I realized I should have posted this a long time ago, but better late than never.  In my spare time I have joined up with some friends to write an iPhone app, called iSamurai. Our website is www.toykite.com, and iSamurai has gotten some really positive reviews and response. We actually have fans, which is awesome.
The game turns your phone into an imaginary sword using the accelerometers (”measures acceleration”) in the phone to figure out how you are swinging the phone.
The game is two player, so you can fight a friend and duel, each sword blow either blocked or landed depending on how you hold and swing the phone.  It is pretty funny to watch, people get very excited.  I had a few friends at work try the game and narrowly avoid throwing their phone through a window as they swung energetically towards their foe.

We’re still doing updates, new version coming out (hopefully) soon.

I’ve been thinking a lot about space travel recently, particularly the recurring theme in the sci-fi world of ’seed ships’, ships that take hundreds of years to reach their destination, carrying everything they need to start a culture from scratch. They locate a habitable world first, then load up and go.
There is this incredible (and real) device called a 3-D printer that allows you to build parts, any part, from plastic or metal dust.  There are several ways you do this, but my favorite is where they lay some dust down, then shine lasers from different angles to intersect at the spot of dust they want to melt.  The liquid dries quickly, but by sprinkling down layer after layer of dust, and melting into liquid only the parts they want, they can ‘extrude’, or melt into being, an entire part.
I was thinking about the fact that you are going to want to replace ANY part on the spacecraft at will during the hundred year voyage to your new home, so a great idea would be to make every part on the spaceship out of material that can be used in a 3-D printer, and store digital copies of every part you make the spaceship out of.  Then, as long as you take enough metal powder with you, you could remake the entire spaceship!  And if you were really clever, you could plan on stopping by asteroids on the way made up of the metal type you use.
The trick would be how to design each part so that they could be made piecemeal in the (relatively small) printer and then assembled within the spacecraft.  Also, electronics are normally made from HUNDREDS of different materials, which would be too complex.  You would need to rethink all of your electronic and mechanical design to limit the number of elements used to just a handful, OR you would need a way to convert basic, plentiful elements into all the elements you need.
The awesome thing is that given sufficient interest we could build a spacecraft with all the properties described above.
The only problem is that a) our propulsion technology is so limited it would take hundreds of thousands of years to get to the nearest star, and b) without some form of artificial gravity the passengers would all die of various illnesses after several decades in space.

Bummer.  Give us two, three hundred years though, and we’ll be so ready.

In the random life of Arin, I just met James Cameron.  He was getting a tour of JPL, so my crew showed off our formation flying robots.  We gave the whole spiel about how they are designed to detect Earth-like planets around other stars, and he was very interested, said we “were doing great work”.  He is damned sharp, faster and quicker to get each concept than our academic peers who we normally give tours to.
I’m officially impressed.

heh, he also said: “you guys are almost doing the ‘pre-research’ for Avatar.  In order to have any reasonable time frame of exploring other stars, 150-200 years, you’d need a pressing reason to do so. Avatar was based on the idea that this had already happened, and that’s exactly what you are trying to do- find an Earth like planet.  Very good work.”

Like I said, a cool guy.  I did NOT tell him I haven’t actually seen his movie yet.

Ever notice that seemingly normal people transform into bitter, hate-filled dumbasses as soon as they post on an internet forum or chat room? Well, Penny Arcade has an elegant formula for this phenomena:.

I’ve been reading the comments section below youtube videos, slashdot forums and digg posts and I can’t think of a better explanation than that. A subject like, say, video game design, that over lunch comes out as a reasoned debate over pro’s and con’s of style becomes a brutal four-letter word mudfest between combating comment threads. God help you should you bring up a subject with actual consequences like politics or free speech or religion in an internet arena- you will hear more unreasoning hatred of and by both sides than you could have ever imagined. The urge to strike back, to make your own wittily caustic reply about the original poster’s clear lack of intelligence and patent evidence of inbreeding will only serve to worsen the situation.

