bytex64.net/blog

The Detective crouched over the victim, peering intently at him. After a moment of deductive prodding, he rose and addressed the others in the room.

"This ignition coil... is dead."

Several guests gasped; others merely frowned in disapproval.

Lady Etrescu, always one to question the world around her, quickly asked, "But who would do such a thing?"

The Detective replied, "I don't yet know, but let's examine the evidence, shall we? Every crime has a reason, and by discovering the circumstances and history of the deceased, we will find the culprit. Who can tell me the recent history of this car?"

Professor Erickson rose, pausing a moment to clear his throat before speaking. "I was in this car barely a month a go, when it suddenly began misfiring. I was merely a passenger, so I can't tell you the details, but I do know that it was fixed shortly thereafter."

"You were the passenger." The Detective paused to light his pipe. With a puff of exhaled smoke, he continued, "Who was the driver?"

"That would be Master Black."

"I see." The Detective puffed again on the pipe, then addressed the maid. "Would you be so kind as to bring the master down? I would like to have a word with him."

"At once, sir." The maid disappeared up the stairs.

Moments later, Master Black appeared, visibly disturbed. "This had better be good. I was on the verge of completing a very delicate and interesting algorithm."

"I assure you, I am dealing with a matter quite non-trivial. Do you recall one month ago when your car began misfiring?"

"I do."

"Could you explain what happened, and how the problem was solved?"

"I was driving around with Professor Erickson, who was with me searching for a house to rent this fall. After seeing a few houses, my car began mysteriously misfiring at more than half throttle. It was found later that a part of the distributor had broken, causing a poor connection. After replacing the distributor cap, the rotor, the spark plugs, and plug wires, the problem mostly went away, except for an occasional misfire I attribute to lower quality replacement parts. Until recently, the car has run fine."

The Detective puffed again. "Until recently?"

"Recently, the car has started misfiring again, but only after it has warmed up. The ECU gave me code 15 — Ignition Output Signal — but after clearing that code, the misfire has continued and that code has not been seen again."

"Are you aware, Master Black, that your ignition coil has been found dead this very night?"

"No, but that would explain the misfire."

"Indeed, but that's only half the mystery. Without understanding what caused the coil to die, any replacement might suffer the same fate. Fortunately, I think you've provided me with all the evidence I need to solve this case."

Lady Etrescu once again queried the Detective. "Then who did it? Who killed the ignition coil?"

Who indeed... If you have an idea what killed the coil, post it in the comments. Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion in part 2!

This last weekend, Erickson and Krystal came down to Springfield. They weren't coming to see me, though. They had been planning on going to Branson for quite a while, and my stay in Springfield just happened to coincide. They got a place to stay for free, and I got to race go-karts with friends. Everybody won. :)

I've just cooked some eggs over easy, a challenge for me, as I typically only eat them scrambled. It's a simple test, really. If I get salmonella, I've failed. In the short term, though, they are tasty.

I found an Asian grocery store nearby, so I'm stocked up on soy sauce, ramen, pocky, and lychee coconut jellies. Mmmm, lychee.

Before last weekend, I was in kind of a funk. Here I am, in a new place, and I can't get motivated enough to go outside. Certainly, I've been much further away from home, and in much less fortunate circumstances, but something about being here just isn't working for me. Yeah, Springfield isn't the best place in the world, but that's not the problem, I discovered.

Every other time I've been far from home, there was always something to look forward to. Another day of seeing new places, moving on, meeting new people. But after coming here, I lost that momentum. I was just here to be here, nothing else. Thanks to people here, I have discovered things to explore, but beyond that I've realized that I do have something to look forward to:

Going home.

Just filling in the square is boring and stupid. I'm not finished here, but as soon as I feel like I've had enough, I'm just going to pack up and go home. And with that realization, I'm actually starting to enjoy myself. Odd how the desire to move on makes you appreciate what you have, isn't it?

Me: That's what friends are for, to point out your flaws and shortcomings.
Chrissy: ...?
Me: ... among other things.

