Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in My Life as the Thrill Kill Kult's LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
3:26 pm	speak of the devil speaking of wanting it all[thefowle] for a pocket device... the graphics oomph of a ps2 in your mobile phone? yes, RealSoonNow(tm) [imaginationtpechnologies]. this is one of my requirements for my mobile integration point. although yes, the "uber-wide" (16 pipe) "high-clocked" (400MHz) variants likely wont arrive in ultra-portable form factors for a while (((config is nearly verbatim the config of a high end laptop gpu the Geforce GO 7800, circa Fall 2005[wikipedia])). however this upscale SGXMP16 model... its 32GPixel/s and 1B tri/s is x7.5 the performance of the PS2's 2.4GPixel/s and 133M tri/s. not bad, for some mobile silicon. see my ranting[antipope] on Charlie Stross' Antipope for some past history on why this is going to make your netbook and laptop obsolete. power consumption itself isnt a problem, presuming you can scale down your power usage by need. a configurable graphics pipe, where you only have one of your n (((16))) pipes open and downclocked, is the Great Path Forwards. the whole "power on demand" philosophy automakers have tried really takes root in computer engineering. and here it is, in the last line of the press release: "individual cores can be disabled based on workload for optimal power saving" couple this with a Cortex A9 processor and you'll have a damned downright transcendent mobile experience. this all goes to show, the goods intel is offering basically boil down to a joke[antipope, continued]. still need actual mW/MHz numbers before declaring this a complete fatality[youtube, viewer discretion advised]. (Comment on this)
11:38 am	kindle gets pdf reading, becomes vaguely interesting^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H worthy of consideration. in spite of being a rampant technocrat, i am not an early adopter. i tend to be far too fussy about my gadgets to pick up new shiny toys; i latch on to deficiencies and rule out the device. i like to think that in equal measure its a weighted measure of opportunity cost. i'm still sticking with my beaten up freebie phone (motorola v551) until i can buy not just a phone, but a mobile system, a complete and portable point of integration. i await a good e-paper system, but i'm holding out for second generation tech (like Plastic Logic) with a more diy'able os. the future brings us many new wonders, and i rarely feel its worth buying into the part-compromised fore-runners. even if the wait is 2-6 years. (Comment on this)
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
11:05 am	chrome os will be announced today. if it follows the Pre model-- "applications" are just self contained web pages / web applications-- i will be happy. but frankly, i'm expecting another cardinal sin unto those already cast by Android-- another useless platform, alone and incompatible, another useless sandy atoll amidsts a chain of identical useless outcrops. open platforms dont just mean consumer and vendor freedoms, they also entail open developer ecosystems. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
10:56 am	theres a lot more to brain simulation than just neurons and axons and synapses. the role of glia is hardly understood, but constantly proving itself to be of greater and greater significance. further, a static neuron simulation misses the ability to grow and form new pathways. i'm sure the singularitarians are all hot and bothered by IBM's BlueMatter's cat simulation, but I for one feel the revelry is far too pre-mature. (Comment on this)
Saturday, November 14th, 2009
10:35 am	props to Springhill Suites Marriott-- your pandora ad is brilliant. dead silence. mr sterling, what was the multi screen urban-center advertising project you noted? leaves falling background ambient shit. -Always yours, rektide write back, thx. (Comment on this)
Friday, November 6th, 2009
4:27 pm	One Voice some group called One Voice just formed, rallying around creating a unified communication platform around next gen LTE wireless. whereas with 3g, your phone either talks voice or data, One Voice's rallying cry is to send everything over standardized data packets. its a fine technical difference, but the end result is a epochal shift, very possibly the precedent to shifting us towards network neutral, decentralized, federated, voip; the end of telecom as we know it. (Comment on this)
2:34 pm	Dear Uhh Yeah Dude Heyya. Chris from DC briefed me on the excellence that is Uhh yeah dude. I'm Fowle (thats \Foul\) from CO, and I dig your shit. I'll give you guys a ring soon enough. If you ever find yourself in need of a phat deck amongst the CO mountains (Sunlight Dr, Summit Cove, CO), my deck is yours. I'm a techie by nature; anything with a tiny computer anywhere in it and I know at least enough to get myself in some earnestly deep trouble. I hold down professional gigs doing software contract work, but mostly I chill, ski, and slowly write open source code for realtime collaborative web environments; thats someplace in the domain of video sharing sites like Stickam, and text sites like Google Wave, Etherpad, and in a nod to you LA types, Zhura. Watching you guys is fantastic; your ability to project that "basement banter" of a good group of cogent smart-asses on to the screen is... compelling. Compelling and mother fucking awesome as shit. Its exactly the sort of shit I want to my techie mojo to enable and bring out in others. All the best, Fowle Matthew "rektide" Fowle Summit Cove, CO 240.383.6718 [posted now to uhhyeahdude] (Comment on this)
