redwyre

 The properties of the memristor were firstpredicted in 1971, and now have been proven to exist.  This discovery is huge, because it allows a new type of memory that is smaller (HP have already prototyped memory with over 6x the density) and doesn’t need constant power to keep it’s contents. Basically it replaces RAM and HDDs.  Also, the memristor has analog memory properties similar to synapses, so we will probably see some advances in neural nets as well.

Some more links:

• http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2008/080430a.html
• http://www.dailytech.com/HP+Invents+Fabled+Memristor+New+Class+of+Electrical+Components/article11652.htm
• http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn13812-engineers-find-missing-link-of-electronics.html

I woke up on Monday morning to this:

..accompanied with a light buzzing sound.  Fortunately for me it seemed to break when it went off at the scheduled time, so I got to work on time.. but for the rest of the week I will have to rely on my mobile to wake me up. And I don’t like it’s chances.

So today I finally got my Arduino Mini and it’s associated USB adaptor, and when I pulled it out I was kinda shocked at how small it really is.

This little beauty has an ATmega168, with 16k of flash, 8 analog inputs, 12 digital i/o pins, 16MHz clock and a package that is easy to use in a breadboard.  Currently I don’t have a breadboard so I can’t do anything with it yet other than stare longingly…

But soon my pretty… soon…

So, I’ve been trying to get my Asteroids game (the first game I wrote in my engine, back in 2002) working again.  Since I wrote it, I’ve done a few major changes, and not bothered to keep it up to date.  So, after a number of fixes, I manged to get it somewhat working again:

There’s some asteroids, and the title text.  I have no idea why the text is upside down, but hopefully it will be an easy fix.  The actual gameplay doesn’t work, you just get an awkwardly rotated ship floating off into space.  But I’m looking forward to getting it running so I can fly around and see the cool particle trails I made 5 years ago!

I spent some time playing around with a piece of normal glass, but it turns out that normal glass almost totally blocks near infra-red light! You can clearly see it’s green when viewed side on. However, it is possible to get almost perfectly clear glass that is clear side on. I got a small 8mm piece and tried it.. it works fantastic!

Here’s the setup, I’ve got the leds aimed into the glass, and a bit of foam blocks light leaking underneith the glass.

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When I first got vista, I looked around for some articles on the Desktop Window Manager, since it can do cool things like real-time thumbnails previews of apps. So as I was exploring, I came across the actual API to do it, and there are some functions that can be used to extend the “glass” section of windows when you have Aero on full. This got me thinking, if I could make my window transparent, could I render transparency with XNA? The answer is, surprisingly, yes!

I don’t know if the XNA team did it on purpose, or it just happened to work out that way, but it is possible:

So, today I got my shiny new 8800GTS, and I decided that maybe this new DX10 stuff (along with my frustrations with XNA) was a good reason to get back into coding and adding a DX10 path to my engine (while retaining DX9, so an exercise in semi-cross platformity).  It’s worth noteing that I wrote most of this engine before I started working, so it hasn’t had much love over the last 4 years.  So, after checking in files, moving libs around, adding libs to dependancies, commenting out code that used and older version of lua and fixing compiler errors, I got it compiling and linking.  It didn’t run though, which I found out was a call to loading the lua io lib which I don’t use, so I commented it out and it actually RAN.

Since it’s the most complete game I have (it was my main demo when I applied to Pandemic), I think I’ll do a bit of work cleaning it up a bit before I start on anything new. I’m thinking of maybe making an RTS, so the tile-based ground might make a good starting point.

Finally got around to wiring up the circuit for the first string of LEDs.  Here’s a first test with the modded web-cam:

I tried beaming it into a piece of glass to test FTIR, but it didn’t seem to work… I’ll have to see if I can get a piece of perspex to try it with.

If you, like my friend, have a tendency to put electronic devices such as mobile phones and audio players through the wash (or other hilarious scenarios) here are some steps to save your device’s life.

First and most important, take out the battery.  The longer the battery is in there, the more damage is done from corrosion.  If the devices has a built-in battery, time is even more important to following the rest of the steps.

Next, the device needs to be dried.  This can be done more effectively by pulling it apart and drying it with a heat gun (or hair dryer).  If you aren’t confident in doing so, you might want to take it to someone who is.  It’s probably a good idea to clean tight spots with some water dispersant so there are no minerals left from evaporating water.  If you can’t take the device apart you could try putting it in a container of something dry like rice to absorb the water, or perhaps a better choice would be to first submerse it in some kind of non-conductive oil or alcohol, or even clean distilled water.  The key is getting the impurities in that water out of the device.

Now if there is any corrosion you will need to remove it, use some water dispersant and scratch it off, making sure you clean it away with the dispersant.

After the device is all dry and clean, put it back together and see if it works.  Hopefully it will!

I finally gave up on creating my own blog software and installed WordPress. In the bigger picture I guess it’s the content that’s important and not the software behind it, even though I had some fun re-inventing the wheel. But lately I’ve been wanting to be able to post stuff on my own blog, so here it is.

My goal for this site has always been to collect a group of people with interesting things to say, so I hope to get some more people on board in the near future. But a big reason for the site is having a way to define myself professionally, and to build my name in the outside world. Also it will somewhere to release any projects that I make public.