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My Trip to Krakow, Poland: The Conference

September 20, 2016 kleucht Leave a comment

This past Friday I had the honor of giving the morning keynote presentation at the 6th annual DevDay software developer conference in Krakow, Poland! Here is the website! (Check it out! It actually has my face on it!)

http://devday.pl/

This conference is sponsored by ABB Automation Group, which is a huge industrial robotics company in Europe. They also manufacture industrial electronics, industrial control systems, and industrial power systems. They’re kind of a big deal.

DevDay is a 2 day conference for software developers that is limited to only 500 attendees, so it’s a small and intimate event. The speakers are truly able to interact with the attendees and networking at this event is highly encouraged by the organizers. During the 2 days, DevDay packed in 4 separate keynotes and a total of 30 technical sessions! It was a really great event! The organizers did a wonderful job!

The DevDay organizers feel strongly enough about using only live speakers, that they pay for their airfare, hotel, food, and also ground transportation. The venue for the conference was a movie theater and the screens were enormous! Can you imagine giving a keynote address on a screen like this?!?!?

By the way, that’s Zach Holman in the photo getting ready to give his keynote.

My keynote presentation was called “We Are The Explorers!” and it presents the story of the great westward expansion by the early American pioneers. It describes how difficult the task was and how great the payoff was. It then explains how the settlers had to live off the land to survive and then it transitions to NASA’s space exploration plans and how we will have to live off the land too. Then it shows off a bunch of living-off-the-land technologies (ISRU) that are being developed by NASA to support future planned long term human exploration missions on Mars.

Here is the official DevDay 2016 video of my keynote on YouTube:

My keynote presentation was very well received and I got a ton of compliments from both attendees and from other speakers! One of the biggest compliments I received was from another speaker who speaks at a lot of conferences all over the world. He said “You rehearsed the *bleep* out of that, didn’t you?”. Yes, I did rehearse the *bleep* out of my keynote during the weeks leading up to the conference. I guess it paid off. 🙂

I also gave a technical presentation called “NASA’s ant-inspired Swarmie robots” which gives the background of the Swarmie project and describes the software technologies that we used as well as various challenges and solutions that we encountered along the way.

Here is the official DevDay 2016 video of my technical presentation on YouTube:

Full videos of all the keynotes and talks, are posted on the DevDay YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/user/ABBDevDay/

There are tons of great professional photos from the event posted on their Flickr account too:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/96896358@N04/albums

Here are my favorite professional photos, though:

One of the highly experienced professional speakers at this conference paid me a huge compliment after my keynote when he asked me how long I had been a Tech Evangelist for NASA. He didn’t know that this was my very first professional conference keynote speech. Sure, as a NASA employee, I speak to students a lot. And I give technical presentations to co-workers and to managers all the time. But the keynote at a conference like this. Never before. I’m honored to have been invited to come speak at this amazing conference!

Also, this was the first time I’d ever left the United States. I had a really great experience! Tomorrow I’ll publish a blog post about the sightseeing that I was able to squeeze in during my short time in Krakow, Poland.

Thanks for your interest!

Kurt

P.S. Here’s a selfie of me standing outside the venue soaking up some sun in an effort to counteract some of my jetlag.

P.S.S. And here is a photo I took of Russ Olsen giving the closing keynote which was a very inspirational story about the race to land a man on the moon!

P.S.S.S. And finally, here is just a photo of me striking a pose after the conference was over.

Computers, User Interfaces

My Apple IIe: A simple text based arcade game in Applesoft Basic

September 4, 2016 kleucht 7 Comments

If we type this simple 8 line Applesoft Basic program into my working Apple IIe computer, we will end up with a cool little text based arcade game! Watch the video below to see the game in action!

This small Applesoft Basic program was published in one of my Beagle Bros Apple Software Catalogs from 1987 (volume 0, number 10). This little program was credited as being submitted by Beagle Bros customer Tim Boehme, who received a box of Beagle Bros magnetic write protect tabs for his efforts!

Wow! Write protect tabs! Amazing! 🙂

Applesoft Basic

Applesoft Basic is the programming language of all the early Apple computers and was provided in ROM (memory) to make it available to the user without the need for a startup disk or the need to load it into memory from a cassette tape.

