Tom LaMantia

M68000 Assembly Language Bounce Animation

admin — Mon, 13 May 2013 21:34:47 +0000

This is a bouncing ball animation I made in Easy68K – a Motorola 68000 assembly language simulator.

This animation places the coordinates of the ball onto the stack frame as the ball falls, and uses a recursive function call to draw the ball on the way back up. Below is an animated GIF screen capture of the Console I/O window showing the animation. Cool stuff.

Polynomial Graphing Software

admin — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 18:42:46 +0000

This is another project that I created for school. It can be used to graph any polynomial in terms of a single variable with an integer degree. The plotter allows the user to input a polynomial, the variable the polynomial is in terms of and the range they wish to model the given polynomial over. The software also automatically graphs the first and second derivatives of the given polynomial.

Users can specify polynomials using integer operands and the operators: +, – , *, (multiple * operators for exponentiation)

For example:

(x*x)-6

x*x*x*x+4*x-4

(x-3)*(x+4)

4*x

-x

etc…

You can download the jar file here.

Feel free to try it out, suggest improvements and identify any bugs! Feedback can be left below.

Java BigInteger Calculator

admin — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 22:54:07 +0000

This is a project I made for school. It is very similar to the windows calculator and supports the following operations on objects of the Java BigInteger class: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, factorial, remainder, negation.

You can download the .jar file here.

You can leave a comment below!

Raspberry Pi Ordered!

admin — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 22:34:44 +0000

Ordered a Raspberry Pi today. Updates to come!

A Java Class For Rational Numbers

admin — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 00:05:21 +0000

I thought I would post a Java Class I made for part of a project that deals with rational numbers. Pretty simple, yet sturdy implementation of rational numbers if needed. The code is pretty self explanatory. This implementation can create a Rational object given a string “a/b” where a, b are integers. It can also create a rational object given integers for the numerator and denominator directly. This class also supports methods to print, rationalize and compare Rational objects, as well as preform addition (add), subtraction (sub), multiplication (mul) and division of Rational objects.

You can take a look/download it here.

Scripting Craps Odds In Java

admin — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 22:42:55 +0000

Just thought I would show you guys a nifty little program I made in Java to simulate your odds on the dice game Craps. The main for loop of the program simulates one game, and you can adjust int i to simulate different numbers of games. The final output shows your total wins, the total house wins and your winning percentage. As you can see, the house ALWAYS wins!

package myPackage; import java.util.Random;


class Main{
public static void main(String args[])

{

float houseWins = 0;

float yourWins = 0;

int thisSum;
Random myRandom = new Random();
for(int i = 0; i <= 10000; i++)

{
/**

Roll two die, take their sums to establish the "come out roll"

**/
int roll1 = myRandom.nextInt(6) + 1;

int roll2 = myRandom.nextInt(6) + 1;
int comeOutRoll = roll1 + roll2;
//Automatic win

if(comeOutRoll == 7 || comeOutRoll == 11)

{

yourWins += 1;

}
//Automatic loss

else if (comeOutRoll == 2 || comeOutRoll == 3 || comeOutRoll == 12){

houseWins += 1;

}
//Play the game

else

{

boolean playing = true;
while(playing)

{

roll1 = myRandom.nextInt(6) + 1;

roll2 = myRandom.nextInt(6) + 1;
thisSum = roll1 + roll2;
if(thisSum == comeOutRoll)

{

yourWins += 1;

playing = false;

}
else if (thisSum == 7){

houseWins += 1;

playing = false;

}

}

}

}
float winPercentage = (yourWins)/(yourWins + houseWins);

//Print the results System.out.println("Your wins: " + yourWins); System.out.println("House wins: " + houseWins); System.out.println("You win: " + winPercentage + "% of the time!"); } }

Creating GnuPG Keys Using Cryptophane

admin — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 04:01:13 +0000

My GunPG key got obliterated when I formatted my Ubuntu box. So today, I went about the task of setting up a new key. While playing around with Cryptophane, I noticed the documentation is a little sparse. So I am going to run through a quick tutorial about creating and using the program.

Cryptophane is a GUI frontend for the GnuPG encryption framework. Do a quick Google search to download it. It saves a lot of messy command line work, and works quite well. It allows you to create GnuPG keys, import/export keys and sign keys. This guide outlines how to set up and use the keys.

