Might move some posts around to seperate blogs…

Im considering 1. installing my own instance of WordPress on my dreamhost account. 2. Moving some postings to their separate blogs. eg, irwin104.chow computerz.instantchow parkingboots.usfparkingisfuckingbullshit

whadayathink? =)

PollDaddy?

This blog needs more boat

So true, perhaps If I had an oil resistant keyboard at my “boat yard” (thanks Zach’s parents) This kinda writing might be easier. Nevertheless, heres an update on S/V RonTom the 1976 Irwin 10/4 I own. (note to self. publish that post about the epic voyage getting the sailboat already!)

After many weeks of searching on the CL and other parts of the Interwebs, I have finally found a replacement inboard motor for RonTom. So, its not exactly a drop-in replacement. But, more like a parts motor for that will be part of a franken-motor that will be re-powering my beamy beast.

The original auxiliary motor was a Volvo MB-10A heres some technical stats on it: yea, stolen from Volvo.com

Technical data
Engine MB10A
Production period 1971-1977
Operation 4-stroke
Cylinder configuration 2
Bore (in.) 3.5
Stroke (in.) 3.23
Compression ratio 6.5:1
Displacement (cu. in.) 62
Power (hp) 15
Max engine speed (rpm) 2000

Sweeettt 2000 RPM! The drive to North Carolina to pick up the motor was a bit torturous. My friend Bill and I drove my car with the ol’ Harbor Freight Trailer. One Sunday night and arrived in New Bern about 12 hours later. What? That doesn’t sound that bad? We’ll it wasn’t really, but All of Georgia was fog and then it rained most of the drive up. Then we passed South of the Border but had no time to stop! Oh my! The drive back home was not as complex. But both of us were pretty wrecked from being up for more than 24+ hours.

I found the motor on a random seaching of the google just on a whim. I was probably thinking that some hot new news about the MB10a was going to hit some blogs or something. Well I found one person on a sailing forum (can’t remember the name) that had a post with a link to a craigslist ad for a used mb10a. Cha Ching!

Heres a video of what the motor looks like running.

Again, those are not my videos. I wish! I got pictures tho!

Currently, I have been taking apart and cleaning rust. Lots of Phosphoric Acid dipping… Stay tuned for updates on the motor rebuild and the eventual repower of the Irwin.

su no more, man, i NEED root… man!

Like a su junkie, the day i discovered the source of my fix was gone, withdraw kickin in.

So after the 1.1 update from months ago, I discovered that there were duplicate ringtones all over the place. Actually. All the notification/alarm/ui sounds where dupped. Kinda annoying. Well, after 1.5 update rolled through on my adp1 and still having that issue, I decided to take a deeper look onto it.

Turns out. After that update, still dups! adb shelled and cd’ed around to the /system/media/audio/ringtones and saw no dupplicate files? Was I crazy? Yes, but not really, I think after 1.1, Android decided it would be cool to add folder named ringtone alarm etc to be added to the list of available UI sounds. Neato, so a few months ago, when I backed up the phone filesystem, I had a copy of the entire / copied to the sdcard. Bam! The sauce of the dups.

Two min later.. idea! Lets delete the redundant audio files on the /system because, its sacred space, theres not enough room for silly ringtones AND skymap. Sadly, root access is no more, and well /system is not writable to users… wtfmate?

Perhaps its time to leave the safety of mom’s house, and move on to the exciting world of home rolled firmware. There are a lot to choose from. JF, Hykuman? TheMan? Update later, sleep now.

———WOOOHAAA hold your horses, Blinky light update————–

Freeken update, or more like JesusFreke update. After a few flames on #android. “type su ya id10t”… Here’s the riddle of my phone not having su. So back in January, the 1.1 firmware was “leaked” as the latest ADP1 firmware out. Ho hoho It was in fact the Holiday version of the firmware, relabeled as Android Dev Phone and well, everyone was duped. So after that, I let it ride out, no reason to change, after all, it was a good firmware and it worked great. But then I got an OTA update for 1.5 (cupcake), which Jf informed me of, was not likely as the ADP1 doesn’t get OTA updates… Holiday does… AHA moment.

So, that one other ADP1 owner that download that adp1-11-official.zip who mysteriously lost your /system/xbin directory, which had su in it… Time to wipe the deal and get an update from HTC directly, or install an “aftermarket” image.

Remember when GPS S/A turnned off?

I’m writing an essay for an ethics class this week on the technology of GPS and how it ethics. (Don’t worry, im just verbalizing). But, yes, I remember hearing about how the US was going to finally end Selective Availability on GPS. It was a way for the government to purposely degrade the performance of GPS in order to make it less useful in a security theater type of way… Terrorists. etc. Something like 20 meters accuracy would be all you could get without the help of differential GPS stations (ground based, known position, sending out signal corrections) So anyways, to end the history lesson, there was a civilian plane shot down in 1983 by the Russians and in 1991 gulf war soildired had to use civilan gps units due to a shortage of the ones that had the proper s/a key. They finally decided it was time to turn off s/a. So in the the year 2000, the same time they finished developing the way they could just turn off GPS for civilians it was set to be free of the pseudo-random noise.
May 1st, I was outside a Starbucks with a Garmin eTrex I purchased from walmart the week prior. Yea, just so I could witness the S/A removal! It was pretty cool watching the bread crumb trail go from a huge 20m mess of noise (you could be standing still and the GPS unit would have your position be all over the place, randomly moving around in a 20m circle) to nothing. the “little dot” of my position was perfectly still. Woot. Did you witness the GPS transformation?

