2003 Honda Civic Si

Dude... it's bright blue.

1984 Saab 900 Turbo

My first Saab, the venerable '84. This one got me hooked.

1990 Saab 900 Turbo SPG

This is what I'm driving now. I like to think of it as living the dream... only ten years late.

Crouching Peanut, Hidden Legume

It's peanut butter death time!! Some semi-useful information for the legume challenged.

1985 Chevrolet Caprice Classic

I finally killed my Caprice. It needed: new front springs, exhaust system from the cat back, starter, tires - basically another Caprice. I had it towed away, taking in a whopping 25 bucks to ease the pain.

Space Church - Flavor System

The latest effort from Space Church fuses the sonic realms of our brains with your ears.

Cooperative Multiplayer Games

This is an index of cooperative multiplayer games. I couldn't find anything like it on any of the intarwebs. Whenever I wanted to pick up a game that goom and I could play, I'd have to wade through tons of ridiculous reviews to figure out which of the good games had co-op play. No major site lists cooperative play as a feature! (I try to keep this updated weekly.)

Fuzzy Doc Recognition With Color Space Segmentation and Matching

A small, fuzzy, and stuffed ``Doc'' from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves is to be recognized by the machine vision system described in this paper. Problem constraints are purposefully vague; Doc is to be recognized in a veriety of poses in clutter. A method of color segmentation in the hue-saturation-value (HSV) color space is employed to segment parts of Doc from the clutter, which are bound with a minimum enclosing box of the contours extracted from these segmented blobs. A rudimentary matching algorithm is described.

Emacs Outline to HTML Converter

The outline can be a powerful tool for organizing your thoughts or for presenting information. They're a bitch to do on paper, though; that's why I try to use computers to generate them. Until I discovered the simplicity of the emacs outline-mode, I used to go nuts trying to restructure the outlines I was generating in WYSIWYG word processing packages. Emacs makes it about as easy as it can get to push stuff around, completely neglecting any kind of numbering, fancy formatting, and tabbing. It's just asterisks! Brilliant! But, the thing looks like hell if you ever print it out to bring to a meeting. My solution: a perl script that converts the outline to HTML. Share and enjoy!

WPI Jazz Groups Tour España!

Photography with commentary from the trip the WPI Jazz Groups took to Spain in the Spring of 1998.

Implementation and Comparison of Radix-2 and Radix-4 FFT Algorithms

Bullshit paper I wrote for the bullshit DSP class I took. The FFT code is good, though. I went the recursive Cooley-Tukey route, and I think it turned out just peachy. There's a version included at the end of the paper and a newer one here: fft.c which precalculates the twiddle factors for a much needed speedup! Check it out!

Newby Photography

I'm learning, okay?

FU2000 Stereo Audio Amplifier

A 20 watt per channel, dual-mono, single ended, class A, DC coupled MOSFET audio amplifier. I'm designing this as an independent study this term at WPI. The design process will be entirely documented on this web page.

WPI Music Groups in Greece: More People!

Even more pictures of people from the WPI Music Groups tour of Greece. These come to us by way of Julie, Melissa, Terry, and Amelia. And by the letter M, for Manteca.

WPI Music Groups in Greece: Last Night in the Bar

Images taken from the last night of the WPI tour to Greece. I might have had some alcohol. I can't remember. Does Ouzo count as one of the major food groups? It does?! I'll Bruce-Lee one-inch-punch your ribcage if you're lying to me. Oh... Okay, I forgive you. Thanks for being straight ahead. It's so rare nowadays...

WPI Music Groups in Greece: People

Americans making fools of themselves, part I: why musicians should only come out at night.

WPI Music Groups in Greece: Places

Mostly non-offensive photographs of places we visited during our tour to Greece: Athens, the acropolis, Delphi, and some islands.

WPI Music Groups in Greece: Places II

More mostly non-offensive photographs of places we visited during our tour to Greece: islands, the parthenon, the stadium, the temple of Zeus.

