No. He'll be an engineer.

Nerd stuff

· Tue Mar 21, 07:07 PM by Steve Gigl

Steve H. at Hog On Ice is currently [heh. sorry about the pun] thinking about getting back into electronics, in more of a hobby mode than during his physics days. His comments—and his readers’, mine excepted—might be interesting to anyone thinking of putting together a hobby electronics bench. (Posts: 1 2 3 4)

Perhaps more interesting (but even more nerdy), I found out today that Bob Pease has been making a streaming TV show on various analog electronics topics for quite a while now. For the 99.9% of you out there who have no idea who Bob Pease is, he’s a columnist and engineer for National Semiconductor, and has become an analog guru. I can’t explain his writing style—other than to note that there’s a lot of “life was better back when…” stuff involved (at least some of which is true)—so you’ll just have to read a few to get the picture. One reason to like him: he doesn’t use Powerpoint, he uses transparencies!

Meanwhile, the latest topic of the show is high-speed data transmission from an ADC, something I probably could have benefited from about a year ago…

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And so it begins

· Thu Jun 30, 09:41 AM by Steve Gigl

My master’s project got started in earnest last night, after I finally gained access to the lab that contains the, er, object of the project (Hey, I almost rhymed).

Wait a minute, this isn’t work! That means I am (mostly) free to talk about it!

So: the lab contains an air hockey table, which will be the environment that I will be working in (or on), designing and testing at least one, but possibly a few ways to sense the position of an air hockey puck on the table when it’s moving.

The project also began in another way yesterday with an addition to our computer family: a used Dell laptop bought from the U of M’s refurbished computer center. It’s not remotely new, but it came with a DVD drive, a fairly decent battery, Win2k (none of this XP nastiness) and all of the ports I would need to use it for controlling my project. It’s fast enough and seems to work well, but I plan to exercise it a lot more during the 30-day warranty period, believe me.

I can see where having the laptop might lead to more blogging, and I’m looking forward to writing at least a couple of posts from my deck, but then again, the project could take over (yeah right, like I’ll spend all waking hours working. HAH!).

Right now my job is to measure the speed of an air hockey puck on the air table, for purposes of determining how fast a sensor would have to sample to track the position of the puck. Sounds like fun, right?

Well, it does to me…

Category: Technology
Scope: Personal

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Memory leak?

· Fri Mar 11, 01:41 PM by Steve Gigl

Has anyone else upgraded to Firefox 1.0.1 and noticed that it never seems to clear the memory that it has built up? I didn’t notice this before I upgraded, but I have no proof that it wasn’t happening before.

(Of course, this pales in comparison to the fact that the new Acrobat Reader never terminates its process when I close the program.)

Category: Technology
Scope: Personal

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This isn't how it works in the movies

· Wed Mar 9, 04:00 PM by Steve Gigl

NEWSFLASH: 17-year-old girl beats 3 different robotic armwrestlers ; Terminator production delayed indefinitely.

So why is that news? Because the arms all used “electroactive polymers,” which are the closest our science has come to replicating muscle fiber with nonorganic substances. Give it a few years…

(via Science Blog)

Category: Technology
Scope: World

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Must...resist...gadget magazine...

· Mon Feb 14, 05:34 PM by Steve Gigl

It’s painful for me to read about magazines like this and know that if I subscribed I wouldn’t have time to do any of the projects.

We’ll see if that stops me from subscribing. Place your bets!

Category: Technology
Scope: Personal

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Nerd stuff

· Tue Mar 21, 07:07 PM by Steve Gigl

Steve H. at Hog On Ice is currently [heh. sorry about the pun] thinking about getting back into electronics, in more of a hobby mode than during his physics days. His comments—and his readers’, mine excepted—might be interesting to anyone thinking of putting together a hobby electronics bench. (Posts: 1 2 3 4)

Perhaps more interesting (but even more nerdy), I found out today that Bob Pease has been making a streaming TV show on various analog electronics topics for quite a while now. For the 99.9% of you out there who have no idea who Bob Pease is, he’s a columnist and engineer for National Semiconductor, and has become an analog guru. I can’t explain his writing style—other than to note that there’s a lot of “life was better back when…” stuff involved (at least some of which is true)—so you’ll just have to read a few to get the picture. One reason to like him: he doesn’t use Powerpoint, he uses transparencies!

