Recycled Electrons - Blog of Keith Horowitz

The computer guesses what you are thinking of at 20Q.net . I'm impressed. It did pretty well. It surprised me and was able to guess Sugar glider . The surprising thing was the list of questions didn't seem obvious to getting the correct answer. I was able to stump it once, and make it go into extra questions twice. It is fun!

Working on creating my own digital electronic borads using point-to-point wiring method. Follow the link above to my Robot-oriented sub-blog to see this picture and the rest in the series. March 2002 - I was on my way to creating a set of two digital electronic boards. The first is an I/O board. This board is responsible for decoding and buffering data on the address bus. It has 1 output port, 6 bits and 1 input port, 8 buffered bits, on the board, for use as a 6x8 switch matrix. It also has outputs to drive up to 7 more 8-bit output latches - this is for the motor driver board. The motor driver board uses 5 8-bit latches and 5 dual H-Bridge chips. In practice, only 6 bits of the 8-bit latches are wired to the H-Bridge chips, thus 2 bits per chip for a total of 10 output bits are unused. Later I realized that I was not taking any advantage of the built in PWM on the HC11, so I will have to write my own dynamic version of PWM using some sort of interrupts if I want to ha...

I belong to a local email list about Linux. A while back there was a question going around about ISP s. One user posted a note about a DSL company that not only allows servers, but has a method to share your wireless network with your neighbors. They call it Netshare . You set a rate for your neighbors to get online via a wireless hub connected to DSL. Speakeasy bills your neighbors. Speakeasy cuts your DSL bill. You are the local admin for your neighbors, setting up the wireless on their computers.

An article on Slashdot shows a Linux-Powered Auto Parking Car. Video

I laughed out loud when after about 5 seconds I got TidBits: One Question Geek Test

DTC - 2001-10-26 - Lots of grafitti in this water tunnel See my Pictures blog 2004-06-29 for 31 pictures of DTC Infrastucture primarily showing water features.

I had a friend ask me lately if I knew what PHS was. I didn't, so I did a quick search. The first article made me think it was a Japanese version of BlueTooth . But after looking a little more, it seems that PHS is the nickname for "Personal HandyPhone System". A type of cell-phone/digital network standard.

Going back in time to when I first got my digital camera. It didn't take long before I started trying to take 'artistic' pictures. I took these the second day. I love the fact that I can take all sorts of pictures with my digital camera, and it doesn't matter if they don't come out that well. It gives a sense of freedom to be able to take all sorts of chances taking pictures. These are pictures I took near where I was working in Denver Tech Center. (DTC is South of the City of Denver, along Route 25.) Denver Tech Center North End - From the Park 6/18/2001 Denver Tech Center - Waterfalls in park, Sprinklers 6/18/2001 Denver Tech Center - water channel through park 6/18/2001 Denver Tech Center - Watercourse through a park 6/18/2001 Going forward in time a few months from above, I started taking pictures of robots I was working on: See my Roboton sub-blog for prototyping robotics, 3/22/2002

I have added a new sub-page with a list of links to Friend Blogs . I also put an XML icon link to my RSS/Atom feed.

I have created a new sub-blog called Roboton . I will use this blog for new, opinions and any of my robot-related pictures I feel like sharing. Look for a lot of pictures in the future!

A bunch of pictures I took, hiking up from Glen Eryie, up the boulder (scree) field onto the Scar. Scar: Eroded rocks, trees and view of mountains Scar: Facinating erosion patterns Scar: In case you weren't sure it was a quary - some of the rocks still have drill holes Scar: Closeup on rocks - Emphasis on rock breaking up in bands Scar: Looking down boulder field. Turns out that these boulders are scree - discards from the old scar quary Scenery - Glen Eyrie-Scar: I was facinated by the way the clouds mirrored the ridgeline I have used about all my good pictures from my laptop hard drive on my blog. I will have to start either taking more pictures or going into my archives (or both!). I have a bunch of pictures I took walking around Denver Tech Center backed up on CD, so you may be seeing those soon! I am also thinking of starting another side-blog, for pictures related to robotics, and not posting them on my main blog like these p...

Get emails about emergencies. They give lots of weather warnings. You can select by county for your area. I even forwarded it to my cell phone for a short while. But stopped that when a storm came through causing 6 emails waking me up between 12:30am and 2am. It might be nice if there was a filter to only send highest level emergency emails overnight to a mobile text message device.