I am not going to explain the technicalities behind how GnuPG keys work (nor do I understand them). Wikipedia has all that info.

Generating Key Pairs

Generating key pairs is pretty simple.

Go menu > keys > generate secret key

Enter all the information is asks. Remember to write down your pass phrase. If you forget it, you will be unable to decrypt any items encrypted with your public key.

Set an expiry date if you wish. This is not necessary. Whatever works for you.

Encrypting

Create a .txt file containing the data you wish to encrypt.

Open Cryptophane, right click your public key > “Encrypt To”.

Navigate to your file.

Click Process on the menu that comes up.

The selected file will now be encrypted.

Decrypting

To decrypt a file encrypted with your public key right click on the .txt file you want to decrypt.

Click open with Cryptophane.

Select a file name and location for the decrypted document.

Enter your private key paraphrase when prompted.

That’s all there is to it! If you have any questions/comments/concerns, use comment form below!

IronKey Launcher Hanging On Windows 7

admin — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 17:03:43 +0000

About this time last year, I purchased a new HP laptop complete with Windows 7. Unfortunately, my IronKey refused to work on this new machine. After clicking on the IronKey unlocker icon, the program would appear to load, the hard drive would click for a few seconds, then the program would hang. Nothing. A quick crtl + alt + del would indeed show that the ironkey.exe process was running, but no menu.

After two extremely unhelpful calls to IronKey support, even they admitted (I am paraphrasing here) “We have no idea what the hell is wrong”. After upgrading software versions, investigating drivers and playing with it for hours, I gave up. Thanks guys.

Well just for the record, the latest version of the IronKey software, version 2.5.1.0 released on Jan 6. 2012 has fixed this problem.

Better late than never I guess.

SEO Is A Complete Joke

admin — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 16:46:33 +0000

Spam emails occasionally provide me with a source of hilarious entertainment. Ones that advertise “search engine optimization” are one of my personal favorites. What exactly IS search engine optimization?. Google will provide you with numerous interesting results, however I thought I would come up with a short (yet not complete) list of all things SEO:

SEO is:

A complete scam
A way to make your “firm” look like it actually does something
A common subject of spam WordPress comments.
A common subject of robot Twitter accounts
A common subject of spam emails
Marketed in all the above ways with a lack of basic grammar using excessive links from url shortening services
A way to make your “firm” look like it actually does something
Commonly conducted by a click center
Not taken seriously by anyone
Overcharged
Overrated
A way to make your “firm” look like it actually does something
A “lingo” to give the impression you understand “all things web”
A often hilarious gimmick
A way to make your “firm” look like it actually does something
SEO < Nigerian fax scam
A overused buzzword
A way to make your “firm” look like it actually does something
The subject of 4,674 (and counting) spam comments in my trash can
The subject of numerous weblogs that dont have a clue
A way to make your “firm” look like it actually does something
Extraordinarily obnoxious
Meaningless
A way to make your “firm” look like it actually does something
That (insert groan here) when yet another SEO bot follows you on Twitter
A way to make your “firm” look like it actually does something
Especially the above ^

Never Force Update Pacman, Trust Me

admin — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 19:19:51 +0000

Last night I melted my Arch Linux machine through my desk. The moral of this post is quite simple: never, ever, ever do a forced update on Pacman. After trying to update Pacman, the update files would download and the system would print out a million "file.foo not found in filesystem" error messages. So I came up with the (not so) brilliant idea of running pacman -Syu --force, and hammering y and Enter on my keyboard repeatedly. Turns out that was not such a good idea.

A quick Google search would have probably given me the necessary warnings:

As quoted from the Arch Linux Wiki:

Every installed package provides /var/lib/pacman/local/$package-$version/files file that contains metadata about this package. If this file gets corrupted – is empty or missing – it results in “file exists in filesystem” errors when trying to update the package. Such an error usually concerns only one package and instead of manually renaming and later removing all the files that belong to the package in question, you can run pacman -S --force $package to force pacman to overwrite these files.

Do not run pacman -Syu --force.

That simple command totally destroyed my system. Any command I type now gives the error: FATAL: Kernel too old

Well, that’s too bad. I probably should have known anyway. Lesson learned.