Re: Broke for good (was Re: ports?)
Article: 8572 of alt.hackers From: ppicot@irus.rri.uwo.ca (Paul Picot) Newsgroups: alt.hackers Subject: Re: Broke for good (was Re: ports?) Date: 14 Sep 1995 15:00:58 GMT Organization: Solipsists Unite! Lines: 42 Approved: AsYouLikeIt Message-ID: 439g3a$6ld@falcon.ccs.uwo.ca NNTP-Posting-Host: oort.irus.rri.uwo.ca Status: RO
In article <950913.150401.26136@cougar.cc.oxy.edu> t_pascal@oxy.edu (C. Regis Wilson) writes: >Hmmm, well.. <root@morningstar.pmms.cam.ac.uk> wrote: >>I had a car with a very leaky boot and stored a soldering iron in it >>for some little time. I think I was half awake when I took the thing >>inside and plugged it in. BANG! Out went the lights, then shortly after, >>out went the soldering iron. Ah well. >> >You foreigners don't know how to speak english. What the heck is a boot? >It must be larger than a bread-box to hold a soldering iron. I have no >idea what this paragraph says. Is this a troll, flamebait, or just good old American arrogance and ignorance? I chuckle at the Ameri-centric globe-oblivious views, like the paragraph above, often found in postings from the US. Wake up and smell the planet, C. Regis Wilson. The U. S. of A. forms but a small fraction of the population of the world. When a USA-ain says "You foreigners" in an international forum like this, he comes off like a twit. For the benefit of C. Regis and the few others still oblivious, boot==car trunk. #vent off #damn_now_I_need_an_obhack #recycle_mail_mode ON I happened to have the guts of an old chart recorder and a HeNe laser kicking around doing nothing, and Hallowe'en was coming up... So I took 2 of the chart recorder galvanometers, mounted small mirrors on the shafts, and arranged them to steer a laser beam around the front yard to terrorize the neighbourhood cats. I drove the inputs to the galvanometer amplifiers directly from a pair of digital-to-analog converters in my PC. A [512][2] array held the XY pairs of a set of points to steer the laser to, so I could define shapes for the laser to draw. The bandwidth of the galvanometers was low enough (500 Hz) that I could do the whole thing directly in software from a 1.5 kHz real-time interrupt on a desktop 16 MHz 386sx, including modifying the shape of the figure in real time with a mouse. Great fun... I should dig it out again this year... (not original: I got the idea from the "spinning globe" laser display they put on at Epcot when they kick everyone out of the park.)