This year we switched Father's day and Mother's day. So in our house it was Mother's day Sunday. I made Yael breakfast in bed. Then she got her gifts. The main gift was a record player. Yes a phonograph. We had one back in NJ that got cranky and stopped working. We didn't bring it with us when we moved to Colorado. So for years we have had records that we couldn't play. Now we can again! We had friends come by later. Then we went out for lunch. The two dad's got free food for father's day. When we were leaving, the sky looked a bit dark, and it rained on the way back. Then a couple of blocks from the house it started to hail. Usually hail lasts for about a minute or two then moves on. This time the hail lasted about 10 minutes. That gave me a chance to take a few pictures... Hail on the Driveway Tree Across the Street During Hail and Wind Enduring Hail Attempting to Proect a Car Hail on the Ground and Grass ...

We got up very early in the morning for the hike: 3:45 AM. We wanted to get on the trail earlier than the rest of the group to make sure we had extra time to complete the hike. Our babysitter showed up at 3:50 -- right on time! We got in our cars and drove over to the massage school. We left the minivan to be driven up to the top by one of the non-hikers, that way there would be more room to drive people down. Then we drove down to Route 24. Up past Manitou Springs. Around through Woodland Park. Then South again on 67 towards Cripple Creek. Up until this point, it was rainy and mostly cloudy. But we started to see some sky through breaks in the clouds, as the sun rose. About 5 miles down 67, we turned left toward the mountain. We drove up to Craigs campground. They have a self-service board for day parking. It cost $4. I filled out the envelope, and put it in the marked post. We put the receipt on the dashboard, and drove up about another 1/2 mile to t...

Here is a neat site: iWorkWithFools.com . Where people anonymously share work related stories. Some of it is just people whining. But some of the stories are interesting and funny! If nothing else, by comparison, it might just make you feel better about the craziness you have at work.

I've been to the top of Pikes Peak a few times now. We've driven up a few times. But yesterday was different. I did my first fourteener. What does that mean? It means I hiked up Pikes Peak. We hiked from Craigs campground. That means we started a little higher, and the trail was a bit shorter than the most popular trail. But that also mean it was steeper. I've been wanted to hike Pikes Peak for a long time. We did it as part of Yael's Massage School group. It seems about 40 of us made the hike! See the last picture in this entry. View down to Colorado Springs - Cloud Covered Pine Trees, Mountain, Clouds to the West Look how far we've gone! First View of Pikes Peak from the Trail Getting Closer to the Peak The Hardest Part at the end Made it!! View from the Top We All Made It!! CIMT Group Photo At The Peak See the other group picture on my photos-blog

We went hiking Jan. 31 in Palmer Park, located near the center of Colorado Springs. Each picture is clickable for larger 1024 image. Looking up at another rock formation in Palmer Park, Colorado Springs Closeup on seeds in winder at Palmer Park, Colorado Springs Rock formation in Palmer Park, Colorado Springs

I tried adding Google Search to my blog. You might have seen it sitting on the right in the last week. After trying it a few times, I decided to remove it. It seems Google searches only pages it has indexed to the master Google site. It doesn't do a full search within your site. So, it would not find the entry on fighting spyware for example. I had asked Blogger support about the option of a master index. I asked for it so that people can at least find any interesting older entries. Also so people canfind an entry even if it falls off the bottom of the archive list. Because you won't see a linked title on the 'last 10 entries' box if you have more than 10 entries for an archive. Also you may completely lose an entry if you have more entries in an archive persiod than can be displayed in the long list. As I don't know when or if they will get to making a master index page, I've decided to make my own. I created a cygwin script mkblogix to creat...

The following essay is my own opinion, and may ruffle a few feathers. The commission investigating the 9/11 attacks has released some major details in the last few days. There is one thing that bothers me in what has been said the whole time: We had no clue to this kind of attack. I think there may have been a few clues. All we have to do is look to our strongest ally in the Middle East. Israel has been dealing with terrorists who are willing to kill themselves to violate society and kill civilians in non-military situations for a very long time. And what has been the response to Israel, even today? Don’t take any active steps to fix the situation. Give in to the terrorists. Give them land. Give them their own country. Give them legitimate power. So the terrorists have learned that terrorism is an acceptable means of political action. It hurt me inside every time the world gives legitimacy to terrorists. Because this legitimacy encourages it. Now terroris...

