Recent content on dohgramming.com
I’m pretty frustrated right now. I’m doing some refactoring, and it is hard going. I’ve been at it for a couple of hours on a Friday, and I haven’t even started the actual feature I’m trying to introduce. What I essentially want is to apply some simple transformations to the symbols constituting my program. If my code was a data structure, I could hack this out in…
Static friction vs kinetic friction Brake lock happens when you switch from dynamic friction inside the vehicle and static friction at the wheel-road interface to the reverse
Spending 3-5 minutes collecting minutiae about some source you’re trying to reference every time is frustrating. Current proprietary tools like Zotero or Mendeley compound this frustration instead of alleviating it. I don’t need an alternate system for embedding and formatting references in my Word documents, I just want to avoid scouring the internet for what year the passage…
Here is a quick and dirty tutorial for setting up ROS on Windows 10. Suitable for most undergrads trying to survive a ROS based class: Set up hypervisor Create container or VM How to install Docker if using container Various Linux bullshittery to get things working (minus whatever is baked into image) Ergonomic devlopment environment Develop over SSH, X Develop over VNC remote desktop (gonna suck)…
Having your entire system in a VHDX is great You can fork different versions using disk differencing Tree-like history of important states for your computer Run dangerous stuff in a clone of your system as a VM Copy VHDX onto USB to migrate your entire box to different physical hardware Upload VHDX periodically for backups Catalog of VHDXs for different OS-es you need to run Can even setup a…
Often useful to install crap you want to play with to a container instead of your machine Install Cygwin (or Win 10 bash userspace?) Install X server SSH in with right env vars GIF of Rust dev environment with VS Code in Ubuntu container on Win 10 desktop
Graphs and heuristic search, etc. etc.
Provide simplified flowchart of algebraic manipulations for doing inverse kinematics by hand Make a canvas thing: user makes mechanism from linkages, display inverse kinematics in real time (sympy server side?) Cover what ikfast from openrave does
hurr durr
Moody diagrams are gr8. Why do we need them? Dimensional analysis and universal applicability of empirical data (possibly separate post) Try to embed jupyter and illustrate moody curves as intersection of equation surfaces in 3D space
Try to provide geometric intuition for Laplacian. Other possible topics for “wtf does X really mean?”: Lin algebra stuff: determinant, ??? Vector calculus stuff: tensors, gradients, curl, Lagrangian vs Eulerian derivatives
It may surprise you to learn that despite the ubiquity of flying machines in the 21th century, it only takes a few repetitions of “how?” to reduce explanations of flight to frustrated handwaving. Things fly (or swim) by pushing around a “fluid”, and fluids have a mischievous way of appearing tame in some settings and intractably unruly in others. Navier-Stokes is beautiful…
This is a blog where I will try to put down things I’ve found challenging to learn. I’ll mostly be posting titles and skeletons for stuff I want to summarize in a blog post; perhaps in another life when I actually have time I’ll fill out the body.