Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Canon Power features...

I don't own a Canon camera... but for the ones that own one and have that feeling that the camera could gain with some extra customizable options in menus, or just want to try advanced photo technics without have to pay a premium price for such features, CHDK might be what you're looking for... http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK
Please note that not all cameras are supported by such free 'add-on'... if your camera is on the list .. you're a lucky one... now you have no excuse for don't try HDR exposure bracketing technics, motion detection technics and don't even dare to take over/under exposed photos again (unless playing with exposure technics), multi focus technics and lightning shot tricks are also possible ... this puts canon cameras in quite some weird place... really... now you can even play games on one... or just remote shot via USB... ... but really this kinda makes me buy a Canon camera just for the goodies in firmware... Digic II, III or IV are the possible engines that cameras have... they have a list on that wikia on the link above... have fun!

Monday, August 10, 2009

5800XM v30.0.011

Update! I updated OTA, since OVI Suite didn't detect the new version, now as far as i can tell... ...the goods:
- Snapier on some tasks (web browsing is more stable and fast)
- A few graphical glitches disapeared
- Tab (unable to change tab in settings and in messages) bug disapeared
the neutral:
- fullscreen toggle button (when in fullscreen) in web browser is located on the corner and is transparent
- Max sound volume is a bit lower... not bad since at old max volume the phone vibrated
the bads:
- Slower on some tasks, specially when is the first time (rotate screen for the first time on some places is slower)
- Interface got a little slower in my opinion
- Hue bug is back! ... but now auto-corrects it self after a second or so

With this update i updated Maps to 3.0 as well... please note that Maps requires a huge amount of memory to install! Now ... when will 5800XM get the interface of 5530XM? ... kinetic (inertial) scroll is welcome as well as a better use of homescreen (landscape on it would be nice as well)
OMFG: http://www.forum.nokia.com/devices/5800_XpressMusic Please read CPU speed - They upgraded it from 360Mhz to 434Mhz!

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Stuff..

Hello bloggers... i wonder who still reads my blog... well ... today i'll provide something entertaining ... my junk album on picasa account was updated... feel free to visit it... I also added an Experimental album with something done with 2 photos with different exposures... after contrast blend, noise reduction filter and selective saturation enhancement you can see the final result... i was expecting something quite worse...

That's all ... oh! ... Having trouble with input on J2ME for 5800xm due to lack o numerical keypad? search for Virtual Keyboard S60 0.91 or 0.94 (1.01 is buggy - 0.94 is tricky - 0.91 is beta) it will help on some of your needs ... (i wonder why nokia doesn't have something like that for legacy applications - Adobe PDF Reader non-Touch is free ... but LE edition with touch it isn't... lame...)

On a side note... Galaxy on Fire 2 was released .... you can download it for free (be warned that to play it till the end you'll have to pay for it - nice marketing manouver by Fish Labs - Same goes for one of their car racing games), i've mastered GoF (first version) on my old mobile phone, but never finished it ... with more than 45h of gameplay i hadn't visit all the planets >_> ... GoF 2 is also big... and while playing on the first solar system is free, after that you have to connect to internet to check for activation EVERYTIME ... so .. enjoy that one solar system ... it's free XD ... try to get all the stuff from it... is a nice quest ... Oh... good summer vacations... i won't have them... *goes emo*

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Ovi Suite + Nokia Maps 3.0 + Nokia 5800

Hmmm ... i installed Nokia Ovi Suite, that by the looks of it should replace the old Nokia PC Suite, it is still beta, but seems to work well... till i checked for updates there and it told me that i had an update available for my 5800... nokia maps 3.0, i read in engadget that the updated was expected ... so i happilly download it and installed it... to see it completely f*** up my phone ... ... after some bashing i restored my phone hability to ... well... phone... but surprise ... i have a phone with GPS ... without working GPS software, when i try to run nokia maps on phone it tells me that i must update it and requests me to go to nokia maps website and follow instructions... i did ... and ... same thing keeps showing on phone >_>' ... Bad nokia ... bad, really bad... well... i'll bash a little more ... Edit: Deleting most of memory card contents solved the issues ...

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Zapp ... noticias!

Bem ... já há muito queixei-me do facto da Zapp possuir um limite invisivel (no plano ilimitado) de 300Mb por dia (mais coisa menos coisa), no qual findado provocava um abrandamento da velocidade oferecida... algo que estava em violação do contracto em 2 pontos diferentes. Ao que parece esse limite desapareceu ou foi aumentado (para cima de 500Mb - foi o maximo que fiz até agora)... posso agora fazer update chatos sem preocupação de ficar com a net 'lenta'... provavelmente algum utilizador menos paciente e mais irritado resolveu 'puxar as orelhas' à Zapp e pelo menos para os utilizadores iniciais o limite desapareceu - existe a possibilidade da Zapp ter acrescentado uma clausula nos novos contractos para permitir o limite sem justa causa. Bem... pelo menos posso ir pro tutubas (que não é p2p - é HTTP - por isso não violo o contrato :p) sem me preocupar muito ... :p Boa proclastinação...

Line of code of the day #4

Weee... another LOCOTD ... (no ... that doesn't mean Crazy Tower Defence) ... today i present here the following line of code: 
solution[i] = solution[j] | (~0)&(1<<z)

The most familiarized with C and pointers will notice that if i is not related in bounds with j value (or vice-versa) something really bad will happen with memory access/write... the lovely usual segmentation fault or worse... the line should have look like this:
solution[j] = solution[j] | (~0)&(1<<z)

Or in a more compact form:
solution[j] |= (~0)&(1<<z)

I lost 3h to find where the error on my code was... you see, when instead of j the i was there I was writing in some area, that area was where a pointer inside a struct was, at first I though the error was in functions that manipulate variables of that struct... when I noticed something very strange when I switch some entries on struct... it looked like something impossible to happen, but after I've done it some stuff worked, so struct control looked fine... only answer would me that I was modifying struct data unknowing it... after a bunch of printf's (like... everywhere) I tracked the error down... cost me a lot of time... and now I 'only' have to finish some algorithmic stuff that is implemented, polish some of the code and optimize some memory accesses...

Well... good coding... i hope you have better luck than me...

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Vista + ICS + NSU

So... with N97 and a few other touch devices from nokia a new update is to be expected for 5800xm, i was trying to check for updates when NSU (Nokia Software Updater) refused to work... it said some components were missing... and i was like "???" ... how can they be missing this was working yesterday and i didn't shutdown the PC?... hmm.. what i have done that could possible damage NSU instalation? Well.. i have configured ICS (Internet Connection Sharing - or w/e) on Vista, so i could share my conection via wi-fi to my mobile phone... right... well.. after disable it, the NSU worked like a charm. -.-'' Nokia or Windows issue ... that is surelly bad... I really hope 5800xm gets wrt widgets for standby screen and landscape on it as well... is totally possible... is just a matter of Nokia being smart enough to sell some extra 5800xm... samsung and LG are really putting lots of effort in standby interface... nokia did it on N97 ... so why not enable that on a 5800xm? N97 belongs to a diferent market so it shouldn't be canibalized by 5800... yes... they are touchscreen mobile phones with nHD screens, but N97 has a really powerful CPU, hi build quality and a physical thumb keyboard... on a very similar (in size) package... the price is twice the 5800xm... but you're paying for the extras... i'm very happy with my 5800xm ... but improvements are always welcome... and we (5800xm users) sure deserve it since we were guinea pigs for symbian touch interface... Ah well... till next time... code i must, code i will... bye~

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Line of code of the day #3

So... remember that little problem i had to 'compact' selected bits? i think i solved it... By using a very special look-up table i manage to do the trick using this 'easy' to read line:
(( f[(m & 0xF0) | (val & 0xF0) >> 4] >> 3) >> (f[(m & 0x0F)<< 4 | (val & 0x0f )] >> 3 ) & 0xF)

Oh, this code is just for 8bits, a simple expansion allows me to use it for 32bits (with look-up table taking up 2Mb)... and no... I won't explain what is in f table has... and yes... I might screw up with the parentesis... I didn't compile that piece of code, but tested it manually instead... it should work... efficiency wise it's better that scan all bits one by one...

You can now commit suicide.

PS: By reading this you agree that i'm not responsible for any harm occoured both physically or mentally when reading the text above... really...

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Line of code of the day #2

Who would guess its another LOCOTD, this time we have some C code to show... solution[batch] = solution[batch] | ~((polar_0[batch] ^ polar_1[batch])&polar_0[batch]) | ((polar_0[batch] ^ polar_1[batch])&polar_1[batch]); In case you're wondering ... yes i could load the values of polar_0 and polar_1 on index batch, but since i don't know what kind of effect that will have on performance, i'll try both and see... compilers and assemblers do magic sometimes... :p I leave the moment to show you some magic ... long live to SWAR Algorithms! Jokes aside, using general CPU instructions to make some crazy highly efficient operations is always good, while it is wise to check such approaches also keep moderation in mind, you can end up with some brain damage... Now... a little puzzle for anyone who is willing to take it: I have an array of 32-bit masks, that in reality represents a very huge mask for a very huge matrix, now ... i want to grab those bits masked (the number of masked bits is known) and pack them all in another array, all of that must be done fast, since speed is what we want. I leave a little example for 8-bit masks, 4 length array: mask 01111000 01001001 10101110 10111100 masked 01101011 10100101 11101110 11010010 result 00000000 00000001 10100111 11110100 I do not have a (eficient) solution for this problem (yet - i kinda have an idea), i hope to find one since this is kinda crucial to optimize the speed of the rest of the algorithm. With that said, feel free to comment and give sugestions about it... Good coding...

Friday, May 22, 2009

Need a media center/entertainment PC?

I was checking ASUSTeK website when i was surprised by this little fella: Rampage II Gene It's tiny.... but packs everything needed to make a quite powerful machine.... problem: costs more than 200€ so ... a PC build with it will cost quite something ... (specially if you pair it with 2 BFG Nvidia GTX 295 H2O, 6Gb DDR3 2000Mhz and a i7 Extreme CPU) ... and to keep things silent and cool, the V1... and this monster... or this puppy - hmmm ... 250+1200+500+1000+500+50 = 3500€ given or taken... pair it with a G9x and a G19, hmmm ... some G51 and the G25 (well... you buy 2 of G's series, you could as well buy the whole set) and a Samsung Led-TV ... That would power up a room :p but is around 5000€ ... ah well ...

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Cleaning fail...

So... today, after have some work done i solve to clean up and desktop since my sister is using it, she cares little over the dust that accumulates on filters... My computer case is very nice, a Thermaltake Tsunami, so i got the moment to clean up the cables as well, a year ago or so, i buyed a lcd panel for temperature monitoring and a card reader, sata plugs and usb extra plugs were freebies (even with the case usb plugs my motherboard still has room for more) by the time i connected everything and just rearrange the cables just enough to allow a good air flow. So today, i rearrange the cables not only for the air flow, but to give it a cleaner look, since the 5,25" panel has around 40 cables that was no easy task, but i'm happy with the result, even the graphic board agrees, since now it won't fire the fan into hi-speed (hi-noise) that easily. So... where is the fail? well... after all the work to clean and correct stuff, i ended up with this: Link (i wonder if this link works properlly) Well, not exacly that one, but you get the idea. A screw from the floppy drive went missing... just to be found right after close the case and connect all cables... oh well... i won't mess with the case any time soon again >_> *resumes work*

Monday, May 4, 2009

Hmm...

Well ... i'm dead tired, have a pile of work above me and it each time i try to reduce the pile, it increases size.... Hmm ... right... i won't sleep till i finnish this piece of code, so ... don't expect for me to be very cooperative into helping in something... In 5 days or so, we shall see if i'm alive after being up and wake working non stop for more that 4 days... not that i never did it before, but by the looks of it i gain a couple of years (or lose, depends on view point) each time i do it... So... 'till then folks *resumes work*

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Swine Flu...

So.... first was the avine flu ... well ... now is swine flu... evolution ...

Quando o frio aperta....

Quando o frio aperta: link Bem... de volta ao trabalho...

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Line of code of the day

Hmmm ... you know... sometimes you create pieces of code that look like crap but do wonderful things and very fast... so i'll paste a line of a VHDL architecture module... now imagine that 90% of the rest of the module is similar... yes... a nightmare to debug... div_buffer <= (NUM_VARS-LOG2_NUM_VARS-1 downto 1 => '0')&((offset-(stack(top)(NUM_VARS+LOG2_NUM_VARS-2 downto NUM_VARS)&'0'))&'0'); But work! I might clean up the code later ... anyway, this calculates a divider for a bit vector calculation ... in software takes around 2*N clock cycles to calculate the bit vector, in hardware takes N*log(N) clock cycles... i would say my implementation is efficient .. XD In other news, my pen tablet and gimp (or should i say GTK+?) are always punching eachother... i found a way of solving the issues ... reboot! ... This only happens in windows Vista... so... yeah ... Vista is not only sluggish, slow and bad... is even worse ... specially since my pen tablet says "Certified for windows Vista" ... go figure!

Monday, April 20, 2009

LCDs...

Hmm... you want to buy a new screen for your computer, or even for your living room, but have no idea of what to choose and how to see if it's really good that cheap one at the store in the next corner? Well, then i have something to you! Was not made by me, but you may want to see if, even if you are already happy with your current screen. LINK You don't need to be an expert to know that my laptop screen does suck, you just need to glance it, but how bad it is? The answer is 1:50 contrast ratio! ... Yes ... i have a freaking laptop with a crappy contrast ratio, sadly, i usually use it to image edition, getting somewhat shabby results because of my pour color choices... go figure! ... Well, i'm happy with my laptop, it's freaking fast beating my desktop in every point, except for the screen... well, at least i can conect it to a proper screen :p EDIT: After a few more tests, i found out i wasn't holding the camera perfectly perpendicular to the screen, since my screen viewing angles are .... bad, i was getting such values, it's not like it's much better, but the after all the testing the results i've obtained were 386:1 contrast ratio and 180cd/m2 on maximum luminance... my pda screen has 580:1 and 295cd/m2 ... one can easily see the diference just by looking at their image, oh well... Hmmm ... in other news, gimp and my new tablet went in disagreement, since only gimp gives me trouble i would guess that it's gimp's problem, but since it does detect my tablet correctly, but looses track of pressure information channel, i would say that is a less ordinal aproach in drivers implementation with some gimp implementation choices that cause trouble, oh well, at least openCanvas 1.1 beta 72 revision 1, never fails me, but it does lack some features xD. Oh, it works everytime in Adobe applications too, well, my 30days trial over photoshop are over, so i can't exacly see if it works there now... well... stuff done with my pen tablet can be found here, some stuff (like the comic with BOOM letters - lineart came from snafu-comics.com) is not entirelly done by me, but you can have fun watching stuff appear there in a random fashion...

Saturday, April 18, 2009

A new gamepad!

Hmmm ... I got my hands in a new gamepad, my old one is a bit worn off, the old one is a Logitech Dual Action rev1, but usb cable is torning apart and shoulder buttons get stuck on bottom sometimes, d-pad really sucks, but analogs still work fine... The new gamepad i got was offered by a friend (that i must choke somehow), it's a very sturdy controller from speedlink, is the d-struct model, first of all, shoulder buttons feel like analog buttons are not analogic, just in case you're wondering, that would be totally awesome. The cordless sistem is really cordless on the package, it even lacks the usb cable to charge the gamepad, but i have lots of those around my house (even my FPGA has one). Bottom line, is a very sturdy, responsive and accurate controller, analogs have a good grip, d-pad looks bad, but isn't that bad at all, most of springs are quite strong, it may be for being new, but being used to my old one, and comparing with a dualshock2 the analogs and the shoulder spring buttons have a very strong springs on their insides.

Friday, April 17, 2009

A new pen tablet!

Finnally i got my hands on a new pen tablet, and now a review over it! It costed me 68,99€ so, my last tablet costed 69,99€, first, let's look at the specs and compare them with my old tablet... I had an Wacom Volito2, it was little but precise, i loved it, 2000lpi 512 pressure levels, A6 area... Now i have an Trust (Aiptek hardware in reality) tablet, it's the 7300, has 4000lpi, 1024 pressure levels, A4 area, it's.... huge... Short after buy it, i installed it in a friends laptop, was pretty linear, and after a bit trouble with ink and graphic modes i was ready to go, openCanvas 1.1 beta 72 is the oldest program i have that uses pen pressure, it worked pretty well, then i installed gimp, and after some changes in shortcuts i even had zoom feature in wheel pads to work, pretty awesome. The worst part was when i arrived home and tried to install it on my laptop, wacom drivers were installed, then entered in conflict with the tablet, it was a mess, even after removed wacom drivers it wouldn't install correctly, so i did what i felt to be the best thing to do, uninstalled every pen tablet driver aplication that was installed and removed all the drivers that could mess up, to make it worse, i have 3 point devices, the synaptics touchpad, the G5 logitech mouse, and a generic HID USB mouse, i removed everything except for touchpad. After all cleaned and rebooted, i installed the drivers (not the aiptek ones, i think they work fine, since in all the mess they were installed once and pen was working, but pressure wasn't recognized in gimp) and then plugged the tablet, a success was what i obtained. About the features and performance of this pen tablet. One funny thing i noticed is that you don't want to work on it with your UMTS enabled phone near it, the pointer will shake a bit, while it's not important for general use, it will screw up if you're editing image or something similar... so turn you're phone off, or just give a meter or so of distance. In gimp it behaved very smoothly, i putted settings of drivers to 0 on sensitivity (that is maximum sensitivity) i can say, that a -10 would be nice, since the lighter strokes aren't quite sensed, it requires a bit of pressure to start sensing the strokes, but compared to my old wacom, is almost the same, a bit more smooth maybe. While the wheel pads are two, they behave as one, and are hardware coded into Scroll, Zoom and Volume features, so using them for other purposes might be tricky, the one thing i can say is that Zoom feature throws Ctrl++ and Ctrl+- keystrokes to system, so if your aplication can be customized in shortcut keys, you know what to choose to have them do what you wish. Build quality is similar to my Volito2, actully both pens and tablets look like use the exact same materials, if wasn't for the brand logos i would that they were build by the same company. Given the price of it, i may say i'll never buy another wacom product (unless they get a lot cheaper), sure pen uses an AAA battery, but i have rechargable batteries for everything, and it's a little bit heavier and bigger, but since my hands are a bigger that the average person ones i really don't care (it's not that big the difference in pens). Just one tip, you may want to use Grab and Drag extension for firefox if you have a pen tablet or a tablet pc, it will improve your experience a lot! There are also smaller versions of this pen tablet, my guess is that quality and performance should be very similar. Oh, and in case you're wondering, i usually hate Trust devices, tumbs up for this one!

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Random photos

Photos

During easter i took some photos on a small town, where ACRA-EC HQ are, click on the photo to see them, enjoy!

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Questing for a Pen Tablet...

Well... my old (not so old ... but old enough to be dead) Wacom Volito2 is dead... so... i searched for a new pen tablet.... my experience with Volito2 told me that a bigger area than A6 is desirable for the kind of stuff i do.... so an A5 area or an A4 would be better... what choices do i have? After google a bit i come to join this conclusions/facts:

  • Wacom pen tablets are .... overpriced... no doubt there...
  • Wacom pen tablets are the only ones that use battery-less pens
  • Wacom pen tablets replacements/extras are .... well.... overpriced... (as expected)
  • European Wacom pen tablets are ... more overpriced than the rest of the world
  • Other brands seem to have identical models - Aiptek, Genius, Trust
  • New Wacom Intuos4 is very very nice .... and expensive (among the Wacom offer is the less overpriced one)

So... to put things shorter (please note that Intuos4 pens have tilt and rotation sensors):

Genius G-Pen M609A51024 pressure levels4000lpi70€
Genius G-Pen M712A41024 pressure levels4000lpi90€
Wacom Bamboo One MA5512 pressure levelsaround 2250lpi180€
Wacom Intuos4 SA62048 pressure levels5080lpi220€
Wacom Intuos4 MA52048 pressure levels5080lpi370€

I really liked the Genius A4 area and price.... according to reviews some people complains of pen size and weight... but since my hands are big and i'm used to heavy ink pens (bigger inertia, steadier strokes, my calligraphy is horrible) i'm quite tempted to try it... a Wacom pen with the same area costs almost 5 times more... if that isn't overpriced... i don't know what to call it... also in european countries intuos4 doesn't come with a mouse... while in other countries it has it included (as well as some extra software from adobe, and conversion ratio from dollar to euro is like 1:1 - considering that mouse costs 70€ i would say dollar worths more than euro for the given prices/hardware...).

Well after easter i might buy one Genius pen tablet... If i do so, i'll review it... hoping that someone with the same trouble will save some zeny

EDIT: On a side note... after hacking the drivers of genius, i can confirm that genius tablet is in reality an Aiptek ... i did check the one from Trust (that i'm willing to buy since is the one available in stores around here) and the aiptbl.ini file is a little give away... xD oh.. acording to store that sells Trust one, it is supposed to have 60º tilt sensor! I can't wait to get my hands in one...

EDIT 2: 60º tilt seems to be a fake feature... but in the other hand i found the A4 tablet at 68€!

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Blender...

Ah... o blender ... aquele programa de modelação 3d que 'ninguem' consegue usar devido a uma interface intragavel... bem... eu nao o consigo usar mas isso nao evitou que perdesse uma hora a tentar fazer algo ... lol... bem o resultado fica aqui exposto para todos os que quiserem ver... eu puz texturas ... mas nao faço a mais palida ideia de como as renderizar correctamente...

"fear the mad kitty" XD

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Wacom tablets...

Hmmm ... tomorrow (25th) wacom will reveal something (my guess would go to intuos4) but i'm not here to rant about it... this actually happen a 'long' time ago...

Wacom tablets are good, yes, very good indeed, i had (well... have) one that stop working for quite some time now...

After my pen tablet (a volito2) stop working i solve to open it up to check if a wire from usb cable was broken or something... what i found left me a bit.... out of mood... i was expecting to find some state-of-art circuit board, what i found was 6 small chips (big enough to be hand soldered) and a some cooper tracks... a simple design... the worst part is that for the looks of it, 70€ isn't exactly a fair price.... at least in my opinion... i didn't open the pen... but ... 70€ is way too much for something of that complexity... Wacom is ripping off customers... but ... there are not much alternatives anyway... at least not with the system that wacom has patented... and that is what i guess customers are paying...

If each pen tablet (at least the low-end ones) costs like 5€ to make (i'm estimating - could be wrong of course) and they want 70€ (the new bamboos cost even more and are worse or the same) they are making rivers of money... *sigh* i serious doubt i will buy a wacom tablet soon, mainly because a 400€-500€ cost 150€ on other brands (i'm talking about a A4 area, 4000dpi, 100rps, 1024 levels of pressure), well, yes they don't have extra pens or such, but wacom extra pens also cost awfully a lot...

In the end it is customers choice, wacom's top quality vs other brand's awesome prices... in low-end i actually think wacom is nice, because of the crappy quality on other brands tablets for that segment... but when the features increase quality differences get reduced, making the choice harder.... oh well... i guess my G5 will have to do the job... (G5 is a logitech mouse - i have the 1st revision one, it's OLD ... but works better than any other mouse, specially for it's age)

Oh well... but this is just me ranting ... yes... i was bored when write this (i corrected some - ugly - algorithms that by some reason continue to work wrong)

VHDL considerations...

While programming in VHDL can't be considered a very easy deal, there are certain things on it that are very easy to do... i lost 2 days with one of those things...

Making a crash course into VHDL sintax (and assuming that you know how a computer works in hardware terms), you control bits in vhdl... yes... bits... the simplest think in computers world... of course that it isn't very easy to do complex things of a thing so simple, but anyone understands that shifting bits is just picking a bunch of them and putting them a little bit aside.

In VHDL you can create arrays - vectors - of bits, and you can access each bit or a pack of them by indexing them, sounds scary, but it's very easy actually, one with no knowledge in programming should have no problem doing a static shifter in vhdl.

To index bits, you need to 'create' them... well ... there is a lot of mambo-jambo in VHDL for doing declalations, and while i mastered most of VHDL sintax i still fail in the most basic stuff (well, i'm always learning from mistakes but it doesn't seem enough xD).

Well... lets say you have a array of bits, better saying a vector, in vhdl it is called std_logic_vector, and it's simple a vector of std_logic elements.. std_logic elements are the representation of a signal value in hardware (well, kinda) they can be 1, 0 or other ugly stuff you really don't wanna know...

Ok... we have our vector puppy in a signal, this should be human readable (or i'm loosing my human side):

signal puppy : std_logic_vector (31 downto 0);

So puppy has 32 bits ordered like 31 down to 0... how nice...

if you want a bit from puppy, you just do like this:

puppy(3)

And that is bit number 3... it's 4th bit if you count from right, since there is a bit 0... easy to get right?

Now harder! >:D you want... the 8 first bits... that will be hard, right?

puppy(7 downto 0)

Damn... was too easy... well... this is being great but grabbing bits without interact with them is a bit... worthless... well... you have a nice operator for concatenate bits! So now we can make our shifter... to concatenate bits you just use & operator like so:

'0'&"0000001"

So ... easy to get ('0' is a bit with zero value .... and "0000001" is a vector of bits) ... so 8 bits with the least significant bit (if you consider the right the least significant bit) at '1'

Now ... how to shift? You should get it now without any help, let's shift our puppy 8 bits to right!

"00000000"&puppy(31 downto 8)

Easy... right? I mean... you couldn't fail that... no way.... right? I did fail at doing that... and lost 2 days of work >:(

I wanted to shift one bit to right, i did like this (taking puppy as an example):

'0' & accu(30 downto 0)

That simply replaces the last bit with '0' ... >___>''

PS: Sorry for the length of this post... 

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Manga reading...

I found another good manga for reading, it's quite crazy, has lots of action, comic stuff, fantasy and ... well ... boobs ... by some reason author of it put most of the wizards as females with 'some' attributes... The name of it: Kurohime Good reading...

Monday, March 16, 2009

Rubik's Cube

I like puzzles... and i happen to own several Rubik's cubes [at right: 2x2x2, 3x3x3 and the demoniac 4x4x4 (5x5x5 is hard to find...)]

Today i took the day to think a bit of solving approaches to the 3x3x3, the method i first learn was the layer by layer method, the first 2 layers and the top cross are pretty intuitive for me, i found the algorithms to solve them by myself, the top corners are easy but since i have a bad memory i can't memorize all the algorithms (like +50) that allow the a nice optimization.  So i researched for a new method, i found Lars Petrus method to be quite funny to apply, it requires some understanding of the cube, at least to solve the 2x3x3 (first 2 layers) but if applied the top cross will automatically be done and it isn't required to go into that 4 corners twist algorithms application.

I can't tell if the method is faster or not since i can do the cube under 90s (if i don't get too unlucky) with my old approach, this one requires a bit more of look ahead, but is funny how the top cross is automatically created (this is due to a parity trick in algorithm).

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Now a question for the readers, you don't need to be a cube expert: Do you think it is easier to solve a 4x4x4 cube with different colors on the sides or with different images?

My answer is with different colors, at least with my method. I don't own a cube with images, but by trying to make patterns on the 4x4x4 i found out that it is really hard to make stuff on the place we want, so in a image all cubies have a specific place giving the same trouble.

Monday, March 9, 2009

That was big...

Just some random (funny) fact, this was the message that you would (will - hmm, better don't ask how) get when you've finish Lemmings for Atari Lynx:

Link (7442 bytes .TXT)

Yep... they took almost 7,4Kb of perfectly good space and used it to something that can be called one of the longest game over screens ever made (maybe not, but at that time there weren't many games with such big end), well, it was some way of developers reward player... ...a weired way...

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Nexys2 with plexiglass

Pictures speak for themselves...

I know it will get scratched, but at least is not the board that will get those scratches ... :p

"No... I will not fix your computer..."

Hmmm ... ultimamente tenho sido, demasiado requisitado para compor PC's, redes, saber que componentes são uteis ou não, resolver problemas ligados à informática no geral...

Se têm algum problema desses, tenham o meu contacto e tenham a infeliz ideia de me contactar para resolver tal assunto vão aqui umas dicas:

Primeiro, procurem no google, se não sabem o que o google é ou não tenham internet... bem ...ou vão a uma internet pública e procuram ou desistam de usar um PC...

Segundo, procurem por uma solução no google, o uso de termos em ingles ao inves de portugues ajuda... procurar frases completas não é grande ideia...

Terceiro, procurem no google, a serio... não desistam se a primeira pesquisa não der resultados uteis, o google é um ferramenta util, façam uso correcto dela e obterão respostas

Caso após seguir as dicas acima indicadas não resolveram o problema, podem desistir de usar o PC, ou contactar-me, caso optem pela segunda opção devo avisar que estou a pensar em pedir remuneração pelos minutos gastos...

...Por isso ... voltem a procurar no google... caso não gostem do google, têm muitos outros motores de busca: Ask, Yahoo, AltaVista, Wikipedia, kuantokusta (não me venham perguntar outra vez se aquilo tá barato ou caro)....

Friday, February 27, 2009

Thursday, February 26, 2009

VGA 8bits per pixel limitation... not a real issue!

This was the most colourful image i could find in my images folder (image from VGCats.com): As you can see only the sun is a bit weired... this was using a custom 256 color pallete on gimp and simply changing color mode to index using dirthering.... Dirthering is really powerful ... I was surprised with the results i've obtained using only 256 colors, specially with only 2 bits for blue channel, i shall try applying a small image into fpga to check if the final result is really this good... who knows, perhaps a small animation XD I may upload the pallete later for the ones who wish to try :p PS: It's 12:48 ... why does blogger think it's 4:24am .... i'll never know >__>''

FPGA and VGA Screen

It wasn't easy... but i manage to put VGA to work on the nexys2. Main issues i found and solve: 1) Screen mode - My lcd doesn't like 640x480@60Hz ... it works but it complains (something like: please use 1440x900@75Hz) 2) Calculus issues - After change to 800x600@72Hz (50Mhz pixel clock - the clock of the fpga how nice... XD), i found out my pixel mapping was all wrong... the reason? Apparently a math error, mine of course, i just forgot that putting stuff closer isn't made first x_coor <= H_Counter - HP+HB that + was supposed to be a minus or ... just put it like (HP+HB) .. yeah, stupid me... >__>'' ... it's a bit sad, since this thing made me lost about 3h of work... 3) Syncronization issues - After try some extra logic stuff to calculate the color of a pixel, i found out that it might cause some little gliches .... not happy with them, i used a syncronization buffer In the end i just obtained a very nice VGA module it allows the use of an independent pixel mapper module, thanks to an extra sincronization module... it even allows the sheduling of pixels ahead of time... that way is possible to pipeline some work. If possible i'll try to show my VGA module in action in a near future (maybe a pong game, that sounds easy enough XD) And in case you're gonna ask how VGA signal works: Timings The best google result you will find (pdf) Any questions or ideas, just post below...

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Hello World!

Well ... here it is! The hello world in the nexys2 ... lol... not that complex, but the block i made will allow me to output useful information once i start to implement more serious stuff... HELLO World Enjoy...

Comics update!

Well ... 2 new comics suggestions: ULTIMO - Sci-fi, fantasy, action, fight Bamboo Blade B - Hard to describe... filled with craziness...

Monday, February 23, 2009

FPGA - Nexys2

While was not today, the Nexys2 from digilent has finally arrived, i spent the weekend playing a bit with it, it is a quite neat package, i had already the latest Xilinx ISE Webpack installed, so was just a matter of reading the reference manual, set the pins and start testing stuff. Just a tip: If you adquired one of these, you may feel some trouble in using the segment display, to activate an anode you must use zero value there and to activate a catode (that controls each segment independently) you must also use zero value there. Also, buttons and segment displays are inversed, so ... button zero is at right and segment display controled by anode zero is at left, so if you're using buttons to do some action on the display above them take this in consideration. The demo/test provided gave me some trouble to compile in ISE 10 ... it was made for version 8, eitherway source code of it provides a nice tutorial in how to use VGA port and PS/2 for a mouse. If i get time i shall show you some demos of it running crazy stuff i made to test some code (an Hello World running into segment displays.. scrolling of course, 4 displays aren't enough for 11 chars) I also leave some links that might be useful if you didn't already knew it: fpga4fun (digilent site has changed)

Monday, February 9, 2009

Awesomeness!

I just took a sneak peek into NOiSE manga .... it's just... awesome - a very action packed fist chapter! If you are to search for such comic may be advised that: "May contain strong language, excessive violence, nudity and/or lots of blood and gore." I can say it contains excessive violence and gore... Good reading >:D

A very big joke...

I believe most of ppl know the uncyclopedia website as a parody to wikipedia... well... I go there usually to have a good laugh, today i found something quite nice, hilarious.... and .... long... XD .. They also have Unbooks one of them is a nice big, continous joke, i leave the link here so that you with free time can also lose some on reading it, enjoy! My_New_Life_as_a_T-Rex

Monday, February 2, 2009

5800 XpressMusic - Review

Yep, i buyed the first S60 touch device by nokia... i've been using it for a couple days, so lets talk about the goods and the bads: The goods:
  • The screen is perhaps the best screen i ever saw in a mobile device, a little smaller than iphone but with increased resolution, it has an awesome constrast and bright (i use it with bright on lower settings).
  • The battery looks like it gives what it promises, i used it for 2 days on a intensive kinda way and it is still kicking
  • The performance doesn't make it the fastest device, i won't recomend it for 3d games, but it is quite fast on most of the tasks, reproducing video with 640x368@25fps without trouble.
  • Connectivity tests were flawlessly, Wi-Fi wizard configuration is quite intuitive, bluetooth sincronization with hands-free headset was easy, trully a nice experience on this point, helping all this browser is really good rendering pages very similar to desktop way, flash lite 3.0 is a nice think as it supports flash 8 videos and animations.
  • The GPS works quite well ... Nokia Maps and Google Maps (google maps works really well on this device!) provide a nice interface and worked quite smoothly.
  • Multimedia features are quite nice, video, music, radio and images are presented/rendered nicely, the interface on these aplications was quite well made.
The bads:
  • The interface while fast (except for auto-rotate in internet browser) it's not the most intuitive thing, sometimes you need to tap to select and to tap again to confirm, requiring a double tap, this usually happens in dropdown-like menus. There are also some gliches in browser and with mini-QWERTY keyboard (not that bad). Also in landscape mode the top bar of the browser (equivalent to the title bar and status bar of the desktop merged) is freaking huge the could save that area to the page and provide a bar identical to the one in portrait mode...
  • Lacks pre-loaded software, you can however download a bunch of free stuff in a aplication very similar to app store, some are trully free like QuickOffice (only for read documents not to edit), others are trials... the worst thing is that Adobe Reader 2.5 LE is TRIAL!!! I mean with all that bunch of pdf's that exist on the internet a pdf reader is quite handy but to not make it free when non-touch versions are free is freaking bad...
  • OS is not that open as most of people may think by look at nokia foruns, installing some applications may prove near to impossible (certificates are a pain), adding to that, the tools provided to development are beta or bug filled. The device is still 'green' require a some extra time to enable development of aplications worth the effort.
In the end is a nice device, lacks a bit in software support, but i read that firmware updates are arriving to correct some stuff (available in Asia). During the usage of this device i found some nice stuff that you may like if you have one of these:
  • Game Boy Color Emulator MeBoy - A freaking good java aplication that works pretty well with the touch interface provided by the phone to java aplications.
  • Google Maps -You know what this is ...
  • Handbreak - You WILL need this to watch your videos on the phone, SUPER is also a nice alternative.
  • Well .... this - I didn't tested all of them... lol
That's all ... enjoy ^__^

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Puppy Linux

Today i spent the entire day installing linux (well, any SO that could run would do it) in a old machine, with 64Mb of ram, it had to be a light distro, and since it doesn't have a - functional - CD drive, it had to be really installed, also, bios didn't support pen drives for booting and such (and i don't have floppies avaliable around here), so there i was, with a very dusty computer to restore. ---------BEGIN------------- QUEST: Ressurrect an old PC --------------------------------------- Task one: Find a way to inject an SO on it, solution - hijack a CD drive from other (old) computer. Task two: Connect the drive to the computer, errr.... how the heck i open the PC box? After an hour of metal bend and cut (not the metal, the fingers), access!! Now to put the drive on it... oh wait... it doesn't recognize the hardrive now.... hmmm ... ok ... reset bios... solved... i think... Task three: Select and install a mini-distro, DSL, too hard for the users, feather linux, only on CD, soo... among the images i had in my laptop hardrive i selected Puppy Linux, it started up once i burned the CD and booted from it... nice... now... WHERE IS THE HARDRIVE???!!! Task four: Track down why linux isn't recognizing the hardrive when bios is... errr.... this is the first time that this happens to me... hmmm ... ok... *removes more pieces from another old PC* puts HDD and CD Drive in diferent cables... works! *phew* Linux detects it... installs ... and.... Grub error 17... Task five: Find why the grub thown such an error.... reinstall linux... error disapeared.... riiiiightt ... this one was easy... oh wait... error 2 now ... #%@§!!! Task six: Solve the error 2... hmmm ... *google* *google* *forum* *google* *forum* ... mess with bios ... ok .... change type/detection of HDDs ... ok... crap ... computer doesn't start and just keeps beepping ... ok ... reset BIOS on jumper... ok ... make the same change... ok ... now starts .... and.... success .. . grub is on! Task seven: Finish Puppy configuration... all working! ----------------------------- BONUS QUEST: Come back next week and repeat all steps because users WILL destroy it... ------------END-------------- *sigh* On a side note, Puppy linux is quite awesome.... not as powerful and versatile as the DSL, but freaking fast!

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Labels Sphere

Added a new widget, if you like it you can find instructions here: http://www.bloggerbuster.com/2008/08/blogumus-flash-animated-label-cloud-for.html Not very useful, but kinda cool... ;p

Friday, January 9, 2009

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

Ok .... pra quem não saiba este bichinho vai estar à venda na worten mobile por 364€ ... é o iphone killer da nokia na minha opinião... GPS, FM Radio, Touchscreen, Acelerómetro, Wi-Fi, microSD de 8Gb included, 3.2 MP na camera, filma a 640x480@30fps .... Symbian S60 release 5 (V9.4) - com todos os goodies .... TV Out .... ah sim ... é também um telemovel com 3G ... e mais não digo.... google it! >:D Acho que o vou adquirir, o meu Sharp 903SH tá a precisar da reforma... não, não o ponho pra retoma (quem é que seria doido a esse ponto?) Comparação

Thursday, January 8, 2009

RTSS@2007 CiberMouse

Ok .... i made a ciberMouse within RTSS2007 rules, if you don't know what it is ... is simple... imagine a mouse in a labyrinth, there are more mouses there, they all want the cheese and to come back to their home, but the mice have a problem, they are kinda blind, have 4 really bad eyes (one eye is on their back - don't ask!) and they only sniff the cheese at 120º on they front, to make. things worse they can only sense 2 things at the same time and they take a while to sense the cheese, and some walls don't let cheese be sensed.... oh... they also carry a compass that takes a while to view the way north is... This is, of course, the metaphore for this contest... kinda... xD ... well i think an image explains it better, so here it is, the final state of a run, my mouse is the pink... the other ones are the samples one that come with simulator... So... i won the run... like ... i went to cheese and come back without hit anything... sure, took a while ...is kinda funny to see how near i come to the start point (mouses have 2 engines that have error and inertia associated when energy applied) so is not easy for such thing to happen... Well ... it's 6:10am ... i think i go take some rest...

Monday, January 5, 2009

T260HD

Hmm... it happen a week ago but i managed to convince my dad to buy a Samsung T260HD to replace both TV and computer screen, for 450€ this is perhaps the best computer screen i ever seen, the 1920x1200, 1:1000 contrast (1:10000 dinamic) with 5ms response time and crystal view design... just awesome... of course that if it was to desk work the T240HD would be enough it has the same features, just in a smaller screen (and less 50€ to pay). The TV tuner works flawlessly, i just have analog TV, so i can't say much about DTV features (but i can say that playing a 1920x1080p video is kinda amazing). In my case the 26" (25,5" to be more accurate) are quite the point, and a bigger one wouldn't fit the shelf... The color calibration took a while, it was to bright/white with default setting, but a little mess in the brightness and contrast provided a nice image, very similar to the one on the old TV (CRT) we had. If you're searching for a TV/PC Screen combo... this was made for you.... (if it's for a desk i wouldn't buy anything bigger than 24") I would leave some pics of it... my my mobilephone camera is suffering from old age (the CCD is kinda burned a bit, so above, and sometimes even in, ISO 400 is quite noisy) so it's better to seek google for such pictures...

Saturday, January 3, 2009

Messing with google...

Strange calculation... There are plenty useless things you can do with google.... ...this is one of those... enjoy! x3

Friday, January 2, 2009

Happy new year :3

So ... here we are ... a new year ... a whole old trashy world... it could be worse i guess... I guess this year will be no diferent from last one from me... well... i hope to finish my studies and get a job, but that's life going as expected... And you ... any hopes or dreams for this year? Hmm.. well ... anyway... good luck with them i guess ;3