2:23 pm	I'm getting prepped to host court with some of my friends. We'll probably do audio/video teleconference book groups, and i'm thinking a bi-weekly semi-coordinated "news" hour amongst friends. Invites "soon", it'll be chill. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
5:16 pm	since i've been gone pandora became a pay service for >40 hours a week. its only $0.99/mo. it stopped working reliably in opera. (Comment on this)
3:34 pm	winter sunlight palace is coming online. layout is mostly in head. (Comment on this)
Friday, October 30th, 2009
12:27 pm	sky full of clouds; the distributed model akka's stm can be backed against various persistence modules, including cassandra and terracotta backends. theres a lot of appeal to this; actors being backed by big clouds or lightweight localized storage. instead of trying to solve the data center problem in the cloud layer, transparently use a cloud layer to back a distributed computing layer. this, to me, seems much more natural & sane. (Comment on this)
12:14 pm	burning a little extra time researching what NoSQL platform to use. currently investigating Cassandra, Hadoop, and Riak. Cassandra I think just got cut, on account of being built for low latency systems. Hadoop has a ton of traction, and runs on Java. Riak is much more web-y, is document oriented, and erlang powered. as a part of the "one system to rule them all" architecture I want to build, disconnected operation and data-center grouping are key components. most cloud systems focus on semi-homogenous clusters of systems; i'm much more interested in building a high level operating system -esque software platform that functions like a global single-system image. data-center awareness is kind of the keyword here; although i'm interested in smaller scale systems, the notion translates: if you have data centers in new york, san fran, and amsterdamn, talking within a data center is almost free, but connections between these different data centers is highly constrained; you want a system that is aware of this. i'm loath to even imagining going diy here. if i did, scala & actors would be the order of the day, backed with delimited continuations, and grow a syndication layer on that. i ran across a fantastic quote, in reply to Ian Clark's Vega announcement; Source code, compiled code, continuations and (immutable) data will inevitably blend, and will not stay separate entities, as they are now. -rapido (Comment on this)
10:16 am	for a while, i was sad with the feeling that i'd abandoned [OpenWRT] (a linux distribution targetting smallish devices, mostly wifi routers) in favor of straight up debian. facing the return to openwrt, i'm suddenly no longer feeling any of that wistful remorse. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
6:12 pm	the recent JVM hype-- DaVinciMachine-- is an interesting trusswork to support advanced next gen languages. what i dont see-- and this terrifies me-- are next gen languages that can use that platform. speeding up dynamic invokes for JRuby and Clojure is all well and good, but where are the statically runtime compiled code systems? where is template metaprogramming and quasiquotes? yes, vestigially these things exist-- most any language can compile and load code at runtime, but its generating that code thats interesting, difficult, and not really being approached (Clojure aside, being so LISPy). (Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
2:35 pm	colorado pass: its why you live here (no body) (Comment on this)
2:34 pm	$10 "service charges" + $4 shipping charges are all it takes for me to never ever go to another concert again. ticketmaster, go diaf you fucking toolbags. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
2:33 pm	yup i fried something. doesnt look to be any serious damage. been a while since i've been responsible for destroying anything; i guess my time was up. (Comment on this)
Sunday, October 25th, 2009
7:31 pm	i did not use my sunroof nearly enough this summer. fault of my own here, but just saying. (Comment on this)
Saturday, October 24th, 2009
4:46 pm	reader i just downloaded Gears x64; i'm (slowly) restarting now. what finally sold me on this barely used web addon? one thing: offline google reader. i'm cackling to myself at the thought of the fractions of gigabytes synching a day or two of news is going to take. (Comment on this)
Friday, October 23rd, 2009
