Snow
What's the deal with all the snow? I thought we, as a planet, had decided we were done with cold weather. And I was on board with this plan. Stupid snow.
Curtis Jones
Flash
Flash is dead to me. And thanks to dedicated developers, Flash can be dead to you too, with the help of Click2Flash. If you use Safari. I'm sure there's help for Firefox as well.
Of Gum, Skating and Nuclear Power Plants
How does anyone convince themselves it's acceptable to spit gum into a drinking fountain? Speed skating, meanwhile, is the coolest-looking Olympic sport, with all the appeal of Nascar. And Georgia is getting two nuclear plants, a comfortable 150 miles away.
Ecuador Pictures
Ecuador pictures are here.
Guns and Cats
I finally tested my new Beretta 90two, and it was everything I'd hoped, even at a hundred yards. I spent the first half hour at Chestnut Mountain imitating a broken record about keeping the gun pointed down range. Next on the list: a suppressor.
A Naming Fit of Stupidity
Beretta makes two distinct handgun lines: the 92 and the 90two. This is because their marketing people are idiots. I drove thirty miles to a gun store and still got shown the wrong one, because 92 and 90two sound awfully similar over the phone.
The Mad Hatter
Johnny Depp. Anne Hathaway. Alice in Wonderland is going to be great. No, not this one. This one. Ha ha ha.
Spectrum Analyzer [005]
A week of work on demodulation and still no sound, so I went back to the UI: drag the graph to adjust frequency, fading controls, mouse-tracking power and frequency readouts. The signal I assume is AM 750 isn't anywhere near where it should be. Off to Ecuador.
![Spectrum Analyzer [005]](/content/images/size/w720/2025/10/sa004.png)
Spectrum Analyzer [004]
I reworked the spectrum analyzer around lock-free, wait-free queues so the device read thread never blocks long enough to corrupt its own buffer. More work per graph, yet CPU dropped from 120% of a core to 65%. Then -O3 made the data vanish entirely.
![Spectrum Analyzer [004]](/content/images/size/w720/2025/11/Screen-shot-2010-01-11-at-9.46.45-AM.png)
Spectrum Analyzer [003]
My first idea for the waterfall display was drawing millions of 1x1 rectangles per second. That didn't work at all. Treating it as a raw RGBA image and letting Core Graphics render it directly was so much faster. Now I just need an HF satellite overhead.
![Spectrum Analyzer [003]](/content/images/size/w720/2025/11/Screen-shot-2010-01-09-at-5.44.04-AM.png)