Argh lame DoS attacks. Hurry up my ISP and block them, or something.

This is not for people who are easily offended.
Well, the image on that page is worse than the music (ITS JUST YOGURT OK?). :)

Spent a lot of today (yesterday? since it's now 12:45am) working on my little
homemade microcontroller board. Seems when I put a AT90S8515 in it, it works great, but when 
I used a mega8515L, nothing happens. The mega8515 worked fine in the dev
board too, so finally figured out that my 3.69mhz crystal resonates correctly
with the 90S8515, but not the mega. They are apparently pin compatible chips,
though the mega has "slightly different electrical characteristics." Damn.
So now I'm thinking of ordering my own board from ExpressPCB.com. anybody
know any other good places? ExpressPCB has a nice simple free CAD product too,
so I got started designing (err, translating) my board, here. 
I know, that design sucks, reading up on it now =)

(this board is basically a many controls -> rs232 serial interface, that will
effectively be the foot controlling board, for the Jesusonic)

The last jams Brennan and I had last friday (040820*) were awesome. A couple
of good songs in there, repeated over and over, too.

a fun little project, which is remotely useful for if you are paranoid
in public places on your laptop:

tunnel vision (win32)

not sure what I'd do with it, let me know what you think.
left control+right alt makes the circle smaller
left control+right control makes it bigger
left control+left alt+right control+right alt quits it (as does selecting 
it on the taskbar and hitting alt+f4)

OK time for a new program, assniffer (formerly sniff or assniff):
http://www.cockos.com/assniffer/

This is an auto-saving-sniffer, that logs all HTTP transfers to disk.
Somewhat amusing, I suppose.

And PathSync, is up.

Woot had a great time in vegas this past weekend for dave b's party. 
so good. drank way too much, though. still recovering.

went to see a good band last night, built to spill. very good.

there have now been two times in my life, when I found out that there
had been a big, long lasting lie (of sorts) that I hadn't even questioned,
because I trusted the person(s). The more recent one I feel more badly about,
sadly. But maybe now shit will get better.

I think I'm going to get two smallish projects up on the web site soon,
Pathsync (slightly useful) and asSniff (kinda entertaining in a sort of way).
I've actually not touched them in a few months but are pretty usable now...

Damn, Doom 3 is so damned good. Unbelievable. Congrats, id, this is
good.

Happy Birthday doggie!

Now, a little story:

When I was a freshman in highschool, the physics class (which consisted 
primarily of seniors) put on an egg drop contest, to see who could build 
the best device to cushion a raw egg dropped (in the device) from various
heights. There was about a week between when I learned of this contest
and the contest itself, and I was interested. So I thought about it for
a few days, trying to figure out something that would work good and not
be the usual bubblewrap-to-hell kind of thing. Eventually I decided I 
would try a liquid suspension system, where the egg was suspended between
two different liquids, one that was more dense than the egg, and one that
was less dense than the egg. The liquids should ideally not mix, or at 
least mostly not mix. Initially I wanted to do Glycerine for the denser
liquid, since it was very viscous and I thought it would work well. But,
unfortunately I couldn't find any in the quantity I needed, and Glycerine
soap was all expensive. So I decided to do something Glucose-like, which
involved me heating up some water and adding sugar until it was a thick
nasty sweet syrup. For the thinner liquid I used vegetable oil. For a 
container I used what I had handy, and since I did a lot of hiking in
highschool I had a few of the soft white Nalgene Trail 1L bottles. I 
don't know if you are familiar with these, but they are pretty common
and generally pretty tough. So the egg was floating in the Glucose, 
sinking in the oil, all inside this water bottle. I wanted the bottle
to land bottom-first (which later on turned out to be less important
than I had thought, since the liquids seemed to adjust accordingly if
the bottle was rotated even reasonably fast), so I used some soft clay
packed on the bottom to offset the balance a bit. I did a few tests from
around 10 or 12 feet, and it seemed to work. On the day of the contest,
it worked remarkably well from the 20ft or so drop point we had, so good
in fact that we started playing around with shooting it up from a water
balloon launcher. Or shooting it down. The circumstances in which the 
egg did eventually break were a little bit suspect (I think someone hit 
the side of it on purpose, or something), but the design had flaws that
I noticed, primarily that the bottle started leaking, from little holes 
where the bottle landed and was punctured. It still had plenty of liquid
in it, but boy oh boy did it make a mess. 

