I’ve been looking for some decent hiking since I moved to eastern Maryland, and after some extensive internet searching, I stumbled on Sugarloaf Mountain. Their website has a nice trailmap, which was attractive for someone who would be exploring the area for the first time on their own. Upon arrival, I followed the one-way entrance up the mountain to the northernmost parking lot. At 11 AM, it was already fairly busy, so I would definitely recommend starting earlier if possible. I’ve included my GPS track and a few photos I took with my phone at the White Rocks lookout point.

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I’m posting GPS data from a snowboarding trip to Mount Snow in Vermont captured with the Google My Tracks app for Android. The XML Google Maps plugin for WordPress is pretty useful here. The only disappointing thing is that there isn’t a parameter to set the granularity when producing the altitude and speed graphs when using the plugin, as far as I know. The My Tracks app claims a top speed of 35 MPH (!), which isn’t illustrated in the speed graph. It looks like the plugin does a simple downsampling of the data, so it misses some detail. Still pretty cool though! Make sure to check out the map using the Google Earth plugin for a 3D view of the mountain.

This is all of the snowboarding we did before lunch. In other news, the battery life of the HTC Incredible sucks, so there’s no data after lunch.

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The NextGEN Gallery plugin for wordpress is pretty useful, and it there are all sorts of plugins which extend its capabilities. I’ve used the XML Google Maps plugin for example to show photos in NextGEN albums on google maps. There’s also the NextGEN Polaroid plugin which makes the cool flash animation shown below. However, over the course of upgrading WordPress and the NextGEN gallery to the latest versions, the functionality broke. Here’s how to get it to work with the latest versions (assumes you’ve already downloaded, installed, and tested your NextGEN gallery plugin, and that you’ve already downloaded and installed the NextGEN Polaroid plugin from here):
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I’ve noticed recently that I had two mediocre computers when I really only needed one.  I took the best parts from both (which again, are mediocre at best, but are all I can afford at the moment) and combined them into one machine.  On this machine I installed Linux:  Ubuntu 8.04 to be exact.  Using the alternative install CD, I used two harddrives to create software RAID-0 and RAID-1 devices on which to place the /root and /home partitions respectively.  My goal is to completely ween myself from windows completely, at least on my home computers, and I’m still working towards this goal.

I am a graduate student after all, and I still need to be able to write papers on my home computer for publication in technical journals.  Standard procedure on my old windows computer was to use MikTex and TeXnicCenter.  MikTex is great because it automatically downloads and installs whatever latex packages it needs on the fly, and TeXnicCenter beats the snot out of notepad.  After switching to Ubuntu and Gnome specifically, I started tracking down replacements for these two pieces.  The most intriguing (and first) solution I came across was using the Eclipse 3.4 (Ganymede) development environment with the Texlipse plugin.  Eclipse is an extremely extendable platform that has great plugins and tools for developing in all sorts of languages, and I’ve been using a customized version at work to develop software which runs on some Texas Instruments fixed-point DSPs and Xilinx FPGAs.

The first step to getting a workable Eclipse-based LaTex environment working Read more

Due to a harddrive failure, I was forced to reinstall Linux on my aging laptop.  Previously, I had been running Gentoo which was built completely from source (if you want to learn about linux, building your own Gentoo installation from source is a great way).  Gentoo ran pretty fast on my old laptop since the only packages installed were the ones I had taken the time to build using Portage.  However, upgrades were always a pain since every package had to be built from source.  Yea yea yea, I know you can install pre-compiled packages from Portage, but what’s the fun in that, right?  Anyways, I’ve been running Debian on a home server and it’s pretty stable with no frills.  Ubuntu, being a quasi-derivative of Debian seemed like an attractive choice for a laptop.  Wow, is it ever.

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As my crappy 802.11b wireless router gasped its last breath, I started looking for a suitable replacement. My home network includes a web/email server, a dedicated MythBox, my standard desktop tower, and a laptop or two. Naturally, I wanted to upgrade from a just a simple router to a more full-featured firewall without spending a whole lot of money. An old AMD Athlon 900MHz computer with 512MB or ram would become an excellent base for a Smoothwall Express 3.0 installation.

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In the lab where I work, everyone has desks with smooth faux-wood tops.  The natural reaction is, “Oh man, my optical mouse is going to work great on this!”  If you thought this, you would be horribly wrong.  The shiny smooth top inhibits the optical mouse’s ability to image the surface and track its own movement.  Luckily, a researcher named Mike Carr came up with a solution by creating the World’s Cheapest Optical Mousepad.  Just print out the PDF on a black-and-white printer and affix it to your desk.  When it gets worn out, throw it away (or better yet, recycle it) and print out another.  The random pattern is an ideal surface for enhancing the performance of any optical mouse.  If you’re an online gamer and you get fragged, chances are that your enemy is using this optical mousepad.  Ah, the wonders of modern technology…

When generating a printed circuit board (PCB) layout, it’s a good idea to know the capabilities of your PCB fab house before you start. I’m ashamed, but I’ll admit that I recently finished routing a board with Altium Designer only to find out that I had created a layout which didn’t fall within acceptable manufacturing tolerances. I didn’t find this out until I tried to submit my design to PCBexpress.com (they’re pretty cheap and decent quality). It turns out that I had used a 5mil tolerance between traces instead of 6mils. Doh! After I had finished cursing myself up and down, however, I noticed that PCBexpress lists “Altium Designer 6″ and “Altium Designer 6 (With Sunstone DFM’s)” under the options for CAD software when you submit your design. That got me thinking. What are Sunstone DFM’s?

Sunstone Circuits is the actual fab house servicing PCBexpress.com. After hunting around on their website, I stumbled across this. Sunstone offers Design For Manufacture (DFM) rules for download for both Altium Designer and Eagle. In the zip file for Altium are two rule files and a set of instructions in a word document. The rule files are for single and double-sided boards, and multi-layer boards. Importing the appropriate rule file into the rule-set for an Altium PCB design establishes all the important layout rules to ensure your design gets manufactured the first time every time. Rules are set for things like trace width and spacing, via and hole size, thermal relief sizes for internal planes, solder mask tolerances, etc. This really beats trying to translate the manufacturing information on PCBexpress.com into working rules on my own, since apparently I’m not very good at it.

I’ve been working on a project for about a year which requires a high speed digital data link between a GUI (running on a generic windows computer) and an Altera Cyclone II FPGA. I wanted to implement this link with a high-speed USB 2.0 connection, a hardware task I was sure I could undertake. However, I didn’t want to spend a whole lot of time writing windows USB drivers and implementing the USB standard in an FPGA. Enter the Bitwise Systems QuickUSB 2.0 Module.

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