Roberto De Almeida

Most engineers are familiar with the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and would have little trouble using a "canned" FFT routine to detect one or more tones in an audio signal. What many don't know, however, is that if you only need to detect a few frequencies, a much faster method is available. It's called the Goertzel algorithm.

I was wondering if I should share this in Google Reader, Twitter or here on my blog, but it's too interesting too forget about it.

SymPy is a Python library for symbolic mathematics. It aims to become a full-featured computer algebra system (CAS) while keeping the code as simple as possible in order to be comprehensible and easily extensible. SymPy is written entirely in Python and does not require any external libraries.

I don't really have a need for symbolic math right now, but it's good to see a pure Python library for this. I much prefer the approach of small libraries with few dependencies, instead of using a hundred megabytes download like Sage (which I use only for the web notebooks, they're great for giving Python courses!).

When I started my PhD I used Maxima for my Geophysical Fluid Dynamics assignments and it was very impressive. Even though symbolic math is simply based on rules on how to manipulate symbols it always impressed me to see a computer integrating an equation symbolically instead of numerically.

For Italian men the smell of a vagina is something earthy. The vagina for them is a prize, a beautiful flower to be admired and won, not as in the United States, a term of disdain, a cunt. In Rome a vagina is una fica, a term deriving from the fig, a great thing, a delightful gift, a ribboned fruit. Among young Romans, the expression fica is a way to convey something extraordinarily good, akin to “cool.” They even make it into a superlative—fichissimo, meaning that something is the “cuntest” and very good indeed. Una fica is not only a sexually attractive woman, it is anything worthy of possession or experience. Imagine an American guy saying: “Wow, that is so vagina!” You can’t.

In the next week, we’ll be making some highly requested changes to Google Reader. First, we’re going to introduce a brand new design (like many of Google’s other products) that we hope you love. Second, we’re going to bring Reader and Google+ closer together, so you can share the best of your feeds with just the right circles.

As a result of these changes, we also think it's important to clean things up a bit. Many of Reader's social features will soon be available via Google+, so in a week's time we'll be retiring things like friending, following and shared link blogs inside of Reader.

This is great news. Most of the information I consume daily comes from Google Reader (the rest is email). I don't use Google+ because there's no way to share posts from Google Reader directly, and I refuse to copy the link, go to another tab, and copy it in Google+.

Let's just hope the opposite way will also be available, ie, I want to be able to see my Google+ timeline inside Google Reader. Otherwise it doesn't make sense.

Tangle is a JavaScript library for creating reactive documents. Your readers can interactively explore possibilities, play with parameters, and see the document update immediately. Tangle is super-simple and easy to learn.

This is really interesting: add "variables" to your text that can be changed by the user, while the rest of the text changes accordingly. I just think that it's too uncoupled, requiring you to write an HTML template and add Javascript code; it would be better if the initialization and update where written directly in the template. Maybe it's possible and I haven't found out.

At one time I wanted to develop a presentation app that worked like this. Graphs would have a legend describing them, and changing the legend would update the graph. This could be used for presentations written in HTML (which is how I do them these days, anyway).

One of my first NOAA APT satellite images! (click to learn more)

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) manages a few satellites in low earth orbit.  There are three actively transmitting APT signals at the moment, NOAA15, 17, and 18.  Each of these satellites passes overhead a few times a day.  I’ve been interested in learning how to receive their signals for a while now, and I’ve finally succeeded!

Really cool, the guy implemented a software radio in order to receive satellite images. The software radio kit he used is pretty cheap (~US$ 20), which makes me want to do the same at home. :)