Un-Progress

It seems that I have under estimated the amount of time required by these 5 week summer sources I am taking, which are squeezing in 15 weeks worth of information, a 3:1 compression ratio. This has crippled most of my projects I had in mind for the summer, including this site which is quite poorly being updated recently. The custom case design mod I had in mind for almost 2 years will stay one more year stuck in my head, adding more and more ideas (it seems it will never be done though). I doubted I will ever come around to the tesla or the gauss rifle projects, but they are definitely out of the scope for this summer.

The only thing I am working currently is the Analog Gauge stat display and fan controller. Based on a 16 Channel DAC chip which simply takes in binary values and spits out analog values to the outputs, quite simple actually. I haven’t even bought any electronic parts or the DAC chip for the project, currently working on the software side. This project will be sometime during the fall, but I really hope to get it done before the quakecon which I think is not very realistic at the moment.

Other non significant things include the remote trigger system for the dry ice cannon being tested just this last weekend. Although at the later part, everyone wanted to shoulder launch potatoes so.. yeah not being used very much. It was quite simple as to just completing the circuit using two 9V batteries. After cleaning my closet, finding a nice UV cathode tube and the inverter I decided not to connect to the computer and simply just hook it up to two 9V batteries (yes, the same two used in the dry ice cannon trigger). Although the inverter was designed for 12V DC, it took the 18V without any problems, but interestingly no brightness difference was noted which I had hoped for before. The only natural step next would be to hook up another 9V and see how the inverter would take 27V (probably not so well) but let see.

I have also seem to have misplaced my beloved digital camera, meaning no pretty pictures for a while, until I find it or get another.

Last but not least, my pet project right now is developing the mind-date for my bot. Its a chatter bot (although I don’t like to use that word) based on the Eliza engine, run through GAIM using a perl plugin on top of the perl Eliza interface. I tried to test how well my progress with the bot is by letting it chat away with SmarterChild which is another well known chatter bot. Below is somewhat a interesting conversation.

(15:29:58) dryicerx999: what do you think?
(15:29:58) SmarterChild: I don't really "think." I'm a robot.
(15:30:03) dryicerx999: i do
(15:30:03) SmarterChild: Very well, whatever.

You can talk to my bot at AIM: dryicerx999 (greet it several times for it to work, some stupid glitch) but beware that the plugin is extremly unstable there for the gaim client quits very often. If it is online, feel free to test it. Its quite violent so be careful, it has no limit when it comes to harassing humans.