Monthly Archives: March 2006

Weekend Musings

Did you ever have one of those weekends when you had too much rattling around in your skull to make any headway on any of it? That’s sort of what I’m up to this weekend. Rather than let it all rattle, I’ll toss some of it out here:

  1. I heard that OfficeDepot was liquidating their stock of the Zyxel 2000W wireless VOIP phones for $59.04. I went to my local Office Depot and picked one up. I might still give a more thorough review, but the bottom line is “don’t bother”. It works fairly well as far as audio quality (although at the default gain settings you get some echo), but the deal breakers are really miserable battery life (I doubt you could get an hour of talk time, and slightly less than 24 hours of standby time) and problems hopping onto open access ports. It’s just rough product all around.
  2. In a somewhat work related thread, I’ve been studying a bit about anamorphic camera lenses. Lenses like this are used to film widescreen 2.39:1 film onto regular 35mm stock, and then a similar projection camera lens is used to “undistort” the image back upon projection. Pixar has done many of its films in Cinemascope, so it’s of some interest. Anyhoo, I found that in my junk box of optical crap, I had an old Bell and Howell anamorphic projection lens. Somewhat on a whim, I decided to try placing it in front of my ordinary miniDV video camera, and seeing if it would work. It seems to: I need to make a jig to hold the lens in place in front, and then maybe I’ll shoot some video. Stay tuned for that.
  3. While I was doing some further research, I found a thread about people manufacturing their own anamorphic projection “lenses”. I put lenses in quotes because the way this works is by passing light through two different prisms, made from glass and filled with turpentine and water, respectively. As part of my telescopemaking endeavors, I learned quite a bit about optical design before, but I hadn’t really studied this kind of anamorphic system before, so I went to work trying to write the design equations for this kind of setup. I think I roughly understand what’s going on. I never really studied prisms much, but basically they are trying to create an achromatic prism. To really design such a thing, you need to know the index and dispersion (Abbe number) of the two materials, and do a bit of spreadsheet math. I might doodle around with that later today.
  4. I did a bit of geocaching yesterday. I was going to try to download some of my tracks and plot them with Google Maps. Maybe I’ll get to that later too.
  5. Oh, and I have Weight Watchers weigh-in today. My weight is up, and I’m feeling annoyed and deprived.

That’s what’s rattling around in my skull, now, the incredibly diverse tags.

[tags]Geocaching,Anamorphic Lens,Weight Watchers,VOIP,Zyxel 2000W[/tags]

WordPress Development Blog › 2.0.2 Security Release

There is a new security update for WordPress, which I’ve already installed without any serious mishap/problems. If you run WordPress, you might think about giving it an upgrade.

[tags]Wordpress,Blogging,Security[/tags]

Addendum: I’ve been having minor problems with the Dashboard in this release not displaying correctly.  I’m still trying to figure it out.

MRO to be new Mars moon on Friday

Phil Plait reminds us that in about three hours, around 10:30PST, the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter will fire a 27 minute retro burn and enter a highly elliptical orbit of Mars. Over the next several months, it will dip into the Martian atmosphere, aerobraking to reduce speed and circularize its orbit. Then, serious science and imaging can commence!

Ah, the relentless march of science.

[tags]Mars,NASA,Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter,Science[/tags]

Addendum: I copied Phil’s original message which contained an error: the time was actually 1:24 PST. As I am typing this, the burn is over half completed, all systems are nominal.

Addendum2: The spacecraft completed over sixty percent of its burn, but telemetry is currently “LOS” as the spacecraft is occulted by Mars. The burn will continue, and the spacecraft should emerge from behind the planet in about a half an hour.

Addendum3: MRO has emerged from behind the planet, and is now in Mars orbit.   Congratulations!

I don’t buy Bonds…

I often listen to sports talk shows while commuting (especially now that I’m on hiatus from my commute time podcasts and baseball season is coming up) and today the AM waves were all atwitter with news of the Sports Illustrated cover story excerpting the upcoming book by Chronicle sportswriters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams presenting documentation that Bonds used a variety of performance enhancing drugs beginning in the 1998 season.

