I still have a few of those in original printed form.

Douglas Jost

Ethics vs morals. Ethics lets you sleep at night, knowing you won't get sued. Morals just let you sleep at night. So, can you sleep at night?

Douglas Jost

You think Jalapnos are bad, try Habaneros... Even after washing one's hands.

Douglas Jost

I'm from Calgary... Lived there all my life, until 3 years ago. I had visited China a few times before on business, and was amazed at so many things. I really enjoyed my trips to China. Then I had the opportunity to work long term in Chongqing. Visiting, and living in China are two completely different things. It's really interesting, to see the vast difference between the poor (and I mean dirt poor, living in filth, the likes I had never seen before), and the middle to upper middle class (who can afford to drive cars, costing at least the same amount we'd pay, paying for gasoline, near the same price as we'd pay, etc), and they are situated almost as nieghbours. I've heard in the rural areas, the standard of living is extremely low, such as no gas, no electricity, but I haven't seen that first had, yet. The difference in the mentality between China and the West if fairly phenomenal. You see the buildings which look unmaintained, and that seems to be the norm here. I don't understand it myself. Most people here concerned with saving money, so the buy the cheapest things, and don't pay to maintain them. I've seen buildings which are ten years old, look worse near 100 year old building I've seen in Canada, let along the several hundred year old buildings I've seen in other parts of the world. I'm an electrical engineer, educated and trained in Canada, so I could really get on a soap-box rant about some of the engineering practices I see here, but I'll leave that alone I married a local woman a year ago, and the cultural differences certainly can make life interesting. She does agree with many of my observations about the society here, and does offer some helpful insight to deal with situations. We're going to have a daughter in December, and the differences and similarities in what each of us wants for the baby are interesting... She wants a nanny to take care of the young lass full time, where as I think we should be doing that. At least, she agrees with me that, the baby WILL use diapers, and be toilette trained like children are in the West, rather than, as I see everyday, toddlers with slits in their pants in so they can deficate or urinate on the sidewalk, instead of using a diaper, or holding it until they can get to a bathroom. Hopefully by the time the child is old enough to start being influenced by friends, we'll be back in Canada anyways. Those toilets you referred to, took me a while to actually use. Painful at first, because for me, squatting is not a natural position anymore, b

Not sure about the first link, but the samples at the second link were sampled at 44.1kSps (kilo samples per seconds, as to not be confused with actual frequency content of the data), so anything above 22.05kHz is aliasing. Listening to the 40000Hz tone aliased back to 4000Hz (which is correct by Nyquist theroem, and my hearing), and the 44000kHz tone aliased back to 100Hz, which I couldn't hear, probably due to my crappy laptop speakers having rolled-off on the low end by 100Hz. Even funnier, their claim to play a prank on your dog by using the ultrasonic tones as ring tones on your phone wouldn't work. The speaker on the phone, for the ringer, probably only has an 11kHz bandwidth (hence why nothing has that high fidelity sound coming from it).

Douglas Jost

(36,16 (17, using http://audiocheck.net/audiotests_frequencycheckhigh.php[^])) Ah, after considering the frequency response of the entire system, I think it's the crappy speakers in my laptop... Probably roll off enough near 17kHz. If anything, my lower mid range is going. With the above link, I the 17kHz was almost painful. My wife (same age as me) could only start hearing at 14kHz. Using the 48kSps sample, I was able to hear something above 19kHz, however it sounded lower in tone than the 17kHz, so I'm thinking my sound system is down sampling it to 22.5kSps and there are some aliasing issues.

Douglas Jost

modified on Saturday, May 30, 2009 9:25 PM

All the other recommendations look pretty good, and I think I may even place some orders myself.. I'm not sure of your requirements, and since embedded systems is part of my job description, you could try: http://www.xilinx.com/products/devkits/DO-SD1800A-EDK-DK-UNI-G.htm[^] I've had experience with an older version of this product, and with other higher end products (which a colleague and I implemented an SoC prototype GPS/GLONASS receiver on). This particular board also comes with scaled down versions of the development tools (as far as I can tell, from the web page, since I use the full versions for work). The embedded development kit should come with SoC designs for the FPGA specific to that board, so you should be able to get it going out of the box. The firmware tool chain is GNU (>=4.1), and the IDE is Eclipse, with plug-ins specifically for embedded development with Xilinx FPGAs. If you want to take the plunge and learn some hardware design using VHDL (Ada-like Hardware Description Language) or Verilog (vaguely resembles C, only on the surface), you can also design custom integrated hardware for the FPGA. There are other higher end boards, depending upon the amount of money you want to spend (invest?). Just so it doesn't appear that I'm trying to sell Xilinx (I just happen to use there products for most of my work), an alternative (which I haven't had any experience with, because I get the best field support for Xilinx), is Altera: http://www.altera.com/[^]. They are a direct competitor to Xilinx, and probably provide similar, if not better boards. I'd say, if you are interested in embedded development, even at the hobby level, SoC (or even custom logic) can get fairly addictive.

Douglas Jost