Perl and CPAN
Perl is a scripting language. Some people really like it. I have my own feelings about it, but that’s for another day. Perl has a system to install add-on modules called CPAN, that competes and conflicts with the native package manager on a Linux install, but sometimes the only way to install a random package is to use CPAN. Here’s a quick little guide on how to do that. Standard disclaimers apply.
sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell
install Bundle:CPAN
(press enter a bunch of times to allow CPAN to access the web and do updates)
reload cpan
install Module::Whatever
Repeat that last line for each package the perl script requires. Takes a lot of trial-and-error to find all the packages you need to install. Good luck.
Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station
The Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, commonly referred to as Palo Verde Power Plant, is a nuclear power plant located in Tonopah, Arizona, about 50 miles (80 km) west of central Phoenix, and is currently the largest nuclear generation facility in the United States, averaging over 3.2 gigawatts (GW) of electrical power production in 2003 to serve approximately 4 million people. Arizona Public Service (APS) owns the largest portion (29.1%) of the station and operates the facility. Other owners include Salt River Project (17.5%), El Paso Electric Co. (15.8%), Southern California Edison (15.8%), PNM Resources (10.2%), Southern California Public Power Authority (5.9%), and the Los Angeles Dept. of Water & Power (5.7%).
Palo Verde is the only nuclear generating facility in the world that is not located adjacent to a large body of above-ground water. Instead, it evaporates water from the treated sewage of several nearby municipalities to meet its cooling needs. The water consumed by the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station represents about 25% of the annual overdraft of the Arizona Department of Water Resources Phoenix Active Management Area.
via Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Grand Coulee Dam
The Grand Coulee Dam is a hydroelectric gravity dam on the Columbia River in the U.S. state of Washington. In the United States, it is the largest electric power-producing facility and the largest concrete structure. It is the seventh largest producer of hydroelectricity in the world, as of the year 2008.
The reservoir is called Franklin Delano Roosevelt Lake, named after the United States President who presided over the completion of the dam. The foundation was built by the MWAK Company, a joint effort of several contractors united for this purpose. Consolidated Builders Incorporated, including industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, completed the dam. The United States Bureau of Reclamation supervised the contractors and operates the dam. Folk singer Woody Guthrie was commissioned by the Bonneville Power Administration to write songs about the Columbia Basin Project; the songs Roll On Columbia and Grand Coulee Dam are part of that series.
The Grand Coulee Dam is almost a mile long at 5223 feet (1586 m). The spillway is 1,650 feet (503 m) wide. At 550 feet (168 m), it is taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza; all the pyramids at Giza could fit within its base. Its hydraulic height of 380 feet (115 m) is more than twice that of Niagara Falls. There is enough concrete to build a four-foot wide, four-inch deep sidewalk twice around the equator.
via Grand Coulee Dam – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Character LCD Megademo
Hedelmae made a character LCD demo for the Assembly 2003 wild competition. It uses a 20×4 character LCD. Nice work!
I used a modified LCDproc (for Linux) as the backend. Only the character set and the update speed were changed. All the actual graphics and animation was custom code. The effects were written into a 1bit 20×12 buffer then converted to 20×4 and finally LCDproc updated the image on the display.
Fish Ladder
A fish ladder, also known as a fishway, fish pass or fish steps, is a structure on or around artificial barriers such as dams and locks to facilitate diadromous fishes' natural migration. Most fishways enable fish to pass around the barriers by swimming and leaping up a series of relatively low steps hence the term ladder into the waters on the other side. The velocity of water falling over the steps has to be great enough to attract the fish to the ladder, but it cannot be so great that it washes fish back downstream or exhausts them to the point of inability to continue their journey upriver.
via Fish ladder – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Peshtigo Fire
The October 8, 1871 Peshtigo Fire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, is the conflagration that caused the most deaths by fire in United States history. Having occurred on the same day as the more infamous Great Chicago Fire, the Peshtigo Fire is mostly forgotten. On the same day as the Peshtigo and Chicago fires, the cities of Holland, and Manistee, Michigan, across Lake Michigan, also burned, and the same fate befell Port Huron at the southern end of Lake Huron.
Mandelbrot Set Viewer
A few days ago I made a Mandelbrot Set Viewer using a graphic LCD and an Arduino. I made a fun video with a sweet soundtrack and I’ve got all the code and schematics posted.
computer-science computing link networking security wikipedia
by Layne
leave a comment
Two Generals’ Problem
In computing, the Two Generals’ Problem is a thought experiment meant to illustrate the pitfalls and design challenges of attempting to coordinate an action by communicating over an unreliable link. It is related to the more general Byzantine Generals’ Problem (though published long before that later generalization) and appears often in introductory classes about computer networking (particularly with regards to the Transmission Control Protocol), though it can also apply to other types of communication. Some authors also refer to this as the Two Army Problem or the Coordinated Attack Problem.
via Two Generals’ Problem – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Extispicy
Extispicy (from Latin extispicium) is the practice of using anomalies in animal entrails to predict or divine future events. Organs inspected can include the liver, intestines, lungs, or other major organs. The animal used for extispicy must often be ritually pure and slaughtered in a special ceremony.
The practice was first common in ancient Mesopotamian, Hittite and Canaanite temples. Later, soothsayers from Ancient Roman times used the entrails of a bull to determine the advisability of a particular endeavor and Etruscans used patterns seen in the livers of sheep to assess their future. There exists substantial evidence to indicate that this was the main form of divination within classical cultures.
Organ models and extispicy manuals in cuneiform script are widely found in archaeological excavations in the regions, showing the prevalence and significance of extispicy. Commonly, (in antiquity) the majority of the divination was wrought from viewing the intestines and the liver.
Although extispicy would commonly be viewed with skepticism by the modern mind, some 20th century scholars suggested that this technique was also a valuable and legitimate form of, essentially, autopsy, which might indicate internal disease tied to poor environmental factors, information that would be important to nomadic peoples.
Mel Kaye
In programming folklore Mel Kaye is an archetypical Real Programmer. Kaye was formerly a programmer at Royal McBee Computer Corporation. Ed Nather’s “The Story of Mel” details Mel’s prowess at programming. Although originally written in prose, Nather’s story was repeatedly distributed by email — the resulting wrapped lines were taken to be free verse, and were kept in this form at many sites.
According to the Jargon File appendix where the story may be found, Kaye is (or was) indeed a real person. In a FOLDOC document he is credited with doing the “bulk of the programming” on the Royal McBee LGP-30 computer. In Nather’s story, Kaye is portrayed as being prone to avoiding optimizing assemblers in favor of crafting code to take advantage of hardware quirks, for example taking advantage of the rotation of the LGP-30’s drum memory to avoid writing delay loops into the code. The story as written by Nather involved Kaye’s work on porting a blackjack program from the LGP-30 to a newer Royal McBee system; company sales executives had requested the installation of a cheat code allowing the customers to always win the game, a request that Kaye reluctantly acceded to, but accidentally changed the odds in favor of the dealer rather than the player. Subsequent to Kaye’s departure, Nather examined the code and found out that an apparent infinite loop had in fact been coded in such a way as to take advantage of a carry-overflow error, causing program control to shift past the loop to a jump instruction.