The HappyCart Atari 2600 Cartridge Emulator

Twenty one years after the Atari 2600 came out, all computer nerd children of the eighties have 2600 emulators on our PC's with the accompanying 500+ ROM images. But, if you're like me, playing these things on the PC loses quite a bit of the original experience. The answer: the HappyCart! - take any of the (legally owned) ROM images sitting on your PC, download them to the SRAM on this cartridge, plug it into your Atari and play - in front of the TV. Ahhhhhh... Atari thumb.  Steve and I started this thing in 1998, but he's done all the work on it recently. It's cool. Check it.

An Acoustical Analysis of Spaulding Recital Hall

Women's boots and resonant breasts of doom.

Other Jazz Resources

Free and tasty Jazz resources on the web.

I AM A FUCKKING NINJA

I will kick you're ass!

Karen Andrews - Industrial Design

You need to hire my sister right now.

Kim Belli: Penetrating the Ground With Her Waves of Nondestructivity

Please, hire Kim to fix all the bridges. It would make a finite difference to my time domain.

The Art of Lynn Andrews

This is a showcase for my Mom's artwork. Way to go, Mom!

The Media Application Server (MAS)

When people ask me about MAS, I tell them it's "Sound for the X Window System". Then, I say, "Yeah, network transparent, platform independent sound. You know how you can run your X applications over the network? Well, this gives those applications sound support." If they're still interested, I let 'em have it, "Actually, MAS is completely format-independent. It doesn't care what kind of data it handles, it only knows about sequences of timed events on timestamped data. So you can do video, or any conceivable future time-sensitive data." This is what I've been doing at Shiman Associates Inc. for the past 3 years.

C:\MIKEJUNK

I'm guessing this is around 1987 or 1988. My family had a Tandy 3000HD. It was like 6, maybe 8 MHz. It had a 20MB Mitsumi hard drive that beeped softly when it was seeking. It was on this hard drive that I first established my directory for, you know, just stuff. Since then, I've always had a C:\MIKEJUNK, even if it was spelled /home/rocko/Mikejunk. Randomness, ahoy!

Moment Representation of Blobs in 2-D Intensity Images

Short paper on an early fun form of machine vision using moment invariants. It may suck, but you've gotta love those cutlery images.

XUDP: A Real-Time Multimedia Networking Protocol - WPI Senior Undergraduate Project

A study of chronological advancements in TCP/IP combines with advanced topics in multimedia communications to produce a functional implementation of a real-time, multimedia internetworking data transmission protocol. This new IP-based protocol, named XUDP, uses the concept of timed-obsolescence and the lessons learned from the development of TCP/IP, yielding an end product that efficiently utilizes the available network bandwidth to transmit real-time multimedia data in a manner that maintains the end user's perception of the linear progression of timed sequential data.

Radio Shack PZM Modifications

Schematic and documentation of modifications I've made to the Radio Shack Pressure Zone Microphone. Cool, cheap stuff.

My Resume

You need me. You may not even realize it yet. But, believe me. You do.

Saab

The most intelligent car ever built. This is for the people who keep ours running a little too long.

Adult Entertainment - Serious Play

Last of three nights at the Vanguard. Crowd out in the street, shoving and elbowing to catch one phrase of the shit going down inside. Ives is on his 86th chorus of some free shit Nielsen whipped up last night. No fucking cheese blintzes and belgian waffles with margarine here, this is real USDA prime grade stock, kicking and bleating and bleeding all over the stage. Buchanan is slaughtering it mercilessly, jesus man! Suddenly, Nielsen is laying down 13/8, is that it? A voice yells, "What fucking time signature is that?" and I think Scaramongos is in seven, Buchanan is in GOD KNOWS WHAT. I took way too much fucking acid for thirteen. I'm subdividing, 4-3-4-2, 4-4-4-1, 3-3-4-3, 2-2-1-3-1-2-2, 3-4-4-2, ... [it gets worse, trust me]

SMSurround - Theatre Audio Controller

Steve writes: "SMSurround was a combination of custom hardware and software designed to help run audio cues in a live theatre situation. It supported mix/matrix automation, MIDI automation, WAV playback automation, CD audio automation, scripted cues, scalability, and surprisingly a fair amount of stability. SMSurround was built from a combination of off-the-shelf hardware (PCs, CD-ROMs, sound cards, outboard MIDI hardware, etc.), custom hardware (automated mixer/matrix controller), and a lot of custom software."

