GPS apps on my htc desire and turning a hardcase into a hard-mount for my bike.

This is the kind of novel thinking that will really make this kind of technology ("Platinum" solar cells) a truly viable technology. Even with the Pt atom though, these solar cells are much cheaper to manufacture than traditional inog solar cells (Si, CdTe, CuGaInSe2, etc...), however the power conversion efficiencies are low (0.1-7% compared to 14-19% for Si...)

Also these polymers aren't printed, they are spin coated, which in my opinion offers little to no control and wide variability with the morphology of the active layer of the cells, which is the primary determinant in the battle for charge transport vs. relaxation.

EDIT: Ideally I will be able to contribute to this in a couple years from now when I am conducting my graduate research; literally 8-9/10 chemistry/materials graduate schools I have checked out have some sort of photovoltaic research going on. Only time will tell.

These (plastic "organic") semiconductors are present in cells as thin films, are flexible and translucent. However you correctly noted that the big problem with these cells is their low efficeincy (relative to inorganic cells).

hand-editing SNMP MIB files. corporate rules prevent me from using any of the nice free tools that make this so much easier.

Corporate rules against free tools? You work for Mickeysoft?

nope. I'd imagine any U.S. corporation big enough to get sued has similar guidelines. Even those heavily involved in FOSS.

been playing Fallout: New Vegas. Great game, but gives me headaches just like Fallout 3 did. I can't figure out what it is. It feels like motion sickness.

I've played lots of FPS games, lots of first person RPGs, 3rd person RPGs, all sorts of stuff, and never had this problem except in Fallout games. Any idea what could be causing this? I really like the game, but it's not worth getting headaches over.

I think it has to do with the refresh rate, so everything seems jittery when looking around quickly (which happens a lot in this game, lots of time spent looking around for stuff to scavenge).

Actually, Microsoft's rules are incredibly liberal relative to its size.

Ok maybe I should clarify...my company has pretty decent rules around this. If you bother going through the process, you can get most tools approved for use if they're sane. What my company is looking out for, is stupid licenses that could allow the tool's copyright owner to claim some right or force some action with regard to the content it produces. e.g. a text editor that says it owns any files you create. That would be an extreme case...less extreme is the "viral" GPL quality.

I'm sure Microsoft is careful about GPL licensed software, no?

That's understandable and increasingly common these days

I don't work for them personally and can't comment extensively, but I do know engineers there that opt to use vim over VS (although I imagine that's had plenty of time to be approved, seeing as it's been around since before I was born)

fwiw, I (and most of my development team) use vim as well.

Eclipse-***** here. It may be bloaty, but it lets me easily work on multi-language projects at the same time, and there's a plugin for everything except for Tetris

i love eclipse, i don't get to use it often enough. though i still think VS beats it on the debugging front.

i can't believe there's no tetris plugin view!! hmm...the first BF OSS project?..

That it does, but not for Python and Java ;).
As a winter project I'm actually planning on writing a Golden Cheetah plugin to do virtual courses, CompuTrainer/TacX style, and possibly have racing. PM me if you're interested!

I'll take it. Lol.

ah yes, of course :) my life's been 95% c and c++ the last few years, it's easy to forget!

sounds fun. if i find the time though, i was thinking of a telemetry overlay project ala the rides video thread/dashware. i know a couple of other people have written similar apps, but i haven't seen them open the source up yet.

on a more general geekiness level - anyone else addicted to scrabb.ly? i keep trying to quit, but it makes a really great short-term distraction. e.g. if i'm waiting for some code to build and don't feel like answering emails, flip to scrabb.ly and knock out a couple of words, done.

C++0x is on my list of languages to learn, but my heart and paycheck lies with dynamic languages for the time being.
Could definitely be an interesting project. My reasons for wanting to do the virtual course thing is that I'm rather selfish and during the winter it rains something like 90% of the time in Denmark, forcing me onto the trainer. $40 on an ANT+ USB Stick and a speed sensor could alleviate some of the boredom. I'll probably end up to lazy to do it, in which case I'm just going to hook up quarqd to some pipes and force it to pause VLC when I stop pedaling
One person has already tried to derail my GPA with Scrabulous, don't think you'll draw me in!

Just finished a huge code review for a pet project of mine, another few rounds of testing and then I'll launch it to the public. If it gains half the traction elsewhere that it has at my school I'm hoping it might even score a bit of media coverage.

I'm also about to submit my application to MIT, and if that doesn't qualify as geeky, I don't know what does.

vi or vim. But I'm an admin. My programing consists of sub 1,000 line scripts. Most are sub 100 lines.

Heretic. emacs++

you're all crazy. i write my code with a hole puncher.

it's refreshing to hear of people doing voluntary code reviews.

good luck!

i'm not an EE/physicist/anyone else who'd know, so - regarding electronic gruppos. will wireless ever be feasible in the pro peloton? is there any existing technology that couldn't be jammed/hacked?

I posted here a while ago about emacs. I think it was here. I learned enough to get by in the 5 years I worked in an emacs environment. vi is foreign to me. I still want to ctrl-e to get to the end of the line. I forgot most of it though, no usage in 3 years.

We (large online brokerage) are a vi environment. From operations to systems|database|network engineering, I don't know anyone that uses anything other then vi.

I'll bow out of the emacs vs vi "wars". Whatever. They are both pretty straightforward and easy to use.

I'm just glad that I don't have to do anything in Interleaf anymore. Using that to write technical papers with colleagues way back in the day that had DEC VAX machines and just had to do EVERY freakin' thing in Interleaf gave me a huge headache.

I successfully made 1 byte of memory in my electronics lab out of op-amp transistors with positive feedback.

Maybe this means I will be able to understand all of the digital and computing lingo in this thread soon. Probably not.

Were these organometalic op-amp transistors?

yeah, it's possible. Probably more expensive than it's worth. You couldn't make it jam-proof really. Anyone nearby with a really strong transmitter could always jam it, if they used the right frequency. You could make it really hard to jam, but never impossible.

The hacked part is much simpler. Just code each transmitter/receiver pair to each other using a semi-secure protocol.

Don't mock me :D