http://thatswh.at/

It’s juvenile and hilarious. My two favorite things. It looks at every tweet on Twitter and finds tweets that tell other people “That’s what she said.” It then finds the tweet that was in response to and puts it on a list.

This produces some of the following gems:

“my hands smell like meat”

and

“@mikejarrell @Jabrown85 Haha, thanks. I think he’s a little crooked but it was hard since he is the same height as me.”

Classics.

Enjoy!

Come on Bruce…fill in the rest.

Sidenote: Speaking of going to California, I’m doing just that tomorrow morning. We are doing the final (knock on wood) tests of the rover I’ve been helping out with. The tests are out in the desert (fun!), so that should be extremely hot.

The other day I sat down to write an entry to the esteemed contest, ironcoder. This was short lived however, because I got sucked in by a virtually unknown gem of 10.4: Quartz Composer. I was browsing around dragging random ‘patches’ into the canvas, when I saw an innocuous line in the patch library.

This little patch holds the same power that started the computer revolution. Armed with my limited digital design knowledge, I set out to create some well known circuits from within Quartz Composer. I started out building a full adder. This takes three inputs and produces two outputs. When you chain these together, you can make an N bit adder. You have one in your CPU right now, chugging away at thousands of operations a second.

This allowed me to string them together to create a 4 bit adder.

This produces the following output:

After this I knew what I had to do. I had to create the foundation of modern computer storage…the flip flop. This little guy holds a bit (binary digit) indefinitely. If you want a fast way to store data close to a processor…this is the way to do it.

CPUs have things called registers that are basically a bank of flip flops with some logic to do different operations. So my next task was to create something like that. Because of a limitation with Quartz Composer (it can’t do recursion), I had to not implement some features I wanted to. I ended up with a parallel load register that could ‘hold’, ‘load’, and ‘clear’.

I then plugged that register into a small test flow that would print out the contents.

And it produces the following output when you hold the load line high on the next rising edge of the clock:

So there you have it. The escapades of a bored college student. Mess around with the following stuff and email me (zacwhite at gmail.com) or IM me (cubeman) if you make some modifications.

Download 4bitadder.qtz.zip
Download flipflop.qtz.zip

http://apple.accuweather.com/adcbin/apple/Apple_Weather_Data.asp?zipcode=Norman,%20OK

or

http://apple.accuweather.com/adcbin/apple/Apple_Weather_Data.asp?zipcode=73069

It does that nifty little city autofill thing by sending a request like so:

http://apple.accuweather.com/adcbin/apple/Apple_find_city.asp?location=Norman

and gets this back:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<adc_Database>
	<CityList us="12" intl="49" extra_cities="1">
		<location city="Norman" state="AR" postal="71960"/>
		<location city="Norman" state="IN" postal="47264"/>
		<location city="Norman" state="NC" postal="28367"/>
		<location city="Norman" state="NE" postal="68963"/>
		<location city="Norman" state="OK" postal="73019"/>
	</CityList&gt
	<Copyright> Copyright AccuWeather.com</Copyright>
	<Use> Apple Widget</Use>
	<Redistribution> Redistribution Prohibited.</Redistribution>
</adc_Database>

(I took a couple out of the list).

Anyway, so then the weather widget just updates a little list based on that. I might write a cocoa class that accesses all of this stuff using this API (if you can call it that).

Who doesn’t want to be a Hobo? The life is simply this: Jump from train to train traveling the country in search of food and a place to stay the night. That whole life kind of appeals to me. You would get to see the country and get to sleep under the stars almost every single night. You could stay in the warm places during the winter and visit each state in the summer. Best of all, you don’t need any money or clothes to speak of. Just use the land and other people to get where you go and what you need. Maybe this thought came to me because I would much rather be sleeping in a boxcar right now than studying/taking this math test or writing this memo for Engineering Practice. Remind me to rant about Engineering Practice sometime. It is a required class for engineering that teaches me NOTHING and yet it has huge team projects that take exorbitant amounts of time. Jeez, when does the next train come by? I bet I could be in Kansas City by morning…