Casio’s FX-CG, or Prizm, is a rather interesting device, and the programmers over on Cemetech seem to have found it worthwhile to make the Prizm do their bidding in software.
The Prizm device itself is based around some sort of SuperH core, identified at times in the system software as a SH7305 a “SH7780 or thereabouts”. The 7780 is not an exact device, though, and it’s likely a licensed SH4 core in a Casio ASIC. Whatever the case, GCC targeted for sh and compiling without the FPU (-m4a-nofpu) and in big-endian mode (-mb) seems to work on the hardware provided.
I nearly always find it interesting to muck about in someone else’s code, often to add simple features or to make it do something silly, and the Linux kernel is no exception to that. What follows is my own first adventure into patching Linux to do my evil bidding.
Aside from mucking about in code for fun, digging through public source code such as that provided by Linux can be very useful when developing something new.
A short story I was doing nothing of particular importance yesterday afternoon when I was booting up my previously mentioned netbook. The machine usually runs on a straight framebuffer powered by KMS on i915 hardware, and my kernel is configured to show the famous Tux logo while booting.
I sometimes use Links on various computers when I can’t be bothered to deal with a full graphical environment and just want to look something up. Given I also try to ensure that this site renders in an acceptable manner in text-only mode, Links is indispensable at times.
Now imagine my surprise when I discovered that Links will try to transliterate Japanese kana (a general term for the scripts in which characters correspond to syllables, rather than more abstract ideas such as in kanji) to some extent.
Examine the page header and title readout at upper-right. In that shot, Links has translated the kana in my page’s header to a reasonable romanization- the pronounciation of those characters would be Tari, as in the beginnings of ’tan’ and ‘return’.
One of the fun things to do with computer languages is abuse them. Confusing human readers of code can be pretty easy, but it takes a specially crafted program to be thoroughly incomprehensible to readers of the source code yet still be legal within the syntax of whatever language the program is written in.
Not dissimilar from building a well-obfuscated program is using esoteric languages and building quines. All of these things can be mind-bending but also provide excellent learning resources for some dark corners of language specification, as well as the occasional clever optimization.
Obfuscation It’s not uncommon for malware source code to be pretty heavily obfuscated, but that’s nothing compared to properly obfuscated code.
In a fit of boredom this evening, I tried to see what the speech recognition in Windows 7 would give back when I made raptor noises into it. The result.. speaks pretty well for itself:
F and has and has a Hack it has A hack who know Her house Just how hot enough And who know how It has had To add up data at data to go out and It’s all of all Go ahead goal happened: how has a Staff headed to a
And if his own booth for th FFI have had for the hand-held her and who often have no
I recently converted the root filesystem on my netbook, a now rather old Acer Aspire One with an incredibly slow 1.8" Flash SSD, from the ext3 I had been using for quite a while to the shiny new btrfs, which becomes more stable every time the Linux kernel gets updated. As I don’t keep any data of particular importance on there, I had no problem with running an experimental filesystem on it.
Not only was the conversion relatively painless, but the system now performs better than it ever did with ext3/4.
Conversion Btrfs supports a nearly painless conversion from ext2/3/4 due to its flexible design.
It’s a Christmas miracle! There’s a new post! Or maybe not, but take what you can get. Here are some fun links.
It’s hardly a secret that LEDs may also be used as rather poor photodiodes, but this paper from Mitsubishi Research Laboratories goes into great detail in how such properties may be exploited for short-range wireless communication with only a few parts on a microcontroller. Boing Boing has a neat gallery of technology in use at the US Library of Congress to digitize collections. A ridiculously nice panorama of the Milky Way as seen from the summit of Chimborazo, the highest peak in Ecuador.
It’s been a while since I posted anything new, but there are currently three post drafts and another concept languishing. I’ll get around to those sometime. Here are some vector images to pass the time.
This was a little for-fun project that I built: a Python module/script that can be used to semi-randomly generate words, based on Markov chains.
Background, implementation I was inspired by recalling the story of the Automated Curse Generator, which seemed like something that would be interesting to implement for fun in my own time, as it did indeed turn out to be. In short, the module examines input text and generates a graph with edges weighted based on character frequency, then traverses the graph to generate a word.
To generate the chains, the module builds a directed graph based on the seed text, where characters are linked to all the characters which are known to follow them, with edges weighted according to the percentage of all following characters any particular character consists of.
Because I have nothing better to do right now, it’s a good time to dump the interesting links that I’ve been accumulating.
While radioactive hunks of matter are often portrayed as glowing with a green tinge, we all know that’s not actually true.. unless there’s Cherenkov Radiation involved, as in many nuclear reactors- that’s not green, though. Glowy. Also radioactive. Google have (for now) won the suit against them by Viacom regarding copyrighted content being uploaded to YouTube, which is good news for everyone except maybe Viacom. It’s still fun to read choice excerpts of correspondence involving all sorts of mudslinging in the case (warning: lots of curses).