AIs, Coding, and the Age of Ideas ~ Also the Week in Review

I found ChatGPT o3-mini the day after it relased last weekend. I then spent most of the weekend cranking out apps that I've wanted for months and could now have up and running in about an hour and then fairly polished about an hour after that.

It was outstanding! I'd used ChatGPT to help with the CW historgram over the last few weeks. Coding wennt quickly, but occasionally things got dropped on the floor. o3-mini has exceeded all my expectations by just cranking out code that works.

Oh! Before I forget, the point of this post was to point out, (pun intended), an article Simon Willison mentioned that talks about the age of having ideas and making them real quickly. The article by Geoffrey Huntley talks about this kind of rapid prototyping and the cultural shifts among developers that are happening around it.

Here's a sampling of what I've done with o3-mini:

I've wanted a web control panel for our, (we is KO6BTY and I, KD0FNR), ham radio, Project TouCans ever since we put a WiFi enabled keyer on the rig. For a variety of reasons, it was too much work. This time though? My use of ChatGPT earlier in the week for the straight key version of TouCans freed me up to think about bigger pictures. I made a change to the network topology, replacing TouCans as the network access point with my smart phone, and that changed everything. At that point, I asked o3-mini to write up a control panel for me, and? It just did. I mean good technical writing helped a lot, I suspect, but the code that o3-mini cranke out just worked. My favorite part of the prompting process was one of my last requests:

Make the background of the page black. Make the borders of every box rounded and thicker. Make the borders of every box the orange/yellow seen in the closing credits of the video game "Portal" Make all text the same orange/yellow color.

I wound up with this:

I got the "GI Joe" control panel of my childhood dreams. (The actual kids here who are the reason I even know how cool the Portal end credits are also appreciate the look of the page.) The page has an auto-keyer for calling CQ repeatedly, a custom message sender, and a POTA/SOTA panel that sends out canned messages given the hunter's callsign and RST. That panel also logs my calls in the format that we store them for mapping and adif generation. The iframes for the Utah SDR and the RBN let us see how well our signal's getting out. It's pretty spiffy and mostly I didn't have to think about it.

The best example is that the POTA panel will send out 'gm', 'ga', or 'ge' all on its own by looking at local time and making the decision. Anyone that's ever written datetime handling code knows that it's time consuming. Not anymore!

Speaking of timestamps, KO6BTY and I have been playing around with ionospheric data from publicly available sources for the last couple of years. We found a new source last week and, again, within about an hour had a python script pulling the data into a local sqlite database. The data updats several times a day, but we that's ok, we have a script that accepts the latest date we have and then pulls in only the new data. All of this code was generated by o3-mini!

It's a pretty exciting time to be coding!

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1. While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero. This is typically explained in the following way. While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare. That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2]. Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector. Its operation is in...

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain ...

More Cowbell! Record Production using Google Forms and Charts

First, the what : This article shows how to embed a new Google Form into any web page. To demonstrate ths, a chart and form that allow blog readers to control the recording levels of each instrument in Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is used. HTML code from the Google version of the form included on this page is shown and the parts that need to be modified are highlighted. Next, the why : Google recently released an e-mail form feature that allows users of Google Documents to create an e-mail a form that automatically places each user's input into an associated spreadsheet. As it turns out, with a little bit of work, the forms that are created by Google Docs can be embedded into any web page. Now, The Goods: Click on the instrument you want turned up, click the submit button and then refresh the page. Through the magic of Google Forms as soon as you click on submit and refresh this web page, the data chart will update immediately. Turn up the:...

Copasetic Flow

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