With some $800 worth of fireworks, Jared and Co. put on quite the fireworks display this year!  I’ve missed out the last two years due to internships elsewhere in the country, so it was great to see everyone and placate my inner pryo a bit 🙂

Also gave me a chance to play with my camera a bit again.  It has a pretty decent Fireworks shot mode, which seems to take about 2 seconds worth of exposure data, and then immediately process it in the onboard Digic III processor to highlight the fireworks and darken the rest of the image.  The results were quite decent, in spite of my unsteady hands.

Here’s a few shots I took last night:

In the two weeks since I returned from my extended vacation in England, I’ve put a fair bit of work into tying up some loose ends from Enlight before I move out to Seattle. One of those loose ends was tidying up our website, which I present to you now:

In fact, I actually created two websites recently. The second website I’ve put together is closely related, and is the new web home of the Maquina Project:

Both pages are set up using WordPress on IIS 6 with PHP via Microsoft’s FastCGI module. It was an interesting install… a bit more involved than when I’ve done it under Apache in the past, but successful nonetheless. (If you’re looking to do the same (IIS 6 + PHP + WordPress), I would refer you to these two helpful articles on IIS.net: WordPress on IIS and Using FastCGI to Host PHP Applications on IIS 6.0)

The theme for both pages is Cutline, by Splashpress Media, with a fair bit of additional tweaking of my own. For instance, I removed all the “Blog-looking” stuff (essentially, the entire sidebar and comments) from the static pages, and rewired the links on top so that the news updates (blog posts) would look more like just another page.

About a year and a half ago, I bought myself a Netgear GS108 gigabit switch to upgrade my in-apartment “backbone”. Unfortunately, it gave up the ghost last week, starting slowly flashing its lights on and off, and dropped all the PCs in our apartment off the net. I tried a few things, determined that it was, in fact, the switch that was broken, and took it out of service. Fortunately, just before throwing it out, I tried searching for any similar problems, only to find out this particular model is known for this failure.

The Problem: A Netgear GS108 is Broken

Broken, here, means that the switch appears to slowly flash all of its lights, at a rate of maybe once every two seconds. The computers connected to the switch cannot communicate, or at best, are communicating for a fraction of a second, and then report that a cable has been unplugged.

Under the Hood: This symptom indicates failed capacitors on the GS108’s circuit board. For more information, see the comments on Newegg’s product entry (with thanks to the users there who found the problem). If you open your switch up you will see two dark green capacitors with bulging tops (these are broken).

The Solution: Replace two failed capacitors

Supplies

• Broken GS108
• Phillips Screwdriver
• Two replacement 1000μF capacitors, (at least 10V rating)
• Soldering iron
• [Optional] Hookup wire, heatshrink tubing, electrical tape

Procedure

1. Begin by unplugging your switch from the wall, removing the power cable from the back, and removing all network cables from the front.
2. Open the switch by removing the two small black screws with a Phillips screwdriver.
3. Slide the top/back panel off of the switch by pulling it toward the rear.
4. Locate the two dark green 1000μF capacitors and verify that the tops are bulging outward, indicating that this is likely your source of failure.
5. Remove the circuit board by unscrewing the four silver screws at its corners with a Phillips screwdriver.
6. Desolder the two existing capacitors, being careful not to damage nearby components or burn yourself 😉

7. Solder the two new capacitors in place. Below is roughly how this looked after I replaced mine. (Sorry for the terrible photos… my new camera is arriving sometime this week)

   

   For me, the replacement capacitors I was working with were too tall to place vertically, so I ran hookup wire to connect them in place and allow them to lie flat. As a precaution, I used heatshrink tubing on the leads to be sure they were not exposed, and wrapped the sides of the capacitors in electrical tape, as they got a bit nicked by the hacksaw used to harvest them from their previous home…

8. Place the circuit board back in the shell, and replace the 4 silver screws.
9. Slide the cover back on and secure with the two black screws.
10. For safety’s sake, reconnect just the power first to be sure the switch will power on, before connecting your valuable computers & other devices.
11. Reconnect your computers and you’re done.

Disclaimer:

This worked well for me, and based on the comments at Newegg, seems to be a common successful fix. BUT, I don’t claim that your broken switch is necessarily plagued by the same problem, nor that this fix will work for you. Also, I am not responsible for the actions you take to fix your switch: be careful with soldering irons, flux, and lead!

In the past three weeks, instead of doing all the studying / schoolwork I am supposed to have been doing, I have, among other things, also read three really great new books. Too great, in fact, in that I read the latest today in one 8-hour sitting. (Well, technically I did move from the couch to the chair, and paused to bake some chicken for supper… but I read the thing straight through, nonetheless.)