Back in the day I used to read Warcraft 3 gaming forums (don’t even start with me), and there was a particular poster whose gameplay seemed to echo my own desires for a smaller, quick paced game. His name was Mr.FunSocks. One day he was in one of his comment wars with another regular named zz33t and I chimed in my support for Mr.FunSocks with what I thought was a well reasoned analysis of both sides- I was promptly mocked by Mr.FunSocks as a n00b (I had only been a member of the forum for months, not years) and by zz33t as totally misunderstanding everything you-idiot-fuckface-why-don’t-you-shut-up-now.

Sigh. My fellow man. Why must you suck? Why can’t we all just get along?

This is a combination of two talks, Hans Rosling’s second talk and Bjorn Lomborg’s talk.

There is a correlation that doesn’t get much press coverage- given the current technology in use in the world today, CO2 emissions rise as GDP rises. This is across the entire globe, over the last decade. This says that CO2 emissions become more of an issue the more wealthy and successful the world becomes unless we radically change the way we produce energy. This is shown in Hans Rosling’s data using the Gapminder tool.

This is a factor in Bjorn Lomborg’s talk, (posted previously). His economists placed global warming at the bottom of the list of problems we should solve first. This is based in part off the data showing that a small reduction in CO2 emissions would only postpone the day that most of Bangladesh and India goes under water- it won’t prevent it. The economists thus concluded that the solutions to date (such as the Kyoto treaty) would only delay the inevitable trend by a few years and are thus of little value.

His economists ignore the fact that most of the other solutions to global problems would tend to improve GDP and thus speed up global warming because CO2 emissions (with current technology) go up with GDP. So if we absolutely must solve global warming by limiting CO2 emissions then we should focus all our energy on technology to make the production of cheap, CO2 free energy a commonplace standard across the globe, because we are going to need only more energy as time goes on.

American news tends to portray global warming as a problem created by the developing world using dirty energy sources like coal. Not really. The USA creates more CO2 emissions per person than any other nation, not because we’re bad people but because we’re filthy rich. As the poor nations become less poor (China, India, I’m looking at you) they will consume more energy, driving up CO2 emissions to approach US levels.

CO2 emission is a problem of the rich nations. It is exacerbated by more people becoming rich, which is a problem worth having.

By the time I finished posting the previous image I realized that none of my friends have any idea what it is that I’m talking about.

Alright, quick refresher: Nicholas Negroponte has a project called “One Laptop Per Child“, possibly the most important thing to happen in education in the last 10 years. He has created a very small, simple laptop for the cost of $200 (soon to cheapen) that is being sold en masse to the developing nations of the world for the education of their children. The kicker is that as a condition to buy the laptops for the children the governments have to agree that the laptop belongs to the child, and can be done with as the child likes. This is an amazing educational tool- but listen to the TED talk, Nicholas says it better.

This laptop is called the XO-Laptop. It used to be called the $100 Laptop, but when the price crept up they realized marketing would need to shift…

The goal is educational, but as a marketing tool they have created a temporary offer called Give One Get One, where they allow you to buy one XO-Laptop for yourself and simultaneously donate one to the developing world. I signed up, and my copy showed up this morning.

The image in the previous post was taken off of the laptop. It has a mike, speakers and a small camera. I could have taken a video if I wanted to punish y’all.

I am currently typing this blog entry off of my XO-Laptop, logged on wirelessly to the internet.

Sweet.

I just received my OLPC XO laptop! This is the best thing ever!

This is me, on geek.

I’ve always wondered why there wasn’t a simple verilog tutorial explaining how to use fileio for use in simulation. Well, now there is.

I have some code examples for a verilog module that opens, reads and writes binary or text files. Unfortunately, Modelsim doesn’t have the ability to write to a binary file (lame!) so I wrote a simple c program to help me do the conversions to/from binary and text files.

The verilog example shows the use of: $fopen, $fwrite, $fdisplay, $fread, $fclose, $readmemh.

Create_binary_files.cpp

Verilog_Fileio_tutorial.v (Server issue prevents me from called it a .v file. My apologies in advance for this lameness. Rename the .txt to a .v at will)

If you want, you can get the entire zip file that contains all the output products of these two files. The zip file also includes a project file for Xilinx ISE 7.1 as well as a project file for Visual Studio 2005. Verilog_fileio_tutorial.zip
Enjoy.