O'Reilly (technical book publisher) has come up with a giant wall chart of The History of Programming Languages . It has interesting arrows charting cross evolutions and merging of ideas, like those that lead to Java. You can view a nice-size PDF version of the chart. The site claims it documents over 2,500 languages. I wouldn't quite agree on the count. In some cases, the show multiple versions of a langauge as a different language. Is Cobol 85 really a different language than Cobol 74? It seems more like a major revision, but I would not call it a whole new language. And I certainly wouldn't call python 2.2, 2.2.1, 2.2.2 and 2.2.3 as four different languages. On the chart it looks like there are a 3 or 4 dozen main lines, with multiple versions and evolutions occuring. Such as CPL to BCPL to B to C, and then a few different standards versions of C.

Some more pictures I took when hiking at the Garden of the Gods - on New Years Day this year [2004]. Click on pictures to see larger 1024 images Rock at N Parking Lot   Rock Wedge               Moon Over Rocks Rock V                                     Climbers Downtown COS                             Rock & Sky     I found that with the Hello software, you can only post one picture at a time to a blog. Sometimes I like to have more, as you can well see from this and many of my other entries. And you can only upload when you are posting to a blog. So to get the pictures uploaded for the Liberty Bell 7 entry, I wound up making 9 entries. Then I captured the URLs of the pictures and create a 10th entry with all the pictu...

I posted a question to blogger support about a week ago about backing up my blog. I had realized that I had all this work out there, but I was completely relying on their servers to keep my work safe. I also had no easy way to move the data over to my own FTP server if I ever wanted. This was a few days before weblogs.com abruptly closed . Blogger posted a solution on their help site under advanced topics. Their solution was to make some complicated manual configuration change to put all your blog entries on one page, then save it. I was not in a rush to do this. I was tempted to just go out and browse each entry and save it. I had also set the option to have blogger email me each post, and I set up a filter for the emails. But there is a problem with this solution: you only get the initial entry, you don't get any updates if you edit an entry. Then I suddenly realized that I might be able to use wget to backup my blog. Wget is a line command utility that can be...

Florida, Fort Myers Beach: Seagull on seaweed; 2003-12-20 (select for full image) I took this picture while I was visiting my Dad and Step-mom last December.

A while back, at the Denver Museum of Science and Nature , they had the Liberty Bell 7 Exhibit . This was the second US Manned spacecraft. During recovery, it filled with water, and they had to let it go. It sank to the bottom of the ocean for a long time. A few years ago they found it, and recovered it. It has been a traveling exhibiting at museums. Here are my shots at the exhibit.

Just this past weekend, my son got me back into the game we call Fighting Robots . Others know it as Total Annihilation or just TA for short. This game is still fantastic. At first we installed the basic disk, and had to play each other. My son was not happy when I beat him. But eventually he understood. Then after we loaded the other disks, and the patch, we were able to play against computer opponents. That was a lot more fun. Today, I was checking out my laptop. I was looking at the services. I turned on the telnet server. But I couldn't connect. Which is the correct action, as I have the firewall software turned on in XP for ethernet. So I went to allow telnet connections inbound on my compter on the firewall settings. But I noticed something odd: a service called dplaysvr at the top of the list, allowed in. What was this? Where did it come from? My first few searches on the internet gave me some worry - some virus programs will install under the name dp...

Another view of Pikes Peak  This is my first post using the Google/Blogger recomended tool: Hello . It is a system tray tool that lets you post pictures and web entries to your blogger/blogspot site. It posts the pictures on the blogger server photos1.blogger.com. Hello acts as a server on you system, so that your web browser can talk to it via port 3522.

I have added a (free) page counter from sitemeter.com . It also tracks some statistics. It had a web page for automatically installing into blogger/blogspot sites! I hope to see it go up with all my visitors!

Last October we went with the online school group to a Corn Maze and pumpkin patch. Crossing a bridge in the corn maze. View across watermelon patch, to pumpkin patch. Self portrait. Standing on the kid's climbing structure , my reflection in the dining room window.