You can read this summary if you like on sfgate.com.

Juiced or not, Bonds was clearly an incredible baseball talent.  Prior to the 1998 season, Bonds had amassed 371 career home runs and 417 stolen bases in 12 years in the majors, with seven Golden Gloves and three MVP awards.    The new book claims that in 1998 when Mark McGwire broke the single season home run record, that Bonds was jealous of the attention that it warranted, and resolved to do something about it.

None of this is really all that new, but on the radio fan after fan called in, and I found their comments to be irritating in a number of ways.

  1. Some fans called in saying that nothing was proven and that Bonds didn’t use steroids.  Since even Bonds himself admitted to using steroids (unknowningly, as he claims) this seems to be an absurd assertion.
  2. Others called in to say that while Bonds may have been using steroids, lots of other athletes have used performance enhancing drugs like Lance Armstrong, McGwire, or Palmero, and nobody is crying about them.  This seems to be the most childish argument: “everyone else is doing it, and they aren’t getting in trouble”.   This in no way exonerates Bonds from responsibility.
  3. Others called in to say that it seems hypocritical for Bud Selig and baseball management to come out against steroids, since they clearly benefitted from the hysteria created by McGwire, Sosa and Bonds for hitting homeruns.   While I agree, again, this in no way exonerates Bonds from responsibility for his actions.
  4. Others called into claim that since it wasn’t illegal, nothing should be done.  Well, actually I agree.  But just because there is no legal or contractual course of action doesn’t mean that Bonds’ actions were appropriate.
  5. Another group called in to say, “yeah, it’s bad, but what are you gonna do?”  My philosophy: when people cheat, take your ball and go home.   Just simply refuse to play with them.

I won’t be cheering for Bonds any more, even though he helped treat me to one of the most exciting baseball moments I’ve ever witnessed.  It’s not like I think he’s a total sham: as I mentioned, he’s an amazing talent.  When he set the single season mark for home runs, he seemingly hit everything that came over the plate, and didn’t swing at anything which didn’t.  He was uncanny in his ability to put the bat on the ball.   But go back over each of those 73 hits.  If the performance enhancers he was taken add ten feet to the length of his hits, how many homers would have simply been long outs deep to right?  Could he have captured that particular record without the boost?

He’ll almost certainly pass Ruth, a chubby guy who smoked and drank.   He may even pass Aaron.   He’ll be undoubtably enshrined in Cooperstown as the greatest homerun hitter (and maybe the best player) of all time, but you won’t get any cheers about it from me.   You see, when you play a game, you should play fairly, or not play at all.   The story of Bonds will always be one of phenomenal talent, tinged by the scandal of doing whatever it took, ethical or not, to gain baseball’s highest honor.  I think he’s cheapened the game, irrevocably harmed the integrity of the game.  He’s not solely responsible, but he is responsible.

I’d cheer if he failed to break Ruth’s record, because then we wouldn’t have to bring up this sad chapter in baseball everytime home runs are mentioned.

[tags] Baseball, Bonds, Giants, Steroids[/tags]

Help me with a VOIP experiment…

I’ve been experimenting with voice-over-IP telephony using the Asterisk open source PBX system, and I’m at the point where I’d like you to help! I’ve setup a phone number with VoicePulse Connect! to route to my Asterisk server, and configured a very simple extension so that you can record comments about my blog. Whatever charges you normally acrue will be charged for this call, but feel free to waste some of those free nights and weekend minutes and a minute of your time to try it out:

When you dial 510-323-0224, you’ll hear this:

Welcome to the brainwagon.org comment line, powered by Asterisk, the open source PBX system. I’m experimenting with using VOIP technology as part of my weblogging and podcasting experiments, so I’d appreciate it if you’d go ahead and leave a message at the beep. Feel free to include any comments (positive or negative) about my blog and please include a brief rating of the voice quality (say, from 1-10) and whether you accessed this number from a cell phone, a regular land line, or via some other VOIP service like Vonage. Your comments will be recorded, and I reserve the rights to retransmit them as part of a future podcast. If that’s okay with you, wait for the beep and record your message. When you are done, hangup, or you can hit the pound sign, and it will play back.