Meanwhile, the latest topic of the show is high-speed data transmission from an ADC, something I probably could have benefited from about a year ago…

Category: Technology
Scope:

Rantback

And so it begins

· Thu Jun 30, 09:41 AM by Steve Gigl

My master’s project got started in earnest last night, after I finally gained access to the lab that contains the, er, object of the project (Hey, I almost rhymed).

Wait a minute, this isn’t work! That means I am (mostly) free to talk about it!

So: the lab contains an air hockey table, which will be the environment that I will be working in (or on), designing and testing at least one, but possibly a few ways to sense the position of an air hockey puck on the table when it’s moving.

The project also began in another way yesterday with an addition to our computer family: a used Dell laptop bought from the U of M’s refurbished computer center. It’s not remotely new, but it came with a DVD drive, a fairly decent battery, Win2k (none of this XP nastiness) and all of the ports I would need to use it for controlling my project. It’s fast enough and seems to work well, but I plan to exercise it a lot more during the 30-day warranty period, believe me.

I can see where having the laptop might lead to more blogging, and I’m looking forward to writing at least a couple of posts from my deck, but then again, the project could take over (yeah right, like I’ll spend all waking hours working. HAH!).

Right now my job is to measure the speed of an air hockey puck on the air table, for purposes of determining how fast a sensor would have to sample to track the position of the puck. Sounds like fun, right?

Well, it does to me…

Category: Technology
Scope: Personal

Rantback [4]

Memory leak?

· Fri Mar 11, 01:41 PM by Steve Gigl

Has anyone else upgraded to Firefox 1.0.1 and noticed that it never seems to clear the memory that it has built up? I didn’t notice this before I upgraded, but I have no proof that it wasn’t happening before.

(Of course, this pales in comparison to the fact that the new Acrobat Reader never terminates its process when I close the program.)

Category: Technology
Scope: Personal

Rantback [1]

This isn't how it works in the movies

· Wed Mar 9, 04:00 PM by Steve Gigl

NEWSFLASH: 17-year-old girl beats 3 different robotic armwrestlers ; Terminator production delayed indefinitely.

So why is that news? Because the arms all used “electroactive polymers,” which are the closest our science has come to replicating muscle fiber with nonorganic substances. Give it a few years…

(via Science Blog)

Category: Technology
Scope: World

Rantback

Must...resist...gadget magazine...

· Mon Feb 14, 05:34 PM by Steve Gigl

It’s painful for me to read about magazines like this and know that if I subscribed I wouldn’t have time to do any of the projects.

We’ll see if that stops me from subscribing. Place your bets!

Category: Technology
Scope: Personal

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Cool.

· Fri Feb 11, 02:37 PM by Steve Gigl

This is going to be of interest to no one but other electronics engineers and hobbyists, but Fry’s stores are now carrying a limited-scope schematic-based $249 SPICE (circuit) simulator from Intusoft.

To explain my interest to non-techies, commercial versions of SPICE simulators usually run in the multiple-thousand-dollar range. There are open-source versions available for hobbyists, but they are generally more limited and harder to use than commercial versions.

Also interesting is the fact that Intusoft thinks that enough copies will be sold to package it and put it on the shelves in retail stores. I take that as a good sign for hobby electronics and basement inventors.

So, all I can ask is: why aren’t there Fry’s stores somewhere nearby?

Category: Technology
Scope: National

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Hard drives, pt. II: What do they do?

· Fri Feb 4, 09:53 PM by Steve Gigl

My attempt to explain hard drives to non-techies continues with a question: what do hard drives do?

My starting description would be: hard drives act as permanent storage for digital data in a computer system. Sounds simple, at least for those of us who have been using computers for 70% of their lives and/or went into electrical/computer engineering.