6:44 pm	ad infinitum in order to complete my new years resolution to become a pro hookah smoker, i need a hookah. the pro-sumer in me is having a hard time figuring out what exactly it is i need. weighed in at 189. this seems to be my go-to middle-ground weight if i'm not being glutonous and not trying to be lean. all in all, considering the general unhealthiness / frequent crap food/booze of vacation life, i'm pretty pleased, not too flabby at all. winter i'm psyched for: this winter's dedicated to health, physical, intellectual, mental, social, and I think between exercise and resuming better eatting practices its going to yield very good things. theres this spritely little girl at the gym. she's always at the gym. really its just a weird confluence, somehow whenever i go she's there or shows up promptly, be it after work or evening. i want to ask to do an interview with her, because i've never seen anyone exercise like she does. this 5'2" 110# little thing spends ninety minutes charging through the aerobics at breakneck pace, barely breaking a sweat. most people are either reading or focused on their exercise, she just seems like she's visiting some other world, has left the plane of corporeal existance. i have a thing for dedication and obsession, and obviously this person has mentally attuned herself for a certain kind of bodily obsession so far beyond what i can comprehend. like a fine pocket watch i want to open her up and see what arrangement of springs and dials and counterweights turn her mechanism. vis a vie the food subject, on the road, my menu's pretty short, but altogether good enough to recommend. mostly i drink tea, non-stop, because i love it, but that obsession should be well chronicled already. my other tools are a thermo-electric cooler for keeping food, and a george foremen electric grill for cooking. yoplait somewhat recently revised their yogurt line and there are great selections; pomegranet/blackberry, vanila/strawberry, blueberry/acai... add some form of oats/granola or my recent commercial variant Kashi Crunch and its a veritble meal, protein and all. i tend to have a lot of burgers, as they're the one thing my foreman e-grill can get perfect every single time, and they're ridiculously cheap. $4/lb for angus beef patties? that keep pretty well? um, yeah, i'll take that protien, thanks. i keep quite a few ready-made seasonings around for just this; montreal griller, famous daves steak seasoning, mr dash italian, nearly anything makes a good hamburger. hotdogs are ok, but after half a pack theres not much interest. i've only done grilled sandwitches twice, as they tend to be material intensive and frankly i dont know what i'm supposed to do for good sandwich meat. i pick at a six pack of heavy beers for when i'm picnicing & coding. living in the city in the car is harder. i could afford an inn, not a big deal, but i'd spend all my time there because i'd burned so much cash. i prefer sleeping it in the car. its vaguely edgy and just appeals to all the irrational contrarian and dirtbag parts in me, and it saves me enough money to ease the guilt of doing things like coffee shops and nightlife and ordering good food. for the most part i'm well setup; i've had only minimal issues. give me thirty minutes in any reasonably populated area and i can find somewhere innocuous to throw up the curtain and make camp at. places i've lived-- here-- are dead simple. what makes the city harder is power. a couple hours of writing code, listening to music, and a couple cups of tea and my "ought to be colossal" dual deep cycle batteries are singing for more power. my cooler is still plugged into the starter battery, and while its 60w draw isnt colossal, it means the car is bleeding power and doesnt have a natural way to recoup. most of the summer i've been able to teather the car to household power, but here on my own, power becomces my #1 issue. this morning was one of those 'in a somewhat bad way" deals, with regard to power. i snooped wifi some yesterday afternoon, then went out while leaving the cooler on. came back and spent quite some time doing the code/cooler/music trifecta. then drifted to sleep with the computer/music doing audiobooks. stirred to consiousness and shut the systems down probably ~3:00 am. woke up ~6:00, ate some food, tried to start tea and found the deep store was unhappy but not critical; tea takes a ton of power, so i shut it down and went to start the car. far from the first time its happened, the starter was not having it. turn once, twice, no. thankfully, all it takes is reconnecting the deep cycles, even when they are drained, waiting four minutes for some charge balancing, and then she starts right up. but, my car was basically on empty, and needed a charge. so, for the first time, not wanting to go anywhere in particular, i broke out the generator. its almost sad i didnt get to use it this summer; its role is limited to a rare handful of power-starved situations. normally i'm either driving enough to charge, or have power from a house. it would've been nice to coordinate a camping trip this summer-- one of the main use-cases-- but