This next part, I didn't really remember until today, and it definitely
amused me. When I was a senior, there was a group of studens going to an
egg drop contest at NAU, the university an hours drive a way from my
school, and I forget why but I wasn't going (I think I may have had the
SATs or something that day). I suggested that they use my design from
years past, but that they use a hard Nalgene plastic bottle, which I
thought were even more indestructable (we would usually call them Lexan
or what not, though I'm sure they were just a good hard plastic). I
definitely enjoyed drinking from the hard plastic bottles (the water
would taste better), and I figured it wouldn't leak as easily. They
seemed receptive.

So apparently, they went to this competition, using my design, and it
performed so amazingly well, that everybody was PISSED OFF at them.
OK so that was some sarcasm in there, but everybody was in fact pissed
off. Because on the first drop of their device, when the bottle hit
the target, the bottle burst, sending super sticky sugar water and
vegetable oil (and I suppose an egg yolk and whites) EVERYWHERE. A lot
of people got a good dose apparently, and that group of students were
pissed in turn at me. To which I replied "oh, I guess the hard bottle
was a bad idea." 

Now, when I thought of this today, I really couldn't believe what they
had done, and how stupid it was. They went to an egg drop contest, using
somebody elses design, and DIDN'T EVEN BOTHER TO TEST IT. They had so
much time to prepare, and what did they do? They used my design, but 
didn't even think to test it. Cynicism is definitely wise. Perhaps 
self-doubt is wise, too. 

As preparation for another project, Christophe and I recorded 
an album called My Little Bidet. Muhaha. Not sure what exactly qualifies genres, but this is
something like death metal, maybe?

Finished reading Zodiac, was pretty good.

Got knobs working for Jesusonic using rotary encoders. woot.

Yay back home. My 5:00pm nap last night turned into a full night's sleep.
Woke up at 5:30am today, which was nice. /me enjoys the jetlag.
Need to mow the lawn, it's overgrown. Have a full trashcan, and the
trash doesnt come for 5 days. Ick.

Went to Budapest, Prague, and various places in England over the last
2.5 weeks. Some pictures are here.

Started reading Neal Stephenson's "Zodiac" since I think I've read most
of his other books, and it's good so far. Nice and twisted, which I dig.

Redid a lot of the Jesusonic language, so it's a lot cleaner now and
easier to write code for. Updating all of the effects was a bit time
consuming. But it's done now.

Going to try to spend some quality time with Cody finishing up my S4
this week. If we manage to finish it, I'll be amazed, since it's been
so long already. 

It looks like Winamp's development is going to be really dead soon, since
everybody who has directly worked on it is either gone or will be gone soon. 
Maybe it will get unfucked, I sure hope so.

Woot back to civilization. Driving on the wrong side of the road rules.
Can't wait to get home and code, though.

OK finished the book. Despite a couple of surprises,my previous stucf
mostly stands. :) If anything, disappointed by the endings lack of 
ambition...

So after recently finishing "The Confusion" (see below), waiting for the
final book in that series, I picked up in the airport "The Da Vinci Code".
About 2/3 through it, and it's probably not good style to review a book
while not having finished it, but maybe it'll be interesting to see how
my opinion changes when I finish it. Basically, compared to Stephenson's
books, it just seems a bit shallow in its characters and story. The ideas
that Brown presets are definitely interesting and keep me reading to find
out what will come next, but it's all quite plausable and lacks (for me,
someone who has never really bought into Christianity) the mind-altering
madness of Snow Crash, for example (which TDVC seems to have some parallels
with). I miss the epic nature of Quicksilver/Confusion that was so large
in scope. And they took me a long time to read. But they were a pain to
bring on airplanes (large, hardback, 1000 page books, heh. I didn't want
to wait for paperback). I'll probably update tomorrow or the next day,
at this rate, with how my review changes...

Meanwhile, my friend Dave Newton (no, not the manager of Ride, heh),
sent me this link.  Outstanding, and good too. Goes good with what my other 
good friend Dave (Biderman this time) sent me, this mp3.

