I’m still debating how to handle moblogging, even as I phoned in my picture leaving for Florida today. One option is Flickr + Blogger to automagically create blog posts that redirect to flickr. The other option is to write some mail processing scripts of my own, and send the pics from my phone to myself.

If I go with route two, I can possibly integrate with the XMLRPC work that the Gallery Summer of Code projects supposedly completed. I will have to look into this further.

Meanwhile, here is the history of what could have been my mobile blog to date, had I not been too lazy to get it up and running earlier:

Colin’s Moblog

All Packed Up
Originally uploaded by CCmcGeek.

And so begins the biannual Bayport band trip. Have fun in Florida Kaisa!

…Very Soon
Originally uploaded by CCmcGeek.

I should have known that a) there would already be a free, simple way to do this and b) Paul would know what it was. Thanks Paul! I may still write my own someday, but it no longer need be soon. I guess I’m still not accustomed to having a national network instead of Cellcom. It’s nice! Oh yeah- the pic is just a random view out my window past the speaker.

I realize I’m doing a pretty crappy job of keeping this blog updated lately… sorry! As many of you know, I ended up taking a set of classes this semester with very few exams (i.e., only one midterm + one final per course), but with large projects in all. They’ve been consuming most of my free time, and blog-apathy is my excuse for the rest.

I have, though, been taking pictures over the past couple weeks of stuff that I wanted to post to my blog. I would post a whole bunch here, but I don’t want to be a problem for those with less-than-blazing-fast broadband connections (hi Jeni!), so instead I’ll just post one, and then direct you to my “moblog” gallery (Coming Soon… after I get out of class).

On the topic of moblogging, I just figured out this morning how to send picture messages to my email via my cell phone. I can’t believe I never tried that before! Expect code to be forthcoming this weekend for turning those emails into moblog posts. Then I suspect you will see my blog post frequency increase again.

Anyway, here’s one of the pictures I took recently:

This is why we will have to shut off the fountain soon… it’s icing over 🙁

Dave and I spent all of one late night implementing the first generation (unpipelined) of our 552 project, a 16-bit MIPS processor in Verilog, and then we spent a couple hours this afternoon debugging it. Around 5:15 we ran into a snag:

The assembler we were provided was for a slightly different instruction set architecture than the one we were required to implement. Specifically, in that other ISA, PC-relative branch offsets assumed a least-significant bit of 0 and thus didn’t waste a bit in the instruction for that zero. As a result, the next PC calculation (for that ISA) would be PC .

This is a problem, because Our ISA is byte-addressable, and says the PC calculation should be PC (See beqz instruction for an example.)

Those of you familiar with computer architecture will recognize this as a severe problem: The assembler is generating offsets to odd byte addresses, due to the off-by-one-bit error, while all of our instructions are word-aligned.

On the upshot, I was able to hack around this in the assembler source and get a working version. Plug in the new binary, fix a minor bug in the parameterization of our sign extender and voila:

This is the (admittedly meaningless out of context) output of running the branchTest test program (assembled by my modified assembler).

To see the full output and verify perfect branching functionality for yourself, here is a link to the full waveform [PDF].

It must be Halloween in Madison. Countless scores of retarded drunk kids running around in costumes, high-intensity floodlights erected on State Street, but amazingly enough not that cold. Good weather for those interested in the festivities.

Interesting anecdote: after a couple job search-related activities this afternoon, I took the bus in to campus to meet Jared for supper. Got off at Johnson & Mills and walked up to University. Coming up the street were a whole bunch of people on bikes filling every lane of University, and backing traffic up solid as far as I could see. It was crazy. Lots of yelling and angry horn-honking abounded, but the revelers continued unabated. I guess that’s Madison. I actually think, if you added a light to each bike, that that might be legal… Don’t bikes have the same rights as cars for use of the lanes?

My Halloween:

Pumpkin from Jeni 🙂

Cleaned the apartment. A lot. Plus pumpkin in context.