The books were, in the order they arrived for free:

• Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson
  
• Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi
  
• Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson
  

I thought about putting mini-reviews up here, but I don’t think I have anything amazing to add to the descriptions you can find elsewhere, other than to say that all three are very different books, but I enjoyed all three greatly. Of them, Spin had me hooked the most, seeing as I was compelled to read it straight through. If you like Science Fiction, I highly recommend it; very cool futurist technology ideas (and scary to think about those that are feasible…), and also very neat ideas about how a society might react in the face of a looming yet not immediate apocalypse (in this case, known with certainty to be some 40 years distant).

The most important part:

How you, fellow science fiction / fantasy lover, too, can get free digital books like these to read, on a weekly basis. Check out the publisher Tor‘s new program, called “Watch the Skies.” They’ll send out free digital books once a week, and also enter you in a drawing for something or other.

If you don’t read xkcd every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you’re ruining your life.

I don’t get to drum anymore, but this is still hilarious…

You can identify them ahead of time — they lead with their left foot when the music starts.

I just wanted a brief, self-congratulatory post since I finished my CS 559 graphics program that I mentioned a night or two ago. It works pretty dang sweet, and despite the fact that a “couple” other programs out there already do this stuff and a heck of a lot more (like, oh, Photoshop, The GIMP, etc), I’m still pretty proud to say that 100% of the code that made these pictures was written by me 🙂

Definitely look at these at their full size (click on them), they’re not very impressive as thumbnails. (And that spin one is not impressive ever, but that’s ok. It serves a different purpose.)

Pictures Created By Me

1. Assignment: Create an image of yourself in a place you’ve never been. Of course, I am a nerd, and a huge fan of a particular movie. So the logical conclusion:
   
2. Demonstrate Sharpening and Blurring. I turn to everyone’s favorite College of Engineering icon, incidentally covered in a light bit of ice, courtesy of Enlight:
   
3. Demonstrate Image Rotation and Composition. I took a red checkerboard background, created an image of a single line, and then made lots of rotated copies of it:
   
4. Demonstrate Nonphotorealistic / “Painterly” Rendering. Once again, our favorite College of Engineering icon jumps in as a model. The top picture is the original, the bottom left is the painting type we were required to do (circle brushes), and the bottom right is an extra painting type that I created (custom brush, in this case, an X shape).
   

In between fits of graphics programming today, I had a pretty neat opportunity to beta test a game that some friends of mine are developing for Google’s Android software platform. The game is called Parallel Kingdom, and is based on the idea of using the GPS in the Android phones to play a medieval MMORPG in a virtual world that mirrors the real world.

What does that mean? Well, for example, in one round of beta testing, Jason built a castle on Capitol Square, while Jon set up shop at Camp Randall. I got too close, and got killed 😛 In the virtual world, we got to craft weapons, build buildings, and run around attacking eachother, which will ultimately happen out in real life. Check out their first video, for a sweet example!

I’m looking forward to seeing this progress; they’ve got a lot of really great ideas!

I just found this awesome screensaver / distributed computing project today called Electric Sheep. In short, it’s a screensaver that shows you awesome animations while using your idle CPU to create new ones in the background.

Here’s a couple sample images:

(Images by Scott Draves and the Electric Sheep)

Why “Electric Sheep”?

An homage, it turns out:

The result is a collective “android dream”, an homage to Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

More Background

They have screensavers written for Windows, Linux, and Mac platforms, where the idea is to create some pretty awesome art while your computer is in screensaver mode. When the screensaver is active, it downloads recently completed “sheep” (high-quality MPEGs) from the sheep server, and displays them for your viewing pleasure. Meanwhile, in the background, it also downloads some XML data sets to run through an algorithm which creates frames for these “sheep”. When the frames are done, it sends them to the sheep server. Ultimately, your computer contributes to creating new art while showing you the current stuff!

Behind the scenes, the screensaver is running code called Flam3, to create “Cosmic Recursive Fractal Flames”, and smooth animations between them. A human designer, using one of the tools available at that site, describes the fractal they want. Then, the Electric Sheep in the distributed computing network crunch the numbers to generate intermediate animation frames.

Very Cool.

Let’s do some math:

That’s 180 + 160 + 160 + 500 + 160 + 500 + 500 = 2160. Roughly 2 TB. Much fun 🙂

(Granted, I’m actually going to put those 3 500GB’s in RAID 5 once this copy of Ubuntu finishes downloading, so I’m only adding about 931MB, and actually, I’m going to take the old drives out and run just on the RAID array so that my data is stored in case another drive fails, but still. It will be a lot of fun having a computer with 2TB of storage and 7 hard drives for a while :-D)

Before:

During:

After: