Rik's Ramblings

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Don't you mean ...

"the virgin Connie Swail"

Worth watching the whole film just for that one line.  Which is just as well, as it's the only funny line :-/

  DRAGNET

I'd forgot that Tom Hanks is also in it.


Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Gray Coding

I can never remember how it goes, and neither can you. So here, I've worked it out again and I'll write it down here for all our benefits:


000 0
100 4
110 6
010 2
011 3
111 7
101 5
001 1

0000 0
1000 8
1100 C
0100 4
0110 6
1110 E
1010 A
0010 2
0011 3
1011 B
1111 F
0111 7
0101 5
1101 D
1001 9
0001 1


The great thing about a Gray Code is that, for each transition, only one of the bits changes. This makes it ideal for those situation where you could be sampling the data right when the transition occurs. In such a situation you could (due to alignment errors, propagation delay, aliasing, or other reasons) get a false reading if you were using normal binary representation.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

iFly "sky diving"

Went to iFly at the weekend. iFly is one of those wind-turbine things that lets you simulate jumping out of an aeroplane without too much risk of bodily harm.

iFly, Bay Area

A big fan blowing you at 120(ish) miles per hour suspending you in a column of air and allowing you to do aeronautical tricks (in theory).

Naturally, on your first go you don't really do much other than try stay level and not hit the walls. second attempt was a little better, I was able to steer myself a little and increase/decrease my drag by changing body shape a little.

After two rides I was aching in my shoulders and back, and the next day I was stiff too! When I say two 'rides' I should add that a ride only lasts ONE MINUTE! Quite a work-out!

Suited-up at iFly in Union City


Friday, July 23, 2010

RiksReads: Silas Marner


Silas Marner

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Bike Trip at the Weekend

Mr's Sagar got a new bike, so we took it for a test drive at the weekend. Did surprisingly well for the first trip in a year!

Total distance was a little over 21 miles, from slightly north of Monterey down to 17mile drive.


We made a couple of stops on route (as indicated by the blue markers!). One was for a bacon butty for breakfast (at Lovers') and one for a coffee on the way back (near McAbee).

Shared Route (via KML) On Google Maps

View Bikeride in a larger map

Friday, July 16, 2010

Wow, new patents!

Three more patents have been granted, with my name on, this year.

Updated list of filings, and PDFs added for your reading convenience.

http://sagar.org/workbench/patents/

Thursday, July 15, 2010

OK, I'm back

Dispite all the big talking about setting up my own blogging software, it turned out I'm too lazy. So I've moved to the 'blogger' servers and the new blog URL is http://ramblings.sagar.org.