Now I’m either going to load DD-WRT on my new Buffalo WHR-G54S router or perhaps go to sleep. TBD.

After struggling with very confusingly-worded & vaguely-defined pipelining homework questions most of the day (in between bouts of internet surfing, router ordering, and sleeping), I felt I needed to do something out of the ordinary to get my thoughts straightened out and myself re-motivated to study this weekend. So, I broke out Mom’s recipe cards & started cooking. About an hour later, here is what came out:

And it was good, against all odds.

In other news:

• I bought some new toys this weekend, like the aforementioned Buffalo WHR-G54S. I also bought a nice Digital Multimeter: Fluke 179, some TL81A electronics test leads (probably overkill, but handy nonetheless), and a temperature-controlled soldering station: Weller WES51.
• I have three midterms this week: Monday- CS 540 (Artificial Intelligence), Tuesday- CS 552 (Intro. Computer Architecture), Wednesday- CS 537 (Operating Systems).
• Combining the two items above means its a good thing UPS takes until at least Wednesday to deliver packages!
• Now, Jeni & I are going to get some coffee with Josh, and then going to Marie Antoinette

Dave and I finished our ece 315 lab today with the completion of the bench exam. It went fairly well, though it took us all but the last 3 minutes of the 3-hr timeslot to finish. Below is a video clip of our functional final project, er… functioning.

The idea was to drive the stepper motor at a rate of 10 steps per second, while flashing ‘0’ on the 7-segment display at a rate of 5 Hz. The stepper motor would turn until reaching the optical sensor, at which point it stops and allows the user to manually move it to a new position. When the pushbutton is pressed, the stepper motor turns back on and moves to the optical sensor again.

The cooler part was that on power-up, we also perfectly center the bar underneath the optical sensor by swinging back and forth to detect both edges. That looked really sweet but I didn’t think to record it. Oh well.

Here’s the final construction board after 6 labs’ worth of adding parts:

And here’s the aforementioned clip of the functioningness: (Requires QuickTime, or VLC, or something)

Jeni & I saw Gomez last night (see last post), and since then the song “How We Operate” has been driving me nuts. All day it’s been running through my head, and I kept thinking that it sounded very, very similar to some other song that I knew. At some point Alanis Morissette’s “Uninvited” came to mind, and somehow I was sure that was it, even though they didn’t seem similar enough.

Fortunately, when Dave came home for lunch, his musical knowledge came to my rescue. The reason they sounded so similar despite being different was that they have the same chord progression. Being a percussionist, I’m not 100% sure what that means, or how to hear it in a song, but it makes sense to me, and explains why these two songs have gotten stuck together in my head! Incidentally, Dave is amazing. I explained my predicament to him, and found him an old copy of Uninvited I had laying around. He listened to it for like 30 seconds, started playing along with it on his piano, and then listened to the iTMS clip of How We Operate again, and handed down his verdict. It was pretty awesome. Now he’s upstairs playing “Bui-Doi” from Miss Saigon by ear. Unreal.

Cool. I only wish I had a bit more control over this pattern-matching thing that goes on in my subconscious.

Hear what I mean:

“How We Operate” – Gomez
“Uninvited” – Alanis Morissette

Bonus amazing song:

“Bui-Doi” – Miss Saigon

Jeni, Josh, Lauren, Lauren’s mom, and I went to the Gomez concert tonight at the Annex. I was going to try and find a picture of them performing, but I didn’t find one I liked soon enough (read: in less than 30 seconds) that I had no copyright qualms with, so just go here and find one yourself. The concert was awesome, though Josh ended up not liking their music. For myself, I need to get a copy of some of their CDs! Perhaps they are also on the iPod nano that Jeni is letting me borrow right now. I will have to check in the morning.

Now I must sleep, so I can get up and meet my Math 320 group at 8am tomorrow.