The surprise dinner last time was Alan's friend Jon, who took it upon himself to introduce himself, take me to dinner, and show me where the important things are (beer and coffee). It's good that he did this; I would have happily sat by myself hacking and watching anime for the next month. We went to a good bar and grill, shared a pitcher of Fat Tire, and talked at length about things geeky and personal. Oh, by the way, all of New Belgium's brews are available here. :D

Speaking of Anime, I have to stop watching Galaxy Express 999. It's too damn depressing. The movie is depressing, too, but at least it's depressing all in one chunk. In the series that I'm watching, every single episode ends on a downer. Even the last one I saw with Tetsuro pretending to be Hanako's husband to make her parents happy ends on a good note, but then the narrator cuts in with "Nonohana is full of flowers, but they're only pretty for the travelers. Nonohana is a planet where people are poor and toil for the best years of their lives." Sheesh, Matsumoto-san, can't we have an adventure that ends with a little ray of hope?

The Wikipedia article above led me to another series, Akihabara@DEEP. It follows a group of misfit Otaku through their misadventures in Akihabara. I can't really explain concisely what an Otaku is, or the culture of Akihabara, so your best bet is to just watch it yourself and (probably) recoil in horror.

Nola invited me to see the midnight showing of the new Indiana Jones movie. The movie was good. It bent the formula of the originals a bit, but overall, it wasn't the George Lucas-reimagined abomination it should have been. I got to know Nola a bit better. I had had trouble understanding her over the phone, which is partly her phone's fault — she has a Samsung — but is also because she tends to trail off or just not speak loudly enough. This is to say, of course, that she speaks just like I do. :/

I've settled in, more or less, and I've begun getting some actual work done. Right now, though, I'm going to watch some more Akihabara@DEEP. :)

A while ago, my boss, Alan, offered to let me stay at his house in Springfield, MO, while he and his girlfriend were away. I got my stuff in order, accepted his offer, and here I am in the Ozarks (or so the billboards tell me). It's a small house near the MSU campus, stocked with Apple Cinema Displays, fast internet, and all the organic food I can eat (which probably won't be much). Even their hand soap is organic, a feat I didn't think was possible. Erickson informs me that Springfield is in the KKK's "top ten places to live," so the place is probably whiter than even my hometown.

After bodging together an AirPort Express and an old Linksys router, I have my laptop and desktop networked. I have found empirically that the Radeon X850 XT does not support dual-link DVI, so I can't use the 30" Cinema Display. I might pick up a cheap DX10-capable dual-link card while I'm here. Wouldn't BioShock on 30" of screen be something to behold? Also interesting: the 30" Apple Cinema Display had a Microsoft mouse hooked up to it. Thank goodness there was a Targus USB hub in-between, or there might have been a terrible fight.

After hearing that the house was hard to find, I tried a little harder than normal, and found it without much trouble. I met Alan's friend Nola when she dropped off the keys. Unfortunately, after driving 8 hours, I didn't feel like socializing, and that was the extent of our meeting. I'll catch up with her later.

And for those of you who think Wal-Marts in Champaign, Urbana, and Savoy are not enough Wal-Marts, you'll love Springfield. It has five, only one of which is not a Supercenter. That's one Wal-Mart for every 30,000 people. The Chambana area, by comparison, serves nearly 40,000 people with each Wal-Mart.

The preponderance of organic food here has me seriously pondering it... and not in a way that organic food fans will like. You'll often hear "conservation" and "organic" from the same set of lips, but I'm not sure that the two ideas work together that well. I'm a big fan of conservation. As an engineer, the idea of doing more with less is an interesting and useful challenge. Organic, on the other hand, throws out many of these productivity-enhancing achievements in the name of healthy living. No pesticides, no herbicides, no preservatives; nothing but the food. Organic food typically costs more. Why? Because you're putting the same or more work into the product and getting lower yields. Things like recycling and solar power are saving energy, but it seems at first blush like organic food is a luxury. That's just my quick analysis of it, though, and I'd be very interested to hear a rebuttal.

SURPRISE DINNER.

I saw a commercial on TV about the efficiency of freight transported by rail. A freight train gets over 400 miles per gallon per ton, an efficiency ten times greater than that of freight-carrying trucks and 28 times that of airborne freight. For those of you in the tree hugging set, ponder that the next time you ship something air mail.

I'm personally more concerned with personal transport (imagine that), and something my dad said struck me as rather odd. He claimed that the cost of food energy required to propel a bicycle a mile was greater than the cost of gasoline required to propel a car a mile. Given the chance to both utilize my expensive university education and use questionable figures and statistics from across the internet to prove someone wrong, I leapt into action.

