Mike Laiosa's Web Page

I had always thought I'd rather write essays and put them on my web page then have a blog. But after years of thinking that and no essays to show for it, I decided to break down and have a blog. It will probably mostly describe my small victories doing things with computers and electronics, but might occasionally contain essay worthy content. You can find recent posts on the right. Below, you can find a nice little organized set of links.

• Games
  • Games I can recomend
    • ROOK - Triumph card game (ala hearts, bridge or even war). The only such game other than bridge that I've seen enjoyed by bridge players, but its easy to learn.
    • Abalone - 2 player zero-sum game of perfect knoledge (ala chess, checkers and go). Good choice if you don't want to get creamed by an expirenced chess player or argue over the rules of checkers.
    • Baloon Cup - Card game for 2 players. Easy to learn and play, but with tricky strategy.
    • Attika - 2-4 player board game. Easy to learn, very well balanced. Plays good with even 2 players. Most games I've played the loosers were only a turn or two away from winning.
    • Carcasone - another city building game. Straight-forward, and with some expansions is playable with a large number of players. (I've enjoyed >10 player games).
    • Settlers - 3 or 4 player with a 5-6 player expansion. The archetypical German board game.
    • Hare & Tortise - What Shoots and Ladders or Candy Land should have been.
  • Games I would like to own
    • Wits and Wagers - A trivia game thats better than Trivial Pursuit because:
      • It cites its sources
      • Knowing lots of trivia doesn't give you as big an advantage
      • Its fast pace
    • Skipbo - Card game for 3+ players.
      • Simple enough that you need not be a game geek to figure it out. In fact, its published by Mattel.
      • Strategically interesting just the same.
• Programming
  • Some notes on Boolean operators
  • Some C++ notes
  • Libraries
    • http://www.nothings.org/stb/stb_h.html - An impressivly complete public domain C library.
  • Machine Learning
    • Latent Semantic Analysis - SVD with SciPy
    • http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs229/materials.html
    • http://www.gaussianprocess.org/gpml/chapters/
  • Clustering
    • k-means
      • Easy to implement, requires choosing the number of clusters
      • Non-deterministic - iterative algorithm's results depend on intiial values
    • QT Clustering
      • Doesn't require choosing the number of clusters
      • Deterministic
    • Johnson Hiearchical Clustering
      • Easy to implement
      • O(n**2)
  • SAT Solving
    • MiniSat
      • Small, popular and open source
    • BASolver
      • Includes description of DIMACS CNF and ISCAS/RTL file formats
    • Automatic Generation of Peephole Superoptimizers
      • The code
    • zChaff SAT solver
  • Signal Processing
    • Faster alternative to the FFT
• Data Visualization and Reporting
  • Nomograms - a generalization of slide rules for arbitrary calculations
    • The Art of Nomography - A good introduction to the concept, but gives a shakey description of the math behind them.
    • Nomograms for Wargames - A less dense explaination with equally shakey math
  • Search
    • Lucine - Java
    • MG4J - Java
    • Xapian - C++, with CGI web interface available.
  • Things I've used
    • Graphviz
    • iReport
  • Things I want to look into
    • http://blog.thejit.org/javascript-information-visualization-toolkit-jit/ - JavaScript interactive graph visualization
    • GGobi
    • OpenDX
    • Infovis
    • Infovis Cyberinfrasturctire
    • Piccolo
    • Tulip
    • JUNG
    • NodeBox
    • Processing
    • perfuse
    • yEd
    • Google Viz
    • Guess
    • Circos
    • Misc. Papers
• Media Tools
  • Levelator
  • Acorn
  • Copy DVDs to your iPod with podencoder. Oh if only there was a modern open source version of Media Cleaner. May be some day I'll write one.
• Telephony
  • Voice
    • Les.NET
    • Gafachi
    • Callcentric
  • Fax
    • Fax1
    • GreenFax
• Electronics
  • DataHunter - cheap wireless networking
  • USB Dev Boards - including some cheap zigby wireless stuffs
  • All About Circuits - hands down the best online resource for basic electronics
  • BatchPCB.com - Low cost prototype PCB fab
  • http://www.vakits.com/ - Cheap SMD parts kits
  • Switching Regulator Overview - One of the more detailed yet approachable explanations.
  • http://ewiznet.com - Simple wired and wireless network modules
  • ATX Power
    • Most pinouts and part numbers
    • AMP 1-480426-0 with AMP 60618-4 is the "Molex" connector.
• Home Repair and Woodworking
  • http://www.factsfacts.com/MyHomeRepair/
• Random Links
  • http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=5MXTBGcyNuc
  • TheUnarchiver