Its a small world afterall…

Doing some simulations of Small-World networks. In other words, graphs/networks that display some small world phenomenon we all know as the “6 degrees of separation” Heres a few generated graphs from my project in Advanced Algorithms. I have been focusing on grid model described by Kleinberg in “The Small-World Phenomenon: An Algorithmic Perspective”. The model is a 2d N sized square grid with connections (edges) connecting nodes in local areas and long distance. Anyways. Heres a pretty snarly picture.

You can track my Python code here on GitHub

n = 10, p=1, q = 2

————-UPDATE————-

wow, that was ugly
Ive updated the code, added a show_me() method which throws a pyplot display of the graph with the nodes positioned as it should be, in a darn grid!

try it out


Python 2.5.2 (r252:60911, Oct 5 2008, 19:24:49)
[GCC 4.3.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import smallworld as sw
>>> sw.show_me( sw.kleinberg_grid(8, 1, 2, 2) )


a nice popup window will now be displaying the grid


>>> sw.plt.savefig("hi.png")
save it for a blog post

other things you can try,
>>> g = sw.kleinberg_grid(10,1,2,2)
>>> u = (0,0)
>>> v = (9,9)
>>> sw.kb_trav(g, u, v)
8

outputs the number of edges traversed with a local information only traversal, nodes only know links they are on currently

if anyone can tweek the make long range function so that it doesn’t run in n^2 time, please feel free =)

A picture’s worth a 1024 bits

The key's randomart image is:
+--[ DSA 1024]----+
|*++.             |
| ooE             |
| .+o.            |
| .ooo .          |
|  ...* .S        |
|   .. *  .       |
|   . + ..        |
|    o o.         |
|       ..        |
+-----------------+

so instead of a string of hex, ASCII ART! Woot!

Dang, you guys really want me!

Lol, the google market is amazing. The second i upload it, 50 people download and comment on it. Neato, then I got an email about my cheezy Sims 2 insipired t-shirts on Zazzle, sold 3 of them ! Woot. Maybe I should buy one myself soon?

Just upped teh Epoch Day App on the Android Market

Yesterday Zach and I thought it would be nice to have a the G1 phone display some unix time_t for the ol’ 1234567890 day coming up in a few hours So shazam! Oh wait, thats already an app. How about EPOCH!…

Real simple, literally took more time RSA key signing the app than coding. Its a webview. App that loads a webpage with some simple javascript that gets the system time and displays it in some wizbang kinda ways. Enjoy your geek chic in simple white numbers on a black screen.

If you gota have this app, you have about 15 horus and 57 min before its just about as useless as the human appendix.

search “Epoch Day” in the android Market

the app is as simple as it gets, but at least its not that dude who published the tutorial notepad application from the android sdk site. more to come for sure.

winding down day one or SMS-Zustellung error

I got myself a German SIM card for my cell phone this morning. It was a snap to buy. However. A pain in the ass to “activate”. Without knowing any German and being cellphone fine print…. It was a miracle to finally figure out what button to click on the blau.de website in order to get the SIM card working and unlocked.

not what it looks like

So why did I go with blau.de? One, it was cheap. Two, sock puppets. Who can resist them? I can’t They are blue (Blau) and they are funny. (goto their website blau.de if you dare)
After all that, voice worked fine. After finding the APN information 3G data worked great! The APN data for blau is the same as e-plus and can be found in google.
But I can’t get rid of the problem with SMS. Im pretty sure I can send them out, but I only get SMS-Zustellung error. Which claims that I have not enough money or theres a problem with… well something… Its consumer level tekno German. so no one really understands what it REALLY means. But, sure enough I have about 15euro left still.
Hey, but I can do voice calling just fine. So go ahead 01577-3906985 is my number =) you can figure out how to dial that, you deserve it =).
Discovery three, or was that only two, shit. Apparently, Club-Mate is the drink of choice for discerning German Hacker types.  So what is the source of its Caffeine? Yerba Matte! Yep.  Most people who I have asked, say they think it tastes “…. ehh its alright…” Oddly, I agree. Its not bad, its not great.But its got a great logo. Every ten minuts or so you hear a loud clank clank click clank. Which is one of these, foot tall, glass bottles knock over on the hard ground of a conf room or hallway. In fact, as I was typing this, it happened. Its popular as hell but know one knows why.

Gota go now. Looking for beer and food.

at Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, ccc.de

I got lucky enough to find the time (and money) to get my ass to Germany this week for the oldfest running Hacker con on the planet. The organization has been around since 1981 and this is the 25th “Congress” or con they have held. Heres my a picture of the “wrist band”. Notice, it is crimped on with a brass swage fitting!!!

http://ccc.de
http://events.ccc.de