Lego Gates

My friend Fred pointed me to one of the coolest uses of Legos I've seen yet, logic gates:

I have now designed working NOT, OR, NOR, AND, and NAND gates. Using two NAND gates I have produced a NAND gate latch or Flip-FLop.

Check out the details!

Travel

I've always liked this photo. It seems to say so much about the excitement of travel and seeing new places. I suppose it's also great marketing for Horizon Air. There is something neat about getting out in the open and walking up the stairs into the plane. You're more in touch with the plane as a vehicle, sort of like getting in a car rather than being queued through a corridor and packed into a tube.

Horizon Air Originally uploaded by lore.

Hummingmoth?

Strange how you can always see something new. I saw this moth while out shopping - it acts just like a hummingbird and almost looks like one too. It's either a Slender Clearwing or a Hummingbird Clearwing moth. Click the photo for more information.

Hummingmoth? Originally uploaded by lore.

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Abandoned Places

Recently I found two different web sites about abandoned places. The photos are very compelling, giving you a sense of lives past, belongings left behind.

Gunkanjima - Views of an Abandoned Island: A little-known island off the coast of Japan that was basically a mining town. Abandoned in 1974.

Elena's Motorcyle Ride through Chernobyl: Chernobyl is of course well-known, but this photo journal is just amazing. There are so many stories of people's lives, and what they had to abandon.

If you have some time to be thoughtful and introspective, these sites are well worth looking at.

The Plague

The plague of cicadas is upon us. The eerie sound can be heard in the morning. I think the sound has been used in very old science finction movies.

The cicadas have been living underground for 17 years, probably sucking sap from tree roots (or so I am told). They come out of little holes in the ground, crawl up a tree, and lose their old shell. After their wings expand and dry out, they are ready to mate, lay eggs, and be eaten. The must be quite tasty (at least my dog seems to think so).



See The University of Michigan Museum of Zoology's Periodical Cicada Page for more information.

Inside the HSV 2 Swift

Too bad I didn't get to see the inside. The ship has some really interesting computing inside:

In Photos: New Navy Vessel's Revolutionary IT - Computerworld

HSV 2 Swift docked in Alexandria

The HSV 2, an experimental high-speed military ship, is docked in Alexandria (see news story). I took the oppurtunity to snare a few pics with my camera phone. I was lucky enough to bump into a gentleman who knew some details about the ship. He said it's quite nice inside, which is unusual for military vessels, and that it can be operated by one person using a small wheel and joystick. The front of the vessel is very interesting; it almost looks like it sits on three blades.

Getting some air!

When I was in high school there were few things I loved more than riding dirt bikes. Motorcyles are so amazing to ride; the freedom you feel as the wind rushes past is amazing. When there's no lid over your head you just feel like you're on top of the world. I didn't race professionally or anything, but I spent a lot of time trying to conquer various natural obstacles, often getting airborne in the process. It's actually good exercise too; tossing around a 200 lb bike is no piece of cake.

How about a game engine for $100?

OSNews has a nifty blurb about the Torque Game Engine from GarageGames. For $100 you get a full featured game engine (supposedly the one that powered Tribes2!). You can even use the Blender open-source content creation tools with it.

From the article:

The Blender exporter and Torque runs on the Mac OS X, Linux and Windows platforms. The Torque Game Engine (TGE) is a fully featured AAA game engine with a multi-player network code, seamless indoor/outdoor rendering engines, skeletal animation, DnD GUI creation, a built-in world editor, and a C-like scripting language. Unlike most commercial game engines, as part of the low cost license ($100), you receive all C++ source code to the multi-platform gaming engine.

I'm ready! Oh wait, there's that day job I have to do...

Introducing software.skyegg.com

I added a software section to the site to house HERMIT and other software I have written. I also added a new freeware program, plist, to view running processes. Not a bad way to spend a Sunday morning, I suppose!

Garbage Collection

Many thanks to Ed Mulroy at Borland for this nice quote I yanked from the borland.public.cbuilderx.language.cpp newsgroup:

And no, C++ does not have "garbage collection". Thank God for that. C++ gives me the ability to not create garbage in the first place.

I love it!

Whisper

Gotta have a picture of the new dog "Whisper", a Belgian Shepherd. Although the housetraining has been a lot of work, she's amazingly smart and attentive. I'd say she's fitting into the family quite well.

In other news, I got an ink painting set and did a couple of pictures of bamboo. There is a technique that isn't too hard (at least for bamboo), but more involved subjects are kind of difficult. It certainly takes some skill and patience, and the right frame of mind. It's an interesting break from mainly digital art, though.

I've also been getting back into the Windows Template Library (WTL) due to the good coverage on CodeProject. It's a surprisingly nifty library...I wish Microsoft would "officially" support it.