Tracking motion of robots with optical mouse like techniques…

For any robot that uses a downward facing camera to look for floor based reference marks, I’d expect that the same sort of techniques used by optical mice could provide a ‘ground reference’ for the motion of the robot.

In addition, I’d expect that any robot with compliant wheels could use this technique to judge load balance by determining the degree of ‘wander’ that is imparted by the difference in compression between the two wheels.

Continue reading Tracking motion of robots with optical mouse like techniques…

Short range drones for last hop delivery…

I’ve been wondering whether anyone would implement short range drones for package delivery rather than the fulfillment center to door model that Amazon seems to be pushing.

I’d expect that a drone that flew from the roof of a delivery vehicle to the drop location (door stoop, front porch) of each destination in a neighborhood would speed up the delivery process while requiring much less robust drones than the full range alternative. Continue reading Short range drones for last hop delivery…

Got to find time to write some emacs lisp…

I’m building up quite a list of things that would be helpful to have some editor automation wrapped around. It is always hard to find the time though…they’re mostly small items that take a few minutes to do by hand. Emacs lisp is different enough from the C lineage procedural languages that I’m normally working in that it takes a bit of time to reorient to the environment. Soon though…

DRAM related forced bit flipping attacks get real

seem to be getting weaponized. This item discusses using known shared code pages from one VM to  another to force memory corruption using the ‘DRAM hammer’ bit flipping attack modes that have already been well documented as a way to inject hostile code into another (probably all given dedup designs) VM on the same physical machine. This would seem to be a very scary attack for cloud hosting companies.

It would seem like this is the time for DRAM vendors to take a close look at their designs and start making serious attempts to implement resistance to this sort of attack. I do wonder whether ECC would prevent this as the bit error might be corrected before another error could be introduced.

Powerful Bit-Flipping Attack from Schneier on Security

 

Using resistance to probe for mechanism…

A post in Derek Lowe’s blog pointed to an interesting technique for probing the mechanism by which a drug acts.

These guys came up with a molecule that was effective against several diseases and then used selection pressures to breed a strain that was resistant in the laboratory. When they sequenced the genomes of the original and the resistant version, they looked for differences that would point to the drug’s target. Seems like a cool and effective way to let nature guide the investigation. As long as the resistant organism never leaves the lab you’ve got an effective drug and a good idea about why the drug works.

Three Diseases at Once?

Blood viscosity and gold corkscrews…

I think this article from Ars Technica shows the true power of modern nanotechnology. This isn’t little nano-bots crawling around, this is serious applied science and that fact that these guys can now get amazingly specific items custom made.

This process started with a need to measure the viscosity (thickness) of the fluid in blood samples in order to diagnose health problems. This is complex because blood is a mess of various tiny items that get in the way. Existing approaches involved separating the liquid part from everything else and then testing it on its own and were slow and expensive. Continue reading Blood viscosity and gold corkscrews…

Created a ninecrows Github account…

as a place to make sandbox projects broadly available.

GIT is my preferred sandbox source code control system these days. Github provides wide visibility and the potential for collaboration should anything grow beyond the sandbox.

In the past I’ve just kept them local with no sharing. As I’m trying to make more of who I am and what I can do visible on the web, adding any interesting sandbox code I create to <a href=”https://github.com/”>Github </a> is the most effective way I have of getting this done.

So far there isn’t anything stored up there, but over the next few weeks I’m expecting to get some things rolling.

Continue reading Created a ninecrows Github account…