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 [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 [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 [002]

Current, average and max are finally drawing on the right scale, and those nine evenly spaced spikes turn out to be broadcast radio stations. 2,048 measurements per block, ~190,000 per second, windowed, transformed and smoothed into a pretty graph. Now for the waterfall.

Denali Expedition 2009

The following is a compilation of posts related to my self-guided 2009 Denali Expedition. I was very diligent is keeping a climbing journal in 2008, but not so much in 2009.

Operator -->

A short C program where x --> 0 quietly counts its way to zero. Behold the goes-to operator.

The Spectral Man-a-lizer

I told someone I was building a spectrum analyzer. "A spectral man-a-lizer??" came the reply. Confusion aside, my filter chain is working and I can correctly claim to have seen radio station WPBS, even if I have never heard it.

Imeem

MySpace bought Imeem and promptly shut it down. Thanks for that. When will MySpace die? Also, backing up to 2TB Seagate drives is finally cheaper than burning DL DVDs, which have a tendency to forget things anyway.