Published on
March 24, 2004 in
Geek.
So early last week, I received the coolest thing from a guy at Altera. It’s called the Cubic Cyclonium, and it makes one heck of a paperweight. In essence, it’s a small system designed around an Altera Cyclone FPGA and includes a bunch of cool stuff (168 LED array, 1MB of SRAM, VGA out), all embedded in a block of clear Lexan plastic. It draws power over a USB cable, includes software to program it to do a variety of neat demos (defaults to displaying time and date, can display a scrolling marquee text message, stock quotes, and several games/screensavers including tetris, pong, life, etc). The VGA also sends out a basic Altera video demo (Altera logo, rotating 3D cube consisting of dots, etc). They’ve also included all sorts of documentation and source code for all the demo software/designs. Here’s a little picture from some of the documentation:
Hopefully I’ll get around to taking some better pictures tomorrow including some showing off the LED array. I haven’t yet figured out what cool thing I want to program it to do, but the Cyclone should be able to do all sorts of stuff. From what I understand, I should even be able to get one of their soft core Nios processors to compile onto it and do some interesting stuff with that (although I’m not sure what software I need to do that and if it’s freely available or not).
Published on
March 23, 2004 in
Geek.
So I don’t think I’ve explicitly mentioned it, but I ended up renaming most of my machines a while back. I decided to switch to a theme as opposed to the random naming scheme I was using before (ie Malaise, Elysium, Nicosia, Sulaco, Aragorn, etc). At this point, most of my stuff is named after characters in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. My aging Athlon box (Elysium) has been named after Polonius, the doddering old fool. My newer P4 box (Sulaco) has been named after Horatio, Hamlet’s buddy. I’ve named my notebook after Laertes (Polonius’ son) and my PDA after Ophelia (Polonius’ daughter). Not sure I’ll ever have an actual Hamlet, since it’s a hard role to fill. Oh, and I’ve decided to keep my Linux server named Malaise since it runs my external host by the same name.
Published on
March 22, 2004 in
Geek.
Well, I finally did it. I signed myself for an actual, bonafide web hosting service. No more being limited to what will fit on my University server (and having to move that every so often) or running off my Linux box over really slow uplink. I’m still in the process of moving in (which will involve a rework of my website to some extent), but have managed to relocate my blog and start transferring some of the pictures in my gallery. Seems pretty slick so far. Since I’m technically on Spring Break, I’ll hopefully have a chance to tinker with it a bit this week and get settled in a bit more.
In case you were curious, I finally settled on Malkier which is the name of a place in the Wheel of Time series of fantasy books by Robert Jordan. It’s a cool series if you haven’t read it. It’s getting a little long-winded, but still quite good.