Portfolio Repository

https://remote.com/marknighswonger

Edumacation

I was able to get into the CompTIA A+ course at ATC. After barely missing the registration deadline. Then trying to beg into the class by being an auditor. Enough people dropped from the class that I was able to get in after it started. On my way to being a network technician.

I have since completed the CompTIA A+ and Network + courses and plan to test before 2019.

I am part of a massive layoff at the Savannah River Site and am set to be terminated as of January 7th unless SRNS picks me up prior to this.

I completed my Procedure Professionals Association certification training and am building my resume and portfolio as a Technical Writer.

God has always kept me in work that I find satisfying and stimulating and I am excited to see what He has in store for this next chapter in my professional life!

It's been awhile I know! I took my final Final a week ago and am waiting for my A to post and find out where I can pick up my diploma.
I'm not quite done with my education. I was inspired to continue to learn more of physics. I am listening to "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking. It's a good overview ​of the evolution of physics going back to the Greeks. The narrator has a rather pretencious British accent but it seems to be in context with the subject. I am also reading"General Mechanics" by  Herbert Goldstein. I should probably say I have begun reading it. Whether I finish it depends on if it becomes more work than pleasure! I also found an interesting physics website.
http://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/

http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/end-of-mosfets-carbon-nanotubes-finally-outperform-silicon-in-transistors/ May Moore's Law Persist or Accelerate!

3D Scanning afforded

http://www.david-3d.com/en

IOT

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things

The Lenz effect of magnetism on aluminum.

http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~wbreslyn/magnets/is-aluminium-magnetic.html
The Lenz effect of magnetism on aluminum.

Quantum locking!

https://www.facebook.com/mavikocaelicomtr/videos/885807994798698/
Quantum locking!

How the Great Plague Gave Birth to Calculus

From Cosmos magazine 

https://cosmosmagazine.com/mathematics/seduced-calculus

In 1665, Isaac Newton, recently graduated from Cambridge, returned to live with his mother in their Lincolnshire farmhouse. The Great Plague was devastating towns across the country. The university had closed down to protect its staff and students. Newton made himself a small study and started to fill a giant jotter he called the Waste Book with mathematical thoughts. Over the next two years the solitary scribbler, undistracted, devised new theorems that became the foundations of the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, his 1687 treatise that, more than any work before or since, transformed our understanding of the physical universe. The Principia established a system of natural laws that explained why objects, from apples falling off trees to planets orbiting the Sun, move as they do. Yet Newton’s breakthrough in physics required an equally fundamental breakthrough in maths. He formalized the previous half-century’s work on infinity and infinitesimals into a general system with a unified notation. He called it the method of fluxions, but it became better known as the “calculus of infinitesimals’, and now, simply, “calculus’. A body that moves changes its position, and its speed is the change in position over time. If a body is travelling with a fixed speed, it changes its position by a fixed amount every fixed period. A car with constant speed that covers 60 miles between 4pm and 5pm is travelling at 60 miles per hour. Newton wanted to solve a different problem: how does one calculate the speed of a body that is not travelling at a constant speed? For example, let’s say the car above, rather than travelling consistently at 60mph, is continually slowing down and speeding up because of traffic. One strategy to calculate its speed at, say, 4.30pm, is to consider how far it travels between 4.30pm and 4.31pm, which will give us a distance per minute. (We just need to multiply the distance by 60 to get the value in mph.) But this figure is just the average speed for that minute, not the instantaneous speed at 4.30pm. We could aim for a shorter interval – say, the distance travelled between 4.30pm and 1 second later, which would give us a distance per second. (We’d then multiply by 3,600 to get the value in mph). But again this value is the average for that second. We could aim for smaller and smaller intervals, but we are never going to get the instantaneous speed until the interval is tinier than any other – when it is zero, in other words. But when the interval is zero, the car does not move at all! This line of reasoning should sound familiar, because I used it two paragraphs ago when explaining how to calculate the gradient of a tangent. To find the gradient we divide an infinitesimally small quantity (length) by another infinitesimally small quantity (another length). To get the instantaneous speed we also divide an infinitesimally small quantity (distance) by another infinitesimally small quantity (time). The problems are mathematically equivalent. Newton’s method of fluxions was a method to calculate gradients, which enabled him to calculate instantaneous speeds. Calculus allowed Newton to take an equation that determined the position of an object, and from it devise a secondary equation about the object’s instantaneous speed. It also allowed him to take an equation determining the object’s instantaneous speed, and from it devise a secondary equation about position, which, as it turned out, was equivalent to the calculation of areas using infinitesimals! Calculus, therefore, gave him the mathematical tools to develop his laws of motion. In his equations, he called the variables x and y “fluents” and the gradients “fluxions’, written by the “pricked letters” ẋ and ẏ.

