Happy 25th Birthday to the World Wide Web

I remember my family's first computer well. It was 1997 and I was an easily-excited 6-year-old boy. This rather large contraption just landed on my dining room table and needless to say, I was very curious. I remember playing Moto Racer with my Dad. I remember being amazed when we purchased our ATI All-In-Wonder Pro TV Tuner video card. We could somehow watch cable television on our PC... while browsing the web! What a wonder!

Google's Homepage on March 12th, 2014

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the creation of the web. Google has included a small homage to the beginning of the web that we know and love today on their homepage.

I decided to install Netscape Navigator to see how it stands up against the modern web. This is running on Linux Mint 16, a derivative of the popular Ubuntu. Needless to say, the results are not great. Thanks to the concept of graceful-degradation though, most of the content is still highly-usable despite being arranged a little oddly.

http://www.theresistornetwork.com in Netscape Navigator on Linux Mint 16

I tried to load a few websites that I frequent to see how well they are displayed. Read on to see more!

Vacuum Fluorescent Display Alarm Clock

I have been working on this fun little project for the last couple of days. I ordered this VFD display from Noritake as a free sample. I am quite grateful for their generosity and I decided to put this display to good use.

I have written a driver in C# that implements a partial selection of the commands available from this display. The driver is object-oriented with property accessors used to set configuration parameters of the display.

Weather Data, Emails and a Loader Animation :]

I put all of this together into a sample application for a smart alarm clock that I would like to build eventually. The sample application gets my unread e-mail from Gmail and weather data from Open Weather Map. I am also attacking the 16 custom characters that reside in ram to display a few simple animations.

Snow Day: Conky Configuration Time!

It is quite snowy in southern Ontario today so I spent a bit of time configuring Conky on my system. I have heard of conky before but never bothered to put any time into configuring it.

For those of you who don't know, Conky is a nice system monitoring application that runs on the root X window. This means that it sits on your desktop like Active Desktop, but better.

Mine looks good, but I have seen screenshots of some very artistic configurations.

Conky Configuration :]

Read more to see my conky.conf file!

3D Perspective Projection

I have wanted to write a 3D rendering engine for years and I have finally decided to spend some time on the problem. I decided to implement a simplistic rendering engine that supports the following basic features:

• 3D Perspective Projection (far objects are smaller than near objects)
• Triangular Polygons for Rendering
• Simplistic Lighting Model
• Colored Polygon Faces (no texturing)

The largest hurdle for me was getting past perspective projection. I did some research about matrix transformations and got caught up quite deeply in mathematical abstraction. It was the image below that really set my mind in motion. I decided to take a step back and use some simple high school trigonometry to solve the problem.

Leon Battista Alberti and Perspective Projection

I have spent approximately 13 hours on this project and the results so far are fantastic looking. This entire experiment has given me great insights into the way 3D geometry is rendered onto a 2D plane.

The Classic Utah Teapot :]

In this article I will show you the various steps that I have taken to render this image. I will focus on the mathematics behind perspective projection that I used to arrive at the teapot rendering above. The image is not perfect, but I am happy with the results.

Dealing With a Stubborn Laptop Battery

I own an older model Panasonic Toughbook CF-28. I picked it up a couple of years ago for around a hundred dollars or so. It has a Pentium III 800MHz processor and 512MB of RAM, nothing to phone home about. What it lacks in performance it makes up for in its' rugged design. It is a military specification laptop that is capable of withstanding short drops, extreme temperatures and light water splashes. It also has a touchscreen. In other words, it is a fun toy.

This laptop was missing the battery when I acquired it. I decided to opt for a cheap replacement available on eBay for around fifty dollars. When the battery arrived, I was quite pleased with the quality and performance of the product. I was easily able to get more than 5 hours of battery runtime out of the laptop.

This laptop is far from my daily driver and I left it on the shelf for a few months. When I came back to it the battery was expectedly discharged completely. The interesting part is that it would not accept a charge despite the charge indicator being illuminated.

I decided to disassemble the battery to investigate and was able to bring it back to life!

Fixed Battery

A Graphical Introduction to Hash Functions with SHA-2

Bitcoin Logo

Cryptography is the glue that holds together our modern society of electronic banking, web authentication mechanisms and identity verification. It is also the basis for the radical shifts in the way we think about our money such as Bitcoin.

I have been fascinated by the concepts of cryptography lately and decided to implement a cryptographic hashing function to try and better understand them. I will present the knowledge that I have gained in an easy to understand fashion. I am by no means an expert on this subject but if you have a general interest this should be a good starting point.

I have decided to implement SHA-256 due to the widespread adoption and ubiquity of this particular function. This implementation is designed in LabVIEW which is a graphical programming language. Whether you are a seasoned programmer or just interested in cryptography, this gentle introduction will be beneficial to you.

A Testament to X11 Backwards Compatibility

I recently scored a Hewlett Packard 1670A Deep Memory Logic Analyzer and I finally had a chance to fire it up. This unit dates back to 1992 and is packed with all sorts of interesting options for connecting peripherals to it. One particular feature that caught my eye was the option to connect to an X Server.

HP 1670A Logic Analyzer

Here is the interface of the logic analyzer running on a remote X connection. I enjoy the colour scheme.

HP 1670A user interface over an X connection :]

I will give you a quick explanation as to how I was able to set this up by modifying a couple of configuration files to enable remote X connections.

YALEDD! 16x16 LED Display

I would like to present to you "Yet Another LED Display" (YALEDD!): a 16 by 16 LED Display. I am currently taking an engineering project management course and one of the objectives is to take a circuit from design to implementation while sticking to a schedule that we define.

The class was instructed to choose a simple circuit such as an LED flasher or a simple sequential state machine composed of discrete logic, capture the schematic, layout the PCB and have it made by the end of the term.

I decided that it would be boring to design a simple state machine. I also thought it might be pretty cool to have an electronic gizmo of my own design to show off on my desk at work.

Something Special :]

This display utilizes constant current LED drivers to regulate 10mA through each of the LEDs. I have not used multiplexing to drive this display. I've done multiplexing in the past, and the STP16CPC26 drivers looked like they would be fun to experiment with. The entire design uses surface mount technology (aside from a couple of connectors) and was hand assembled by yours truly.

PCB Back

A Sea of LEDs