To hit hardest at the food energy source, I decided to use rice, since it is extremely cheap and provides plenty of energy. Rice provides about 3.47 Cal per gram, or about 14.51 kJ per gram. (Remember folks, a food Calorie, with a big C, is 1000 calories, with a little C) Our $16 bag of rice in the kitchen weighs 9.06kg, which the bag states is 189 servings. Wikipedia says that riding a bike uses about 120kJ/km. This is of course dependent on speed — bike more slowly and you'll use less energy, bike faster and you'll use more. That particular figure is at about 10-12 MPH. Throwing this together dimensionally (thank you, Mr. Cox!):

120 kJ/km * 1.609 km/mi * 1/14.51 g/kJ * 16/9.06 $/kg * 1/1000 kg/g = 0.0235 $/mi

That's 2.35 cents per mile. This does, of course, assume that all of the energy in the rice is converted to usable energy, so let's assume you need twice as much, and it'll cost you 4.7 cents per mile. Of course, this also assumes you don't have any energy saved up in fat deposits that you could use, so (quite literally) YMMV.

The car, on the other hand, is a simple calculation. We'll assume gas is $3.50/gal, and that you optimistically get 25 mpg in the same places you'd use a bike (i.e., not the highway). You get:

3.50 $/gal * 1/25 gal/mi = 0.14 $/mi

So driving yourself costs you 14 cents per mile. There is a wrinkle, though. Most cars can seat additional passengers at no significant additional fuel cost, whereas each cyclist must eat their own rice. For two people, biking is still better at 9.4 cents per mile, but once you have three people, it evens out, and if you can carry four, well, then you're saving money (assuming your friends aren't cheapskates).

But that's not the real wrinkle in this story. The thing we have not considered is chronological context. I told you that my dad told me this, but he heard it from his dad, meaning that my numbers aren't correct at all. If we can assume, though, that the price of rice has stayed constant for the last ten years (and I'd wager it's pretty close), we can figure out exactly when gas hit the tipping point versus rice:

x $/gal * 1/25 gal/mi = 0.047 $/mi

X, for those who have not grabbed a calculator, is $1.175/gal, a price reached, by my recollection, some time in the mid-to-late 90's. So in a bizarre mathematical happy ending, we're both right. But since you can't go back in time and buy gas for $0.70/gal, you should probably ride your bike. :)

Addendum: I used Google to calculate these values, which will conveniently keep track of units for you (and assume silly units like dollars per meter for the answer unless you tell it otherwise). It's a handy feature that I use for unit conversions all the time. For the curious, here is the calculation for rice cents per mile.

Completely out of the blue, I've finished a new episode of VFS, and released it on its new home on the Dominion of Awesome. There's a lot of new and interesting stuff going on with it, and it's probably easier if I just link you to it. I mean, I wrote it, so why repeat myself?

In other, slightly older news, I did decide to jump at the Aiptek Action HD, and I'm pretty satisfied with it. Its low-light performance is less-than-stellar, but on the whole, it's a wonderfully performing little $200 camcorder. I've got a 4GB SDHC card on its way that'll really allow me to stretch its legs. Look forward to some VFS segments in 720p. :D

Other news, which is probably ancient by now, is that recent versions of Flash 9 can stream MP4 files with H.264 video (a.k.a. MPEG-4 AVC) and AAC audio. The Apple fanboys in the audience will note that this means that files you can play on an iPod or iPhone can now also be played unmodified in a webpage, meaning less encoding and more fun for everyone! This is, of course, provided your MP4 files are hinted for streaming, but that's not difficult in the least. The digital videophiles in the audience will note that this means streaming video will look about twice as good as it does with Flash 8 video, and about ten times better than it does with Flash 6 video (which, I might add, is the only kind of Flash video that FFmpeg can do). H.264 looks absolutely gorgeous at any bitrate, so this is a huge win for online video.

Anywho, enjoy the new VFS!

I've recently picked up on Happysad, a webcomic that seems so eerily familiar, that I have to wonder if someone hasn't been rummaging through my mental trash and selling my old memories on eBay. One in particular is near and dear to my heart, a word that's sure to send any man's hopes plunging to the depths of the romantic abyss:

The N-word.

See also: The F-word, and the S-word.

Because the comic has left me with an odd combination of romantic hopefulness and devilishly playful cynicism, I'm going to post this picture up on OkCupid. Of course, if anyone does respond, it's a personal triumph, and if no one does, it proves either that looks don't matter, or that online match sites are wholly useless. Who says you can't always win?

MUHAHAHAHAHA.