Applesoft Basic was actually created by Microsoft for Apple. Hence the name. It is interpreted and not compiled, so it is not very fast. And it can throw syntax errors at runtime if it’s unable to interpret a line of code.

One sort of funny feature of Applesoft Basic is that variable names are only significant to 2 letters, although it allows more. So if you initialize a variable named “KURT” to a value of 10, you can PRINT the variable “KU” and also the variable “KURT” and also the variable “KUPP” and they will all three show a value of 10. They are all three pointing to the exact same memory location.

applesoft-iia

Code

Here’s the source code:

10 REM "MUNCH THE SNAILS!"
20 TEXT: HOME: H = 20: PRINT CHR$ (21): POKE 35,22
30 K = PEEK (49152): ON K < 128 GOTO 40: H = H + (K = 149) - (K = 136)
40 POKE 49168,0: IF RND (1) * 10 < 1 THEN VTAB 20: HTAB RND (1) * 20 + 10: PRINT "@": GOTO 70
50 VTAB 22: HTAB RND (1) * 39 + 1: PRINT CHR$ (46)
60 IF PEEK (1535 + H) = 192 THEN S = S + 1: VTAB 5: HTAB H: PRINT "#"; CHR$ (7): VTAB 23: PRINT "MUNCHED: ";S: GOTO 80
70 VTAB 5: HTAB H: PRINT "V"
80 T = T + 1: IF S < 10 THEN 30
90 TEXT: VTAB 23: PRINT S;" SNAILS MUNCHED IN ";T;" SNAIL SECONDS.": END

Emulators

If you don’t have a working Apple IIe of your own to try your Applesoft code on, you can first try it in a JavaScript implementation of Applesoft Basic. There are some things that this emulator cannot do, though. It’s just not terribly robust.

A very robust option is the standalone Apple II emulator program that you can install onto your Windows computer. It’s called AppleWin. Just scroll down to the bottom of the Github page and download the latest release. It’s in a zip file, so just unzip it and run the executable.

Once it starts, just click on the floppy disk 1 icon and choose the master disk file that comes installed with the emulator. Then reboot with the Apple button and it will boot to Applesoft Basic. Or, you can download ROMs for various Apple games and programs from the Internet and boot those instead. It emulates the speed of the processor, so it’s a very realistic emulation of the Apple IIe. Including several monitor types to choose from.

Thanks

I hope you found this post informative and/or entertaining! Thanks for your interest! And feel free to leave comments or questions below!

Thanks,
Kurt

Computers, User Interfaces

An open letter to Facebook: I have friends, so why do you show me mostly stranger’s posts?

August 7, 2016 kleucht 2 Comments

Summary: Right now, 52 percent of my Facebook News Feed consists of photos of people that I don’t know and they don’t know me. Does that make anyone else uncomfortable? What’s the deal with Facebook’s algorithm?

Dear Facebook

What’s the deal? Seriously! Why do you insist on showing me all these posts from people that I’m not friends with? What is the intent of your algorithm?

algorithm

I have 240 friends on Facebook right now which I believe is a very reasonable number. Not so many that I miss important posts in all the noise. And not so few that there’s little content to show me.

But when I scroll through my Facebook News Feed, sorted by Top Stories, it feels like most of the posts are from folks who are NOT actually my Facebook friends. It feels like most of my News Feed is taken up by stranger posts that a friend of mine has liked or has commented on.

I understand the reasoning to show me some occasional stuff outside of my direct friends list, in case that helps me make a connection with my friend’s friend. But it feels like stranger posts are all my News Feed consists of these days.

stranger

So I got all scientific on you. This afternoon, I scrolled through the first 100 posts on my News Feed and I put each post that I saw into one of the following four categories:

my friends acting towards their friends, but they are strangers to me (writing on their walls, tagging them, liking their posts, commenting on their posts)
my friends acting alone (sharing something or posting text or photos or videos on their own timelines)
strangers acting towards my friends (writing on their walls, tagging them, liking their posts, commenting on their posts)
my friends acting towards others of my friends (writing on their walls, tagging them, liking their posts, commenting on their posts)

Here are the results. From my own News Feed. And just as I suspected. I’m being exposed to mostly stranger’s posts. 52 out of 100 were posted by people that I am NOT friends with. My friend liked their post, so Facebook thinks that I also need to see this person’s post, even though we don’t know each other. I’m seeing into the personal lives of all these complete strangers, every single day. Does that make anyone else uncomfortable?

