Fun in electronics class
We built our first circuit on the breadboard in electronics class, nothing too exciting, just an LED. What was cool was playing with the function generator and the oscilloscope, supposedly the most important piece of lab equipment we’ll use this semester. Also, my lab partner taught me an unforgettable way to read off resistor codes:
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet goes willingly
This colorful mnemonic corresponds to this color sequence:
Black Brown Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Violet Grey White
which associates to the numbers 0…9. Put it together like this:
(digit)(digit) * 10 ** (multiplier)
Octave Plotting Revisited (with updated functions)
It seems that gplot and gset commands are deprecated. I never realized in the past two weeks following tutorials online because I was following along with Octave 2.1 on my Gentoo box. It wasn’t until today that I tried gplot on Octave 3 on Ubuntu that I got very confused. Apparently gplot still exists but it is some sparse matrix function that makes no sense to me. I didn’t realize it was a different function until I compared versions on both computers.
After that, I searched online and found that the gplot and gset functions that hook up with gnuplot had been renamed __gnuplot_plot__ and __gnuplot_set__ respectively. Rather odd move, don’t you think? I tried it and it worked, but it also gave the deprecation warning that the functions would be removed in the next release. So I was pretty surprised as I thought this was the standard approach from all the tutorials I’ve found.
Fortunately, reading the friendly manual led me to an alternative method, simply called plot, which does what I want. I also found print, which saves to file in one neat line that saves me from manually setting the output terminal, etc. I’m still going to write up the tutorial.
Whispers of SoC
The first guy opened his mouth about SoC on the OM community list today. It’s mid-February and yes, that time is just around the corner. I *still* have no clue what I will do, having just scratched the surface, subscribed to some mailing lists and browsed some issue trackers.
After spending some time observing, as well as from what I’ve heard from discussion, the motivation to contribute to OSS for the sake of personal use and improving personal experience seems most reasonable and sustainable. Of course I wonder about that because I also want to make some impact and the stuff I personally use is pretty removed from the average-joe mainstream ie. geeky. But I guess that would be the wrong reason for doing things. Anyways, I’ll keep my eyes open and scope out some other potential sponsors.
More to come!