Anyway...

It has been an interesting weekend. 

Too much drinking for me, indeed, but feeling ok. 

Friday night's conversations tended to that of jewelery making
and politics, and taxes (estate, brackets, why we need them, bla bla bla).

But last night, due to the nature of meeting people you have 
multiple potential connections with (if that's not too obfuscated), 
I met someone who works for (and probably started or something) a 
company that I was familiar with, one that really has pissed me 
(and many people like me) off in the past. This is all a very 
drunken party context, but we had a conversation that dragged on, 
him with his fifth of tequila and me with a small glass of scotch. 

(keeping names out of this -- sir, you know who you are, and if 
you wish to rebutt and let it be known who you are, I will gladly
give venue. mostly I'm just venting feelings here, so don't take
it personally. we just disagree on shit. oh, and I would also
like to apologize to my new neighbor who had to hear most of this
and was probably a buzzkill)

At the time the conversation was a little bit amusing, but in 
retrospect I get pissed off thinking about certain elements. Namely: 
This company I speak of is one that is very patent-centric so we had 
much differences on the subject of patents. One line he used multiple
times in defending his stance (no doubt he had used it many times 
before, likely with more success):

"when you go and invent something, you'll understand" 
"you'll want to protect the things you invent, you won't want people to STEAL it from you". 

I don't know how to write my response to this, having tried writing a 
big paragraph that just made me dizzy. So here are some thoughts:

1) The patent that this company was biggest on enforcing (as far as I
could tell) was one that they didn't actually invent, they BOUGHT. So 
yeah, they have to get return on investment. Fair enough.

2) I don't really consider myself to having invented anything, but I
do realize that I could have patented things that I had developed. No
doubt. SO DONT FUCKING TELL ME I'LL UNDERSTAND IF I EVER INVENT SOMETHING.

3) Maybe I'm not enough of a capitalist, or maybe I'm too much of one,
but I think that  if you come up with some new idea, in this age, I think 
the way to exploit it is by building it, not patenting it and preventing 
other people from building it. 

4) Worrying about protecting patents and having other people STEAL them 
from you seems wrong. I mean, why make shit if you're just going to be
freaking out about what other people might be doing..

5) It seems to me that having an idea or technology that is unpatented
will encourage more improvement on the underlying idea/technology, as
well as competition and incentive for improvement (his response was 
something to the effect of "and we have the best of breed technology",
and I'm like "best of breed because you'll sue anybody who competes?".)
If Intel had a completely valid all-encompassing patent on
the microprocessor and anything like it, that doesn't seem like it
would be healthy, nor does it seem like we'd be where we are today.

6) As someone who really enjoys writing code and making things, I feel
like it's art. Being able to sit down, make something that's completely
new to me from scratch, and infringe on a patent owned by a huge multi-
national corporation, that hoards patents as a leveraging tool for
other huge multi-national corporations, who patent as much as possible,
just sems like a really bad situation. I mean, it's been said before,
but it's fucked up. Very.

That is about all. Maybe more later.

(edit: we did manage to agree on one thing, that a certain other company
that we both had experiences with sucked).

Also: I'm finding that "A Perfect Circle - 13th Step" is a quite good album.

Seems my last update had me bumped from Nullsoft to misc on Webdog. 
Bastards! JK I love you Webdog. Sort of.

Got my AVR starter kit, the STK500. I must say, I'm having a blast with it.
Their development tools are pretty good, and the hardware itself rocks.
(mmm 1 cycle instructions, and running at decent clock rates).

Enjoying getting back to the basics, writing (err, cut&pasting anyway) 
serial code that works by setting the state of the serial line to high and
low, and more. Had some frustrating time with a bad serial cable, but got 
that sorted out. Now the hard part, which I know little about, will be 
making a simple custom board for the footswitches. Basically this 
microcontroller will read a number of switches and knobs, and detect events 
on them, and send serial messages to the host computer (which will be running 
Jesusonic) notifying it what the user has done. All super simple, but should 
work good. anyway, there will always be room for second gen, of having a 
little LED or LCD display on the footboard...