Radioisotope thermoelectric generator

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qkvoVRdoNg

I watched a Discovery Channel special on the Mars Rover Curiosity. The generators for the extended space exploration missions depend on the decay of radioactive isotopes. Russia uses these to power lighthouses in the arctic. That means China probably uses them to cook with.

Latest Stuff

Well I am closing out my two week break between Summer and Fall semesters. I happen to catch an actual educational program on the NASA channel. They were discussing a next generation communications satellite being placed into orbit to upgrade their communications to a state of the art LASER optics network. I was interested in what they would use to receive and process the signal, because we have been learning about semiconductor devices in our Networks class this summer. This is what I found after fumbling through the NASA garbage. 
http://www.ll.mit.edu/publications/technotes/TechNote_NanowirePhotodetector.pdf 
Superconducting Nanowire Photodetector Arrays. 

"An SNPD array can take advantage of a spatially multiplexed approach that allows detection of photons at a higher rate than a single SNPD would support without requiring complex optical coupling techniques typical of other photoncounting arrays. When illuminated by a single photon, only one of the SNPDs loses its superconductive properties. The remaining SNPDs remain available to detect the next photon, while the first SNPD recovers its superconductive properties."

Then the IBM TrueNorth chip with over 4000 cores and 4.5 billion transistors is touted to be the closest thing to the human brain's processing ability http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/187612-ibm-cracks-open-a-new-era-of-computing-with-brain-like-chip-4096-cores-1-million-neurons-5-4-billion-transistors.  

Note to Self

         It's been a while, I know. I started college at Aiken Tech. I'm majoring in Electronic Engineering Technology. I bought an HP Pavilion g7 Notebook. It has a quad core AMD A8-4500M APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics, 1900 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 4 Logical Processors. It's a good portable Windows platform that I needed for school.
         My Nook tablet has been relegated to email, reading and music storage. Which brings me to the original purpose for posting this. MARK! YOUR NOOK TABLET WILL ONLY PLAY MP3S. Stop putting other music files on there. I ripped my entire CD collection and copied them to the tablet as WMA files. The worst thing was I have done this before. I had to delete them, convert WMA2MP3 and reinstall the files. That was only like 5 CDs. Then I remembered that I used a program called wma2mp3. This time I deleted the files and then converted the original WMAs and reinstalled them. At least that is what I thought I had done. I actually converted all 144 songs and placed them along side the WMA files in my laptop's Music folder. Now comes the fun part. How to move only the MP3 files along with the directory (folder) structure so that the tablet will see all the albums, artists, etc. with the MP3 files in order. Not as easy as it sounds. I Googled the question and everyone suggested .bat programs to do this. I knew there had to be a simple solution. One poster suggested Audacity to convert and install. That will work one album at a time.  While looking over the .bat file programs I found this little nugget buried in one of the lines of code. "c:\users\mark\MP3\>DEL /s *.wma" That was my version of it anyway. I copied the contents of my music folder to a new folder I named MP3. Now all I had to do was strip out the WMA files and move the contents of MP3 to my SD card for the nook. I needed to delete 144 WMA files, each with a different name in dozens of subdirectories under MP3. The " /s" command makes the delete command search all those music folders. The "*" is a wildcard symbol that means "any file with a .wma extension". It worked fine.
       I thought I might eventually boot LINUX UBUNTU on my laptop and test it for the laptop team. Full time college has not afforded me the time. I had a week break for Independence Day and all I wanted to do is play my guitar. I have an Epiphone SG Special. It's lighter than the Gibson which has a Mahogany body instead of Maple. It's about $700 dollars lighter on the wallet as well. I have a Peavey Rage TransTube practice amp (15W). I play along with Cds or Satellite music channels. I have been playing on and off since I was about 12. I'm not a dedicated daily player. 

The death of a netbook

My ACER netbook died. So after months of pondering and comparison I have a Barnes and Noble Nook tablet. Overall I am pleased with it. When you turn it on initially it probably takes around 30 seconds to get to the home screen. After that it just sleeps unless it is manually shut off. It has an android operating system so it acts like a phone with a 7" screen.It does have a version of Adobe flash player so you can view webpages normally in either the mobile or full versions. It is lightweight and can be viewed in either landscape or portrait. You can lock the gyro if an image is uploaded sideways. Then you can turn the tablet to view it correctly. It has good graphics and a nice sized qwerty keyboard in landscape mode. At this time you can't cut and paste and there is no cursor control from the keyboard. Things can get a little dicey in full version but most mobile pages limit access. It can actually fit in your pocket snd it is thinner and lighter than a paperback. I have the 8 gb version and it will hold around 1000 ebooks. B&N has it dialed into their server for books, apps, newspapers and magazines. I would recommend purchasing a stylus pen for touch accuracy in full webpages. There is no spell check included. To be continued…

How to Design Programs

I'm guessing I will not have much of a following and have decided to keep some of my my programming links here.


