I’ve been working on a migration from B2evo to WordPress and all of the posts and comments have been moved but the theme still needs some work. Yesterday I started to develop a sinus infection and today I’ve felt like @#$% so I won’t be spending any time trying to fix the blog until I start feeling better. The sidebar is currently located at the very bottom of the page due to a CSS error.
Internet Black Holes (the invisible /dev/null beast)
The University of Washington has some great ongoing research projects. This one made national news at MSNBC (article: here). The Internet’s backbone consists of many thousands of routers speaking the TCP/IP protocol. TCP/IP was designed at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to allow network traffic to take multiple routes to a destination. This provides for communication if one or more of the routers fails – a likely scenario in the event of a nuclear war. Because destinations can be reached though multiple routes, each individual path may or may not link to its destination. If it doesn’t link, any traffic that uses that route gets lost, forever. Never before have these ‘bad routes’ been charted. The CS department developed a tool to search for and track these black holes and they affectionately called it UW Hubble.
Check it out: http://hubble.cs.washington.edu
UW Engineering Open House – Little Red Hen’s Take
Time for my take on my husband’s robotic fish and Engineering Open House. I had a really good time today! If Friday was the day for field trips, then Saturday was the day for families. I came to the open house today, Saturday, and got a kick out of observing the family dynamics of those who came. Some parents seemed to have engineering in their genes and wanted to share their interests with their children. Others were clearly bewildered by the technical questions their children were asking volunteers but were being good sports trying to feed the minds of their little Einsteins. I enjoyed watching Patrick field questions from adults and children alike, and my favorite interaction was between a father and Patrick. It went something like this:
Dad: So do you like video games? [Read more…]
Posted by on 27 April 2008 at 1:55 AM
Filed Under: Life & Updates, Technology and Internet
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Robotic Fish at the UW Engineering Open House
My lab hosted another successful engineering open house exhibit today at the University of Washington. I’ve been working in the Nonlinear Dynamics and Control Lab at UW for two years now and I’m close to completing my masters degree. My thesis is based on a radio transceiver that I specifically designed to enable underwater communication between our three robotic fish. Today, my transceiver was used to demo our work to the UW community and visitors to the university. [Read more…]
Coding Madness
Last week I went to the Portland scrap booking convention with my wife. I’ve done this before and I find it incredibly helpful to harness the creative atmosphere to fuel my own web design endeavors. While she cut and cropped, I sat in front of my laptop hacking PHP. I’ve always worked on my homepage with the intent of “finishing” it one day – but I’ve never come close. New technologies and new ideas to implement keep me from my goal. After this last scrap booking event I found inspiration to completely recode my site and move out of the HTML table mindset and join the new XHTML/CSS div tag cult. Well, it’s not exactly new.. but most modern browsers (except M$IE) are now able to render div tags properly, and when combined with CSS – they offer unparalleled utility. Hopefully I’ll be able to finish the recode and if I do perhaps it will finalize the structure of my homepage so I can finally concentrate on content.
Here is an outstanding tutorial on CSS positioning: http://www.brainjar.com/css/positioning/
IE Sucks
Mood: Very frustrated!
Internet Explorer sucks. Why? Becasue it doesn’t adhere to standards – it is a rogue browser and it needs to be deleted. Micro$haft sucks too! A Much better alternative is Mozilla Firefox. I highly recommend their e-mail client too.
Sacrilege?
I’ve been seduced by the dark side and installed an unholy computer virus on my brand new Macbook Pro. This virus is commonly called Microsoft Windows Vista. Yes I did it… I installed Windows on my Mac.
::sigh::
Talking Fish
I finally finished a project that has been nagging me for the past few weeks! Yah :) We have these robotic fish swimming around and they can’t talk to each other, well, until now. I designed a transceiver communication board using RF modules from Linx Technologies hoping that time would be saved. Designing a stable radio frequency (RF) circuit is fairly straightforward when you’ve got fully integrated embedded modules, but once that design is placed in a conductive medium (like water) it gets a whole lot more complicated. As if RF design wasn’t black magic already, antenna placement, receiver sensitivity and ground plane geometry become critical and will make or break a design. At least the first board revision is done and I can send it off for fabrication and component soldering (2-3 week turnaround time). Now I can get married without this thing hanging over my head. ::breathing a big sigh of relief::
Of course this means I get to look forward to hardware hacking and bug fixing once I return from the honeymoon.