Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
New this year at the Trinity College Firefighting Home Robot Contest will be a Checkout Table, where teams can verify that their robot meets some initial specifications (Section 2.5 of The Rules). The overall size should be the easiest spec to check; I just glued up a pair of suitable Bounding Boxes:
Trinity Robot Contest – bounding boxes
Robowaiter robots must fit in the smaller cube, which is 30 cm on a side. Firefighting robots must fit in the larger box, with wheeled / treaded robots inside the 31 x 31 x 27 cm outline and walkers within the larger 46 x 31 x 27 volume.
Next step: fluorescent orange paint over a white shot coat to kill the lettering.
Despite the fact that nobody bothers to crack your web passwords, as it’s easier for them to crack the entire server and scoop out everyone’s personally sensitive bits like so much caviar, all websites remind / require you to pick strong passwords. So, when I registered myself on a high-value website, I did what I always do: ask my password-generation program for a dollop of entropy.
It came up with something along the lines of:
Gmaz78fb'd]
You can see where this is going, right?
Pressing Submit (which always makes me whisper Inshallah with a bad accent) produced:
The mumble.com website is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.
There’s an obvious need for Arduino PWM and SPI information
Houses are trouble
Blog Summary – 2011 YTD
Despite having no publicity, the site gets about 850 views per day: half from search engines, a third from RSS, and the rest from folks rattling around inside. Not much by commercial standards, but I’m pleased you’re interested enough to stop by…
A new trend in the comment spam load that you don’t see involves a concerted attempt to post irrelevant comments with links to obviously junk websites. The URLs vary, but each site’s links cross-connect it with its peers in weird ways that recycle the few real pages of content (such as it is). However, every page of every website included a specific company’s contact information at the bottom, which is truly weird; usually junk websites have no identifying marks.
Generally I ignore such crap, but after discarding several dozen such comments over the course of a week, I called the company’s phone number and, amazingly, spoke to an actual person. It’s impossible to determine honesty over the phone, but he certainly sounded like a real human who’s busy running a small company and who has no idea what’s going down.
Perhaps his internet marketing company has gone mad?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, that series of spam comments stopped immediately after I hung up the phone. I’ll never know the end of the story, even though we all know the motivation: money changes everything.
The last time this sort of thing happened, I also talked to a pleasant voice who observed that it could well be an unscrupulous competitor (or a hired “internet marketing” company) trying to smear their good name. There’s no way to confirm or deny such a claim, of course.
For what it’s worth, Akismet reports these statistics since Day Zero of this blog, back in December 2008:
42,143 total spam
1,982 total ham
225 missed spam
10 false positives
99.47% accuracy rate
It’s currently killing over 150 spam comments every day, leaving only a dozen or so for me to flush. The lure of easy money seems irresistible, so there’s no hope of a letup.
A long time ago, in a universe far away, I wrote a book that (barely) catapulted me into the ranks of the thousandaires. Time passes, companies get sold / fail / merge / get bought, and eventually the final owners decided to remainder the book; the last royalty check I recall was for $2.88.
Anyhow, now that it’s discontinued and just as dead as the ISA bus, I own the copyright again and can do this:
They’re both ZIP files, disguised as ODT files so WordPress will handle them. Just rename them to get rid of the ODT extension, unzip, and you’re good to go. Note, however, that I do retain the copyright, so if you (intend to) make money off them, be sure to tell me how that works for you.
The big ZIP has the original pages laid out for printing, crop marks and all, so this is not as wonderful a deal as it might first appear. The little ZIP has the files from the diskette, which was unreadable right from the start.
Words cannot begin to describe how ugly that front cover really is, but Steve’s encomium still makes me smile.
The text and layout is firmly locked inside Adobe Framemaker files, where it may sleep soundly forever. The only way I can imagine to get it back into editable form would be to install Windows 98 in a VM, install Framemaker, load up the original files, and export them into some non-proprietary format. Yeah, like that would work, even if I had the motivation.
If you prefer a dead-tree version, they’re dirt cheap from the usual used-book sources. Search for ISBN 1-57398-017-X (yes, X) and you’ll get pretty close.
Or, seeing as how I just touched the carton of books I’ve been toting all these years, send me $25 (I’m easy to find; if all else fails, look up my amateur callsign in the FCC database) and get an autographed copy direct from the source. Who knows? It might be worth something some day…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 