Designing Programs
http://www.htdp.org/2003-09-26/Book/curriculum-Z-H-2.html


Learning to program PYTHON
http://www.alan-g.me.uk/l2p/index.htm

Intel Microcode

Just keep learning new shtuff!

Microcode website

When I upgraded the RAM on my netbook, I was instructed to update my BIOS firmware to the latest release. So I bit my lip and prayed that everything went right. This is one procedure that you don't want to miss on. It can leave your system in an unrecoverable state. It's called bricking your computer. After loading the operating system my BIOS did not recognize the increase in memory. Subsequently neither would the operating system software. My skin crawls when I can't get something to work right, so I set about making sure there wasn't a newer release or perhaps there was a fix for this out there in ether land. While searching Intel's download servers I kept running across these microcode downloads. I had my mind set on BIOS and it took me a little while to investigate just what was this microcode stuff I have never heard of.

http://urbanmyth.org/microcode/

Intel Microcode Update Utility for Linux

The microcode_ctl utility is a companion to the IA32 microcode driver written by Tigran Aivazian <tigran@aivazian.fsnet.co.uk>. The utility has two uses:
it decodes and sends new microcode to the kernel driver to be uploaded to Intel IA32 processors. (Pentium Pro, PII, PIII, Pentium 4, Celeron, Xeon etc - all P6 and above, which does NOT include pentium classics). It also supports processors of the x86_64 architecture.


Microcode has been around for a long time. It was written in assembly code into the harder, more permanent areas of memory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcode

Modern microcode is normally written by an engineer during the processor design phase and stored in a ROM (read-only memory) or PLA (programmable logic array)[1] structure, or a combination of both.[2] However, machines also exists which have some (or all) microcode stored in SRAM or flash memory. This is traditionally denoted a writeable control store in the context of computers. Complex digital processors may also employ more than one (possibly microcode based) control unit in order to delegate sub-tasks which must be performed (more or less) asynchronously in parallel. Microcode is generally not visible or changeable by a normal programmer, not even by an assembly programmer. Unlike machine code which often retains some compatibility among different processors in a family, microcode only runs on the exact electronic circuitry for which it is designed, as it constitutes an inherent part of the particular processor design itself.


**************************************************
Several Intel CPUs in the x86 architecture family have writable microcode.[16] This has allowed bugs in the Intel Core 2 microcode and IntelXeon microcode to be fixed in software, rather than requiring the entire chip to be replaced. Such fixes can be installed by Linux,[17]FreeBSD,[18] Microsoft Windows,[19] or the motherboard BIOS.[20]

Intel has recently released these software updates to by-pass the BIOS updates and write binary code to the processor.

http://dereenigne.org/computers/linux/update-intel-cpu-microcode
You are probably familiar with the terms firmware and drivers in the context of computer hardware, and the endless updating that they require. Most people associate these drivers and firmware updates with peripheral equipment such as graphic cards and DVD drives. You might not however be aware that you can also update the firmware on your CPU (firmware is called microcode in CPU speak).

These microcode updates are normally bundled in with BIOS updates. Given the fact that BIOS updates are inherently risky, motherboard manufacturers are reluctant to issue BIOS updates for anything other than major bugs. This means your microcode can become quite dated. Both Intel and AMD realize this and release standalone microcode updates.

If you are running Debian or Ubuntu and Intel CPU (there is a pretty good chance you are), you can use the intel-microcode and microcode.ctl packages to update your microcode. This will download the latest microcode for your CPU and apply the update automatically on each boot. This process does not apply the update permanently, and is completely reversible.

Periodically run sudo update-intel-microcode
to download the latest microcode version from Intel.

I was already wary of BIOS updates so I didn't just dive in and start downloading files. microcode.ctl is available from the Ubuntu Software Center. I downloaded the program ran the update and voila, even though my BIOS seems unaware of my RAM upgrade it's no longer fooling my operating system.