To explain that further, let’s dissect that statement:
permanent: When you shut the power off to your computer, the data on the hard drive doesn’t get erased, unlike the data in your RAM. Also called “nonvolatile.” NOTE: It’s not permanent in the sense of “will never be destroyed.”
storage: self-explanatory, I hope
digital data: Any information that can be represented by a string of 1s and 0s.

So, what sort of data does the hard drive usually store?

1. Hard drives store programs
Every program you run on a computer is represented inside the processor/CPU (e.g. Pentium 4, Athlon, G4/G5, etc.) as a long string of digital data (translation: binary 1s and 0s, or “On” and “Off,” however you prefer to think of it). The hard drive stores all of your programs for when they need to be loaded into RAM and run through the CPU.

At this point, I should address a question: why do we have to have both RAM and a hard drive in most computer systems? Well, in a perfect world, where large amounts of nonvolatile electronic memory—meaning the data remains when the power is shut off—would be available, we wouldn’t need both. There are at least 3 reasons that we need both at the moment:

1. RAM currently is much more expensive per GB than hard drives.
2. RAM is also volatile; when the power is shut off, your data disappears.
3. The CPU needs to be able to select pieces of programs/data to use when it needs them, and hard drives are much slower than RAM at giving the CPU what it needs at any given time. (When we discuss how HDs work, this will be better explained.)

2. Hard drives store user data
All of the files that you want to keep—Word documents, MP3 files, emails, etc.—have to be stored somewhere. Since this can amount to a lot of data, a hard drive is well-suited to this task. In cases where the data isn’t called upon often, needs to be stored safely for very long periods of time (years to decades), or you are backing up data, other media—CD-ROM/-R/-RW or DVD types—may be more suitable (but that’s a different article).

3. Hard drives act as virtual memory
This is where it might get tricky. First, let’s briefly run through how programs are run (and how data is accessed):

1. The CPU “asks” for a program or some data
2. If the program/data is already in RAM, it is fed to the CPU^*.
3. If not, the data is retrieved from the hard drive and made available to the CPU by placing it in RAM (if it’s purely data it might get streamed directly into the CPU; to be honest, I’m not familiar enough with current CPU and OS designs to know whether this happens or not).

^* There is another layer of memory inside the CPU (“cache memory”), but I’m trying to keep it simple here, so I’m going to consider that as part of the CPU itself. Deal, nit-pickers!

If you’ve ever read an article about upgrading your computer, you read that the easiest way to speed up your PC is to add memory (RAM). The reasoning behind this is that the more RAM you have, the less the hard drive has to be accessed, and the quicker the CPU will get what it asks for.

Years ago, if you ran Windows 95 or 98 on a fairly old machine, you might have noticed your hard drive working very hard—lots of clicking for older HDs, or maybe just the HD light on the front of your PC case flickering a lot—when you ran more than a couple of programs at once and then switched from one to the other. The reason for that is that programs and the OS(Operating System)s themselves got very complex and “big” (lots of 1s and 0s), while memory prices and sizes didn’t necessarily scale with the size of the programs. To allow the computer to run multiple programs and access data all at once that, when added together, might be more than the 32 or 64 MB of RAM that was available, the OS(Operating System) would use a portion of the free space on your hard drive as a sort of backup RAM.

An example: if you had a web browser, Word, and Excel all open at the same time, but were using only the browser and Word at the time, the Excel program and data wouldn’t be a high priority to keep in RAM. So, if memory became scarce, the Excel program and data might be stored in the virtual memory (also called a “swap file”) on your hard drive. If you then switched back to Excel, you would have experienced a delay and heard the hard drive working pretty hard (or just might have seen the drive’s light flashing a lot while you waited) before you were able to do anything in Excel. That was virtual memory at work, gathering the data from the drive to put back into RAM and shuffling data from the other applications into the virtual memory space.

(Virtual memory, while usually a good way to solve the problem of memory scarcity, occasionally ran into trouble with older operating systems and limited memory.)

Lastly, as a further way to distinguish between RAM, hard drives, and CD-type storage, here is a table comparing the three:

¹ The cost of the CD-type media depends on the type and quantity purchased. It can be lower than HD storage, but the tradeoff is that you have to keep switching CDs in and out of the drive.
² The standard size range of HDs and RAM change quickly as technology progresses.