my ability to plan ahead and general availability didnt facilitate anything happening. unfortunately, trying to start the generator, i rapidly discovered it needs oil. drat. i never figured myself for one interested in power electronics, but recently it seems to have become really central to everything i want. this car is but one example. i'm going to detail the situation, but this is insanely mundane shit. the current setup is brutally simple; any car mechanic could piece together my setup without thinking. what i want to do is gain a finery mastery over my power use. i still have some systems tied to the cars power bus, meaning i need the key in the car, which itself drains the starter. i need a microcontroller to bring systems on and off my auxilary power bus. cooler, battery charger, alternator, car computer, car's fans, cars seat controls,.... each of these need to be able to be attached and disconnected from the power bus. ideally, i'd like a small uber low power micro with 802.15.4 or zigbee for this task, but i need to find a compromise between simplicity and capability. once i started looking at "do everything" micros i started wanting linux too, which just raises the requirements all that much more (flash/memory especially, by orders of magnitude). ultimately, whats holding me back the most is simply not knowing what i need to use for switching these high amperage systems safely. minimal voltage droop, power consumption are colosally gob-smackingly important, to a degree where im terrified i'll end up using that pre-technocratic brute, the relay. i also need monitoring circuits; multiple voltage readouts, and ideally, amperage as well, although thats probably impossible. i also have to figure out how hot-wireable the car is; the plan is to replace fuses: take out a fuse, connect a diode to the power supply rail, then a switched line from the auxilary power rail, then a fuse feeding into the subsystem needing to be hotwired. sounds simple, right? only if it works; i'm not convinced this Benz is going to accept that crude hotwiring as acceptable, and i have yet to try it out (although, come to think of it, thats a simple as hell test). i'd started getting into building a motor controller for an electric bike. before getting laid off, that was going to be my next major project. i wanted to switch up to 100v DC at 100amps, which is a respectable 13.4 HP worth of electricity to be switching. ideally, i wanted to use a relatively fast-switching IGBT gate, with the notion that this insane power handling monster would have zero problems PWM'ing AC fast enough to serve as the power handling first stage of a DC charger; this just means that instead of regulating power flow between the battery and the motor, it would be able to also regulate power flow coming out of a wall socket. i regard this as a capital necessity on e-bikes, using the onboard power electronics for charging as well as riding. if e-bikes can only be plugged in from your basement, with some gaudy charger, they're never going to provide freedom. as a technical note, i have not yet attempted the maths to find out if its realistic to use an inductor to limit output voltage of this switched dc power supply, which is pretty essential; i'm thinking of targetting ~36v, which gives a 4/5 duty cycle above target voltage, assuming this plan kind of sort of works at all. still not sure what to do for the 1/5 wave below 36v; ideally nothing, i might try to get some A123's and see if they particularly object to stutter charging. the system would never suffice for real DC applications like power amps, but it might be a "good enough" solution to battery charging. long term i have some power dreams. having a) no real notion of where i would want to own a house and b) stupid general anxiety about fiscal soundness of the house as an investment c) a colossal love of travelling d) the need to bring work with me on the road, i've spent two years dreaming about converting a Dodge Sprinter van into a mobile base. its power needs arent particularly exotic, but it would need a spin off of what i have planned for this car. the real far fetched dream is an full series hybrid car. replace the engine of a donor car (in the running: 1970's celica, mk III supra, volvo p1800) with a 7.5kW-10kW 4 stroke generator, a couple reserve batteries, and a good sized electric motor. generators are the main issue here, on account of generators being overly large, overly loud, overly weighty for no particularly good reasons. a diy full series alternative wouldnt be that hard; with a focus tuned small-ish 18HP engine, and two electric motors, although honestly the ability to take the generator out of the car and use it elsewhere was one of the major selling points of this mad idea. just started my rounds of house hunting. got a much needed oil change. got oil for the generator. organized the storage unit i'd gone from filling to hurling crap into as my desperation to leave grew, and picked out the winter necessities (clothing, ski gear, chains). (Comment on this)