Now if I could just convince it that it's only a single core.... :)

64-bit Ubuntu upgrade

I recently updated my Netbook to the Ubuntu LINUX 64-bit (ubuntu-11.10-dvd-amd64.iso). At first I had heard that the 64-bit didn't provide adequate support for the mostly 32-bit software available. When I decided to take another look, I was seeing more positive reviews and decided to give it a whirl. I have been pleasantly surprised so far. Programs seem more responsive and I have been seeing less graying out when starting programs. The system monitor has now correctly detected my 2GB of RAM. It still appears to believe that I have a dual core processor. (Intel® Atom™ CPU N450 @ 1.66GHz × 2) As far as I can tell, from the product information, It's a single core 2 thread processor.
No glitches and it's the OS that this was designed to run.
Next step install the 64-bit LTS on the (wife's) desktop!


11/02/11
Update: My printer drivers are 32-bit! Canon PIXMA MX340. I was able to get the scanner to work with Simple Scan. The printer not. I'm trying Google Cloud Print but not tested it yet. I will not be updating desktop to 64-bit until CANON gets up to speed!

Playing Catch-up!

I was researching the specs on my Acer netbook. It has the Intel Atom N450 processor. While reading, the article went on to tell about the next generation of this line with the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) integrated into the processor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Atom I will only paste the applicable section here.

Second generation cores
[edit]Pineview microprocessor

On December 21, 2009, Intel announced the N450, D510 and D410 with integrated graphics.[2] Total kit power goes from 11.8 W to 7 W with the new processor and chipset, a 40% improvement.[34][35] Intel GMA 3150, a 45 nm shrink of the GMA 3100 with no HD capabilities, is included as the on-die GPU. Netbooks using this new processor were expected to be publicly shown at CES on January 4, 2010, and to be released for sale on January 11, 2010.[36][37] The major new feature includes longer battery life, with 6 cell systems reporting 10 or more hours of battery life.[38][39][40]

The current generation of the Atom is codenamed "Pineview" which is used in the "Pine Trail" platform. Intel's current netbook platform (codenamed Pine Trail-M) utilizes an Atom processor (codenamed Pineview-M) and Platform Controller Hub (codenamed Tiger Point). The graphics and memory controller have moved into the processor, which is paired with the Tiger Point PCH. This creates a more power efficient 2-chip platform rather than the 3-chip one used with previous-generation Atom chipsets.[41]

On 1 March 2010 Intel officially announced the introduction of the N470 processor,[42][43] running at 1.83 GHz with a 667 MHz FSB and a Max TDP of 6.5 W.[18]

The new Atom N4xx chips became available on 11 January 2010.[44] It is used in netbook/nettop systems, and features an integrated single-channel DDR2 memory controller and an integrated graphics core. It features hyper-threading and is still manufactured on a 45 nm[45]process. The new design uses half the power of the older "Menlow" platform. This reduced overall power consumption and size makes the platform more desirable for use in smartphones and other mobile internet devices.

On December 23, 2009, MSI introduced a new series of netbooks to be released in January 2010[dated info], the Wind U130 and U135, that were among the first netbooks to incorporate the new "Pine Trail" platform. ASUS and Dell have since introduced netbooks based on the Pineview-M chip N4xx.

The D4xx and D5xx series support the x86-64 bit instruction set and DDR2-800. It is rated for embedded use. The series has an integrated graphics processor built directly into the CPU to help improve performance. The models are targeted at nettops and low end desktops. They do not support speedstep.

The Atom D510 processor features dual core running at 1.66 GHz, with 1 MB of L2 cache.[46] The Atom D410 processor features a single core running at 1.66 GHz, with 512 KB of L2 cache.[47] Power requirements are rated at 13 watts[46] for the D510 and 10 watts[47] for the D410.

Rakarrack

http://rakarrack.sourceforge.net/

Loads of fun! Even has a Bass effect!

http://www.geek.com/articles/news/ubuntu-to-switch-from-x-window-system-to-wayland-2010115/


Just starting to get used to X-Window and pfft!

http://wayland.freedesktop.org/

IPAD 2 Q&A: The next advance in computing technology.

A friend recently bought an IPAD 2 and I was asking him about the specs on the unit. Because I have no Apple knowledge or experience I had the feeling we were talking apples and oranges! :)


When I had time today to research why I was posing some seemingly difficult questions, here is what I found.

First some background: Advanced readers skip ahead!

The CPU(central processing unit)  is the square thingy on your motherboard, (the electronic thingy in the metal box with the lights on it), the CPU is under the fan on the motherboard. In a PC, you can exchange the CPU for a faster one. You can buy a better fan or cooler, because some of them are water-cooled. Sounds like a scary mix to me but fast processors have always used a lot of power and in any electronic device, power has always meant heat.  