So, does that all make sense? (If not, questions are welcome in the comments or by email!) Next time I will open up a hard drive (figuratively) to show you what’s inside and what everything does. Meanwhile, have a good weekend!

The Series so Far
I. Introduction
II. What do hard drives do? (this post)
III. What’s inside the box?
IV. How do hard drives work?
V. How does this all affect you?

Further reading:
RAM: 1, 2
Virtual Memory: 1, 2

Programming note: I get the feeling that I’m shotgunning a few too many things into what is supposed to be a very basic article. I keep running into terms and concepts that I feel have to be explained, but I’m afraid of doing the equivalent of using the dictionary to trace all the way back to the definition of “is” and confusing everyone in the process. Anyway, please let me know if I’m being confusing, or if you have any questions, or (heaven forbid!) I got something wrong. Thanks!

Category: Technology
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Hard drives 101, pt. I (Introduction)

· Wed Feb 2, 08:40 PM by Steve Gigl

In an attempt to play to some of my strengths while writing this blog, I’m going to write a post (or series of posts, in this case) addressing a particular technical subject.

Hard drives came up as a first topic because some of my family and friends still don’t know what the company I work for makes, even though they use our products every day. And even though I occasionally try to explain, at which point their eyes glaze over and I am cut off. Really, it’s not that hard to understand, at least on a basic level.

[CMB]
DISCLAIMER: Nothing I will write about has any relation to any projects I have at work, which I am not allowed to—and will not—disclose. This subject may be the only thing that even peripherally addresses what I do, but I will not disclose anything that is not already public knowledge available freely on the web and elsewhere (most of it was public before I graduated from college).
[/CMB]

Many of my readers (if anyone but Doug and my family and friends actually read this site) are probably shocked that some people don’t really know what a hard drive is, not to mention how one works. But it shouldn’t surprise them that much. HDDs(Hard Disc Drives) have been a commodity item for a long time, and as such all most people know about the one in their PC is the size (in GigaBytes nowadays) and rotational speed (7200 rpm for most desktop drives). But non-tech-savvy people who’ve never built their own PC might not even know that much, just that there’s something called LOCAL DISK (C:) on their Windows Explorer (I have no idea what the Mac equivalent would be, sorry).

So: what is a hard drive? It’s that metal whirring thingy in your PC (or Mac) case, right?
Well, yeah, but it’s a whole lot more than that, and knowing a bit more about them can really help you understand what might be happening inside your PC.

For starters, here’s what one looks like with the cover removed (don’t do this unless you never intend to use the HD again):

Here’s what I’m hoping to cover in this series, which will take several days to complete:

I. Introduction
II. What do hard drives do?
III. What’s inside the box?
IV. How do hard drives work?
V. How does this all affect you?

Category: Technology
Scope: World

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Wow. Wow wow wow wow wow

· Tue Aug 31, 11:41 AM by Steve Gigl

Wow:

Even though her colleagues told her it was impossible to create an artificial pancreas that could alleviate diabetes, and that she would never finish it in time to graduate from UC Berkeley, Tejal Desai finished what she set out to do.

... Desai, 31, built an implantable device—containing live pancreas cells—that could be used in place of daily insulin injections for diabetics to control their blood sugar levels.

... The main challenge hindering scientists was protecting the insulin-producing pancreas cells from attacks from the body’s immune system. In diabetics, the immune system damages these cells.

It took Desai four years to step over the barriers. She started growing cells on chemically modified silicon, which she used to create a container of silicon membrane covered in tiny pores.

These pores, which are a billionth of a meter wide, allow glucose, insulin and oxygen to pass through, while blocking larger, harmful immune cells.

This combination of biology and nanotechnology was unknown when Desai began her research, but bioengineering breakthroughs such as her own are making it a quickly growing field.

Insightful analysis, eh? Well, sorry, but some things just cause that reaction in me.

(Via Nanobot)

Category: Biotech
Scope: National

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Test post

· Thu Aug 19, 04:21 PM by Steve Gigl

Trying out sections…

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