The camera I was looking at yesterday at Wal-Mart wasn't the Aiptek GO-HD. It was instead, the new Action HD. What's the difference? It's suprisingly small: The GO-HD captures 720p at 30fps, and the Action HD captures (almost) 1080p at 30fps, and 720p at 60fps. The rest is nearly identical: both of them have a 5MP sensor, a 3x zoom, and cost $200. They share the same case, which is why I was confused.

I said "almost" 1080p because when Aiptek says "1080p," they are deliberately misleading you. "Real" 1080p has a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels. The Action HD captures at 1440x1080, then stretches that into a 16:9 aspect ratio (but if you can tell me the horizontal resolution of a 1080p video just by looking at it, I'll give you $5). Overall, it looks like Aiptek is saving a lot of money by reusing most of the parts from the GO-HD. The Action HD might even be a software upgrade.

I reviewed some footage from the GO-HD earlier today, and I have to say it's quite good for a $200 camera. The detail is there, and for most purposes, it's satisfactory. During fast motion scenes there is a noticeable amount of image skew (an artifact of reading out the sensor while the shutter is still open, what they call "rolling shutter"), and the auto-focus interferes in what are otherwise steady shots. There's no way to lock the focus, either.

After revewing some sample footage from the Action HD, in both 1080p30 and 720p60, it looks like they've improved the rolling shutter, but I haven't yet found a sample video of a low-light indoor shot. If I can't find a cheap eBay camera soon, I might just get the Action HD from Wal-Mart to see for myself. Thirty-day return policy, y'know. :)

Recently, I pondered my spambot problem. Initially, the spam was targeted towards my blog entries, but recently, they've been replying mostly to entries that don't exist. I can't understand why, either. Perhaps it's because I don't provided a 404 for nonexistent pages like I should. I realized, though, that it was stupid to allow replies to nonexistent pages regardless, and I fixed the comment page so that it will only reply to entries that exist. Since I made this change, I have gotten exactly zero spam comments. It seems that I've won this round, but only due to the mind-boggling incompetence of my adversary. There are some very confused spambots crawling my site right now.

"What? This isn't Wordpress! What the heck!?"

I have been looking for a decent SD camcorder lately. They call them "hybrids" because they record video, but also have multi-megapixel sensors that can take pictures, as well. The low end has a lot of Chinese-made models of varying quality, mostly poor. A notable exception is the Aiptek GO-HD, which will record 1080p in H.264 format at 30fps. Unfortunately, that's more capability than I need, and it's priced higher than I want to spend ($200). I've been eyeing an older Sanyo Xacti C5, which does good old 640x480, and can be had for < $100 on eBay.

I was seriously tempted by a $450 Sony Handycam with a 30GB hard drive, though. It would likely be the last camcorder I'd ever need, plus it feeds my Sony fetish and costs less than a PS3 (well, not now... it is smaller, though). Of course, if I dropped it, it would likely crash the HD, followed by much wailing and gnashing of teeth. SD has no moving parts, and I'm not going to cry over losing a $100 camera.

My newly published project is wii_g, a program for using a Wii Remote as a accelerometer logger and display, suitable for use in automotive testing or just dicking about with physics. If you've got Linux, Bluetooth, and a Wii Remote, you're good to go.

I've revamped the code section of my site. It looks the same, but there is magic going on behind the scenes that makes it easier for me to manage. The upshot is that with minimal effort, I'll be able to add the neglected projects that have been languishing on my hard drives unpublished. I've already added one, swarmDS; more on that in a bit.

You may have noticed that I removed the Information and Deprecated sections. My game tutorial, "How to Make Games Without Really Trying," has long since been a stale project, so it's been officially shelved. The other thing, "Bytex64's Scale of Looking Like a Complete Doofus," was pointless. Both projects in the Deprecated section have been banished to /dev/null, never to be seen again. An old, never officially published Processing project, RealTree, has been moved over to the Dominion of Awesome Hacks site.

All sections in /code/ have now been RSS-ified. There is a feed for the index, which will alert you to new projects, and a feed for each project which will alert you to new releases.

I mentioned git in my last post, and with a bit of bodging on Dreamhost, I've set up a git repository for my medium to large-sized projects. Projects that have a git repository will show this in their project page, and link to the associated gitweb summary.

My newly uploaded project, swarmDS, is a port of swarm.3 to the Nintendo DS. It's not official in any way, so you will need the requisite homebrew hacker hardware to try it out. It may work in an emulator; I haven't tried all of them. By utilizing the features of the hardware, I was able to get the DS running 1000 pixels on its tiny 66MHz ARM9, and with the touchscreen, it's a fun little toy. :)