RAM! All PC people are familiar with RAM (random access memory) or soon to be (really ancient memory). We know it, we love it, it's one of the first questions asked after what type processor do you have. RAM is also up-gradable on the PC. It's the little stick thingy you buy and replace the same kind of thingy but the new one has more little black boxes on it. Those little black boxes, just like the CPU, are integrated circuits(IC's).


SHORT HISTORY OF COMPUTING FOR BACKGROUND
I'm showing my age for your benefit here. In the Air Force in the 70s, I was an Avionics Instrument Systems Specialist. I kept all the gauges working for the pilots. Normally I would find which part of the system was broken, usually a black box containing electronics, swapped it with a new one and bring the broken one back to a different shop that fixed them. When we were not busy we would help out the other shop by fixing some of our own black boxes.


I had a manual a stop watch and a computer. The computer was hooked up to the broken instrument or box, plugged in, and then using the manual and stop watch I started a test procedure. The computer was a metal box with switches and lights on the front. I flipped switches and timed how long it would take for a series of lights to turn on and off. This was an early version of what we use in our homes today. 


A computer at it's most basic level is a bunch of switches that are either on or off. You may have heard of binary code. It's 1s and 0s. On or off! A relay is an electrically activated switch. They are still used today in high power and automotive applications. Someone presses a button in a control room. That could be relayed up through larger and larger relays to open the doors on a dam. Something that requires a lot of power and a human would not want to stand there and try to close that switch.  


The vacuum tube was an electronic switch, like a relay but with no moving parts. When power was applied the Eswitch either opened or closed a circuit. Some Eswitches are open (or on) with no power applied, or closed(off) when power was applied. Tubes used a lot of power and were hot like a light bulb. They rather resembled a light bulb with transparent glass and wire filaments that could easily be seen. 


Transistors did the same thing electronically. They were the size of a pencil eraser and made the first portable electronic devices feasible. Since they were smaller and required no wires in the circuitry, they were called solid state. They used much less power, being some of the first battery operated devices. They also generated less heat. Heat is a loss of power. Whenever you can reduce the heat given off in circuitry you can operate on less power. 


In the FAA, until quite recently, RADAR scopes were CRT or (cathode ray tubes). Much like the old televisions they were heavy, bulky and ran hot. Air Conditioning in the room and fans were the cooling devices for this circuitry. If we lost air conditioning we had to shut the scopes off. If you have ever seen the movie "Apollo 13" they struggled to get the capsules power down below 12 amps. My battery powered drill supplies more power than that. They needed that to power a computer that had less computing power than a calculator watch. That helps illustrate how far we have come. Think of a watch battery running that space capsule.


What we use today are digital ICs. There are more than a billion transistors contained in some of the ICs in use today. Each, a tiny little switch, a 1 or a 0, open or closed, on or off.
They are etched into layers of silicon that can only be seen through a microscope.


What does this have to do with the IPAD 2?
The RAM is integrated into the CPU. You can't upgrade it. In fact measuring RAM is really hard to do in this case because it is part of the processor.
It uses a 64bit processor and doesn't have to access the RAM through the motherboard. More speed, less heat(No Fan), less power.(longer battery life)
http://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-a/cortex-a9.php
So you can't compare this processor with a PC. You have to run programs and time them and see what they do side by side.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4216/apple-ipad-2-gpu-performance-explored-powervr-sgx543mp2-benchmarked
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4216/apple-ipad-2-gpu-performance-explored-powervr-sgx543mp2-benchmarked/2


The same thing has happened to graphics cards. It's an on board GPU. Some graphics cards even had their own cooling fan.


The hard/FLASH drive is what drives the price of the IPAD 2 in GigaBytes. Starting at $500 for a 16GB solid state hard/FLASH drive. That's right the last of the internal moving parts have been designed out of the modern computing device. No more spinning disk with a stylus like the phonographs of old.
Why such a high price? If you want to be the first kid on the block with the new toy you have to pay for it. http://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-build-the-ipad-2-2011-3


PROS
No moving parts. No cables. Everything is integrated into the motherboard, equals speed! With less heat loss, through wires and cables and moving parts it requires less power and that increases battery life. Less power in turn means even less heat and therefore no cooling fan. 


This is what will be driving technology. Processing power doubles approximately every two years. Eventually every process will be on one IC. Then companies and consumers can decide what balance to shoot for between size and power.


CONS
I have read about problems with the IPAD when in the sun regarding visibility and overheating and shutting down. Anytime you are buying a cutting edge product you will be suffering through the inevitable initial bug problems. This is disposable technology. Nothing can be up-graded. Starting at $499 it's not like chucking the left over McFries. The price will come down as the manufacturing process finds it's stride. It will be made obsolete in 2 years by the next product. Hopefully there is an avenue to recycle these products.


MN