistakes

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 20:12:44 -0800

None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.

—C. S. Lewis, from his introduction to Athanasius' On the Incarnation *

I like this idea that old books can be an antidote to the unexamined pieties of contemporary thought, and have been putting Lewis' suggestion into practice; at the moment my daily reading is split almost equally between a just-released and currently-best-selling work of pop psychology and Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (although I suspect Lewis would not have counted this as “old”, preferring to read the actual Romans themselves, Gibbon is revered enough and indeed, old enough to have entered the canon himself, even if through the side door).

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Sketchbook: a Thatched Hut

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 21:38:45 -0800

This is an older drawing of a hut from somewhere in Southeast Asia, after a photograph in Architectural Digest. I drew this with a black Pilot G2 05 pen in the sketchbook I was using at that time.

A New Design

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 18:53:44 -0800

I've redesigned my personal site and blog, and would appreciate criticisms or comments. The layout adapts to a wide variety of screen widths using CSS media queries; try scaling your browser window or looking at the site on your mobile phone to see what I mean.

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Colebrook Equation GNU Octave Script

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 19:32:37 -0700

As a way of trying out github for myself I uploaded a small script that iteratively solves the Colebrook equation for the Darcy-Weisbach friction factor, which can be used to estimate head loss due to pipe friction; this played a very minor role in my recent MSEE thesis. The script runs in GNU Octave and it certainly should run in Matlab as well, although I haven't tested that.

Link Love from MAKE, Others

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 09:59:39 -0700

Some of my projects have been drawing attention from Maker circles lately. I'm very excited that the Color Changing Doorbell was featured on the blog of my favorite magazine MAKE.

Also, a website called BuildLounge was kind enough to link to my serial-controlled fireworks igniter, under a category of "Explosions". Welcome, new visitors from these sites!

Audi Caravan to Key West

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Mon, 23 May 2011 16:43:00 -0700

These pictures are from an Audi Owner's Club caravan to Key West on May 21, 2011 using Jay Wilson's brand new Audi S4; a fun trip!

Leaping into the Present with the Samsung Galaxy S

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Mon, 16 May 2011 19:29:31 -0700

Those who know me personally have come to expect a certain amount of frustration when trying to contact me on my phone, which until recently was a Motorola W755 clamshell phone which frequently lost connections, often failed to ring on incoming calls, and had a broken USB connector requiring me to remove the battery and place it in my previous Motorola phone whenever I needed a charge!

Enter the Samsung Galaxy S (“Fascinate” in Verizon's lineup). Yes, I'm aware that the S2 should be arriving in the USA in the third quarter of this year, but it will probably be priced around $300. The original S already has all the features I'm interested in, such as 6-axis inertial sensing and the OLED screen; 4G is less valuable than one might think given a lifestyle that affords constant wi-fi coverage as mine does; finally, at this late date, any smartphone at all is such an enormous discontinuous jump into the present that I can't really lose with any choice at all in this market!

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Ruminations on Leviathan, Prompted by the Film Potiche

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Sun, 08 May 2011 16:06:55 -0700

As an excuse to try out FAU's new Living Room Theaters I spent some time Sunday seeing a French film named Potiche, which was surprisingly and tediously political at the same time. The surprise was my own fault: I didn't research it too closely before buying my ticket. Blame for the tedium falls elsewhere! Whereas most of the audience, I expect, saw Potiche as a charming and funny celebration of female empowerment, I saw mostly a nightmare in which everything was politics, everything from business decisions to paternal pride to tender moments between husband and wife tainted with the tawdry operations of socialist democracy.

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Curiously Vulgar

nospam@example.com (Eiki Martinson) — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 14:55:42 -0700

Altoids mints have for many years been marketed under a brand that has successfully conveyed an image of Victorian understatement, exaggerated politesse, and quirky humor. I would think these lovely characteristics, which carried the mints to such success in the US market, would be enough for Callard and Bowser. Apparently not! A reckless experiment in marketing has resulted in what strikes me as more of a misstep than previous Altoids attempts at boundary-pushing. Recently I opened the familiar tin of peppermints expecting to be soothed by anachronistic charm, instead to be assaulted by an earthy imperative:

“Open your mint hole”? How of-the-moment. Thank you, but I don't think I will.