Stow, MA Stuff

My partner in crime and I have made our home in Stow, MA. Here's what we know. Things to do, things to eat, things to see, and just stuff.

Chaos in the Modern Jazz Movement

An intensive study of rhythmic and melodic innovations in the early 1960's avant-garde jazz music from both compositional and improvisational standpoints, focusing on the music of Ornette Coleman. Parallels are drawn between these innovations and discoveries in modern mathematical chaos theory, resulting in an original composition based on a nonlinear dynamic system known as the Lorenz attractor. A performance of the composition featuring the author is recorded using studio production techniques of the early 1960's.

TCP Typewriter Tutorial Source

I was called upon to write a dorky tutorial while I was doing battle with Berkeley Sockets. If you're currently slugging it out, here's what I think is a good reference piece of code. It's client/server of course - run the server on any machine, run the client with the hostname of the server on the command line. Lines of text entered from stdin into the client will be echoed to stdout on the server. LOTS of comments. Download the whole schmeal with the link above or check out the server or client.

Master's Thesis: An Information Theoretic Hierarchical Classifier for Machine Vision

This is it: the big mama. Binary decision trees + information theory + pattern recognition + machine vision = done with school.

Tubes vs. Transistors, Is There an Audible Difference?

Written by Russell O. Hamm, not me. Amazing clarity.

Engineers and musicians have long debated the question of tube sound versus transistor sound. Previous attempts to measure this difference have always assumed linear operation of the test amplifier. This conventional method of frequency response, distortion and noise measurement has shown that no significant difference exists. This paper, however, points out that amplifiers are often severely overloaded by signal transients (THD 30% ). Under this condition there is a major difference in the harmonic distortion components of the amplified signal, with tubes, transistors, and operational amplifiers separating into distinct groups.

An Engineer Buys a Television

You did know that light follows light, didn't you? The pitfalls of buying a TV from a discount department store.

Building a Hypex UCD400 Stereo Amplifier Kit

Nearly all of my electrical engineering skills are gone, as evidenced by this. Building a Hypex DIY kit switching audio amplifier.

Vintage Technology Resources

There are people who collect even weirder shit than I do.

Will Buchanan - Insane

Will is here to remind us what the real deal really is. He has a mind-warping gallery of his works online.

WPI Jazz Group

The developing Klingon warrior trains extensively with the bat'leth. The saxophone is my bat'leth, and my training was received here. I am also a complete dork.

The XUDP Protocol for Timely Multimedia Transport

co-written with David Cyganski

Current efforts to make networked real-time multimedia data distribution a practical reality have focused primarily on the development of means to exploit the TCP protocol. However, much of the Internet is sufficiently slow or congested as to force most multimedia applications to use large ``streaming buffers'' to accommodate the highly non-deterministic nature of this communications channel. Some users may prefer to trade full reliability and corresponding fidelity for a variable quality, but low latency and properly paced transmission.

XUDP (eXtended User Datagram Protocol) is a transport layer protocol that provides an alternative, semi-reliable, method for transmitting real-time, multimedia data over an internet. Through a process of ``timed obsolescence,'' an application can deliberately specify a time to discard any given data parcel for which all comprising UDP datagrams have not been received. This allows placement of a value on the preservation of the timing relationships between sequential multimedia data parcels which is higher than the value given to reliable but un-timely delivery. XUDP is currently implemented as a user-space daemon, operating above UDP through Berkeley sockets, taking advantage of UDP's fast payload checksum and multiplexing ability. It offers full flow-control with a number of TCP-like optimizations and a sockets-like API.

The XUDP Protocol for Timely Multimedia Transport - Presentation

A presentation of the 1997 paper of the same name. Remember, someday the Internet is going to go right to your TV.