Thursday, March 10th, 2011
In anticipation of my chumby made of atoms coming from a Woot order, I’m starting out with this chumby made of bits.
home > tech
Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008
Hi-Def Video Playback on Windows
Jeff Atwood’s great tips on Hi-Def video playback for Windows.
Thursday, November 9th, 2006
Directory of Open Access Journals
The DOAJ lists scholarly journals that give free access to the full text articles. Some papers are pretty decent — I poked around and found the International Journal of Signal Processing interesting.
Sunday, November 5th, 2006
The IR & EO Systems Handbook — the definitive reference for Infrared and Electro-Optical systems — is available for free. For scanned PDFs, the quality is high. Unfortunately, the fact that they are scanned means that the text is not searchable.
How to download (via Randy Jost):
- go to http://stinet.dtic.mil/
- search for “Accetta and Shumaker”
- download pdfs and be happy
There are eight volumes:
Volume 1: Sources of Radiation
Volume 2: Atmospheric Propagation of Radiation
Volume 3: Electro-Optical Components
Volume 4: Electro-Optical Systems Design, Analysis, and Testing
Volume 5: Passive Electro-Optical Systems
Volume 6: Active Electro-Optical Systems
Volume 7: Countermeasure Systems
Volume 8: Emerging Systems and Technologies
Saturday, June 3rd, 2006
I have joined the Fraternity of Petals Around the Rose (via Steve). Kris, how long till you grok it?
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
Many of Berkeley’s courses are now available as podcasts. Listen and learn …
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
Luxagraf mates markdown and XeTeX (LaTeX with MacOS X fonts) to produce a wonderful offspring: hi-fi text. In goes clean, minimal markdown text. Out comes beautiful typeset pdf documents.
Sunday, October 9th, 2005
DARPA’s Grand Challenge (a race between vehicles that are able to navigate an off-road course without human intervention) started yesterday. It looks like they will soon be announcing the winner because only 1 of the 23 teams is still running with no chance of catching up to the very tight pack of 4 teams that have completed the 132 mile race in less than 10.5 hours.
It’s looking like the final placing will be:
- 9h 55m: Stanford Racing Team’s Stanley, a Volkswagen Touareg with GPS, IMU, laser, radar, vision, and wheel speed sensors.
- 9h 59m: CMU Red Team’s Sandstorm, a 1986 HMMWV with vision, radar, laser, and GPS sensors.
- 10h 4m: CMU Red Team’s H1ghlander, a 1999 H1 Hummer with INS, GPS, and laser sensors.
- 10h 17m: Gray Team’s GrayBot, a 2005 Ford Escape Hybrid with cameras, laser, and GPS sensors.
It is amazing how close the 4 teams that finished were. Sandstorm only lost by 4 minutes!
Saturday, October 1st, 2005
The creator of the creative commons license, Lawrence Lessig, has made his book Free Culture available free online. Since his license allows noncommercial derivitive works with attribution, people have remixed the book into many interesting versions:
Of course, you can also buy the dead tree version if you want to give his publisher a few bucks.
Friday, September 2nd, 2005
MATLAB Update to R14 Service Pack 3
Tommorrow, The Mathworks released an update to MATLAB. It’s funny that I’m reading about it right now, yet it is not released until tomorrow. Some of the improvements of interest to me (and to Steve) include:
- better Mac support for plotting, speed, and the compiler
- large scale modeling which seems to be their buzzword for the integration of Simulink and Stateflow with GUI navigation
- bug fixes in the Image Processing Toolbox, including an improved imagerotate
Thursday, September 1st, 2005
Quasi-Monte Carlo Metropolis algorithm
According to the PNAS Journal (a favorite of Berkely Groks), the quasi-Monte Carlo Metropolis algorithm can get your results much quicker if your MC problem happens to fit their conditions: it has to be “completely uniformly distributed” (CUD). If you have a CUD problem, PNAS can solve it (those of your giggling at this are immature).
Thanks to my friend Sotos for pointing this one out.
