HO Blog - David HOdge ho-blog.com

A College Rejection and Response - Rice

Sat, 17 Feb 2007 11:25:23 -0800

Here is my rejection letter from Rice University and my response to it. I really enjoyed writing it :) Dear David, The Committee on Admission has completed a careful evaluation of your application for admission to Rice. I regret to inform you that the Committee has elected to deny your request for admission. This decision is final for the fall of 2007. We take seriously your choice to apply Interim Decision, and we want you to know that our decision did not come easily. The competition for ad

Stop being such a weak force - a note to Gravity

Sun, 10 Dec 2006 22:16:46 -0800

Below is a corny piece I wrote for my essay exposition class. The assignment was “letter to a friend”. I think my physics teacher may have enjoyed my response a little more than my english teacher did. Dear Gravity, I think it is about time for me to stage an intervention. Firstly, I think you should know you are very influential force that keeps me grounded on this world. However, you are clearly depressed and bent out of continuum. I realized this last millennium, when you folded ont

Don’t get slapped by the “invisible hand”

Thu, 2 Nov 2006 21:45:26 -0800

Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” can be seen propelling me and Nicole to trade in our free market...On Halloween. When Halloween came, we decided to show our love for our new AP Economics class and “the hand”. As far as we were concerned, our costumes and stock trading routine turned out great. In fact, Mr. Ippolito, our Econ teacher/Ex New York Trader, practically died when he saw our costumes. As far as reality was concerned, almost nobody at the costume contest understood our costumes

The better way to BSOD

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 18:38:40 -0700

About two months ago, I wrote about how to make a Mac’s kernel panic look like a BSOD. Today I would like to make a correction. Amit Singh sent me an email after my last post politely suggesting that I missed a solution to Blue Screen OS X. And indeed I did. Shortly after he sent his email, Amit wrote a piece about an easier way to load a BSOD image into OS X’s kernel. No kernel swaps required. He also went into detail about the concepts and code behind the mysterious panic on OS X

Panic! At The Kernel.

Thu, 20 Jul 2006 22:26:25 -0700

The Panic: Armed with the latest and greatest Mac OS X Kernel, I decided to change my “Kernel Panic” screen to the infamous windows “Blue Screen Of Death”. I now have the first mac capable of blue-screening. Since I’m such a nice guy I thought I’d share my wonder kernel and the means to trigger a panic. Briefly, I loaded my “Blue Screen” image into a 17,000 line c structure(Not by hand). And then altered the panic code [osfmk/console/panic_dialog.c] to color anything not covered by the 10

Wave Interference with Unity

Mon, 19 Jun 2006 11:36:37 -0700

Here it is. The product of a few hours work with Unity 1.5. “Waves” models wave interference patterns in 3D and in REAL TIME. Just look at the spiffy screen shot above. It is an awesome way to visualize the propagation of waves and the interference patterns that they create. Yay for waves. A download link is at the bottom of this page. Just move around either one of the green spheres and watch the wave patterns that form. The Unity Game Engine made this super easy. I look forward t

Unity 1.5

Sun, 18 Jun 2006 19:13:46 -0700

My second favorite company just made a huge software release. Unity 1.5 is officially out from the Danish Elves over at OverTheEdge. Unity is one of the most amazing pieces of software I have used in years. The software feels like it came from Apple, however I have doubts as to whether even Apple would have had vision to make such a great product. Unity is Simple AND Powerful: Software Done Right. Tomorrow I will post a project that represents a few hours work with 1.5. It wont be as re

EFF and the NSA...Oh joy, Politics

Mon, 15 May 2006 09:55:53 -0700

Today I officially joined the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation). I had been planning to do so forever. From their website, “EFF is a nonprofit group of passionate people — lawyers, technologists, volunteers, and visionaries — working to protect your digital rights.” w00t! With this whole NSA thing. Specifically them “being interested in our phone calls”, I figured my timing was pretty good. Keep in mind that the EFF fights many cases simultaneously, but this is one that really upsets