So now every time a friend of mine hits the Like button on some stranger’s photo or post, I have to see it in my News Feed? And now I have to spend more than half of my time on Facebook just scrolling past a bunch of strangers graduation pictures or duck face selfies or political opinions or whatever?

Facebook, why would you do this? What’s your angle? What do you want me to do with all these stranger’s posts and pictures of their town and of their family and of their car or whatever?

Are my Facebook posts being shown to a bunch of people who don’t know who I am and who don’t care about my robots, or my space program, or about my computers, or whatever I’m posting about that day?

What do you think about your Facebook News Feed right now? It is what you expect? Is it what you need? Do you get fulfillment out of it? Or does it frustrate you and waste your precious time? Does it make you uncomfortable?

Please leave any comments or feedback below! And thanks for reading my blog!

Kurt

Computers, User Interfaces

iPhone Lightning connector: low volume on audio output

November 22, 2015 kleucht Leave a comment

I recently traded in my old iPhone 4S for a new iPhone 5S (yes, I know I’m a whole generation behind) and needed to buy all new accessories since the power and data connector changed from a 30 pin to a new-fangled Lightning connector.

lightningconnectorplug-294352

I always listen to iPhone podcasts or Pandora music in my car during my commute to and from work, and I had to buy a new FM transmitter because my old one was shorted out. My car does not have an audio input jack. Nor does it have a cassette deck. So my only option in that car is an FM transmitter. Those things are pretty expensive, by the way.

So I bought a fifty dollar (ouch!) FM transmitter from Best Buy which I was pretty excited about initially because my old FM transmitter was just a 5mm stereo jack and it did not power/charge my iPhone, but this new one charges the phone and pulls audio simultaneously using only the Lightning connector. That eliminates the separate charging cable I used to use on my old phone.

10369659

Here’s the catch. The audio coming out of the phone’s Lightning cable is hard coded in the phone to be at about 25% of full volume and there is no way to change it. So the audio level is quite low when I use this FM transmitter and I have to turn my car stereo up all the way and sometimes that’s not even loud enough! Very frustrating.

Also, FM transmitters are far from ideal. They get static from all kinds of different sources. It’s very difficult to find a frequency that doesn’t have static on it which interferes with the listening experience.

Turns out that Apple won’t let the user adjust the volume coming out the Lightning connector because manufacturers of docking products (like home stereo systems and alarm clocks) need it hard coded to a known level for various reasons. I’m not clear on the reason they chose to make the volume so low, but some online posts mentioned that it is a safety feature to keep users from blowing their ears out.

So don’t buy Lightning connector docking products, like an FM transmitter, unless they have their own internal audio amplifier. Most alarm clocks and stereo docking stations do, but I don’t know of any FM transmitters that do. I had to learn this lesson the hard way. Hopefully this blog post will save you the trouble.

Kurt

Computers, User Interfaces, Miscellaneous

My Favorite Amazon Links

July 3, 2015 kleucht Leave a comment

Seriously, what did we do before we could buy anything we want directly on the Internet with just a few clicks? One feature that makes Amazon way better than many other online retailers is the customer feedback system. Here are some of my favorite Amazon sections.

Amazon MP3: You can buy just about any song you want instantly for just a dollar or two. The selection is incredible!

Audible: Oh my gosh, I love Audible. And I’m so glad that Amazon bought it several years ago. They are the worlds largest audio book retailer. You can instantly purchase audio books and listen to them on your phone or tablet or computer immediately. I listen to audio books on my phone while travelling and sometimes during my daily commute to and from work. It is so cool!

Amazon Electronics: The place to go for all your electronics needs! This is not cheap junk … this is name brand and high quality merchandise!

Amazon Instant Video: You can immediately stream just about any popular show that you can think of! It’s a great service!

Amazon Local: Have you heard of Amazon Local? It’s relatively new and you can save money right there in your own home town! Sort of like Groupon, but not as big. But give it time.

Amazon Top Rated Products: Just for fun, click here to see the current list of top rated products for sale on Amazon.

Have fun shopping!

Kurt