Ultimately I’m interested in using Asterisk to setup telephone conferencing with automatic recording so that I could do a podcast with others, all linked together via phones of any convenient sort. This is one small step in that direction. Thanks for participating in my experiment.

[tags]Brainwagon,Podcasting,VOIP,Asterisk[/tags]

Movie Review: Ultraviolet

Yesterday I took Carmen to go see the latest film in the genre of “hot chicks with weapons”: Ultraviolet starring Milla Jovovich and directed and written (as it were) by Kurt Wimmer. Ms. Jovovich has done an excellent job in previous fun movies like Resident Evil and The Fifth Element (both high on my “guilty pleasures” list) but sadly, Ultraviolet will not be joining this list: it’s mostly terrible.

And I’m not talking “could have been better” terrible. I’m talking “in the league with Club Dread or Evil Alien Conquerors” bad. The kind of bad that makes you regret even spending matinee money to go see it. The kind of bad that makes you wish you had that ninety minutes of your life back so you could do something better with it, like, as Carmen put it, a root canal.

Warning: spoilers ahead. Well, they would be spoilers except that to spoil something it needed to be fresh in the first place…

The first sign that there could be something wrong is the opening monologue: usually when a film employs this absurd plot device, it is because they can’t think of something more clever to do to get you into the plot, so they take the weakest of all possible setups: they simply tell you what’s going on. Bleh.

The voiceover of Ms. Jovovich tells us “I was born into a world you may not understand.” Indeed. By the end of the movie, you aren’t going to understand it either.

The voiceover tells us that blah blah blah, scientists, blah blah blah, genetic engineering, blah blah blah, got out of the lab, blah blah blah, infected are rounded up, blah blah, blah, infected fighting back.

I was born into a world you may not understand.

Truer words were never spoken.

Probably 1% of the entire movie dedicated to just dumping the plot on us without anything actually happening. What a waste.

A few words about the look and the effects: this is another one of an increasing number of films which does away with actual sets. Much of the film is (quite obviously) shot with green screens and with computer graphics. Some of it works pretty well, but a lot of it does not. In particular, I found the long, anti-gravity, motorcycle chase seen to be really uneven. Parts of it look more like an animatic than final footage, there were some staggeringly bad compositing, and the action (due to all the warped, oddly placed view angles) was hard to follow and track.

Some of the best effect bits are of course given away in the trailer. By the time Violet goes to attack the army of soldiers, we’ve all been tipped that she’s a hologram. What you haven’t been tipped to is the muddled action which follows. The hologram is not used to create confusion, allowing Violet to wreak havoc against a vast array of foes in true kick-ass fashion, instead, the action just halts there, and we cut away to a boring scene with Violet and Six on a rooftop, talking and… well… I won’t “spoil” it. But let’s just say “tension created, and tension wasted”.

Oh, did I mention Six? Played by Cameron Bright and looking like a young doughy Wil Weaton, this is the kid that Violet (who early in the movie threatens to exterminate the human race) decides to protect because he is “just a child”. As Bender would say, “Does Not Compute!”. Blah blah blah, the kid has antigens, blah blah blah, could wipe out the genetically engineered Hemophage Vampires.

Oh, yeah, didn’t I mention the whole “vampire thing”? Don’t worry, they don’t bother saying anything about vampires either, until about 60% of the way through the movie.

What’s truly terrible though is the final stretch to the final confrontation with Daxus, played by Nick Chinlund. Obviously, to break into Daxus’ fortress of solitude, Violet must defeat hundreds of bad guys. But by this time, the director has obviously exhausted his entire repetoire of fight choreography, and realizes that it would all be boring for us to watch Violet kill another dozen score of generic foot soldiers, so we are treated to a couple of transition scenes that show violet enter a room full of soldiers, we cut away, and then violet emerges from a room full of bodies.

Sigh.

All in all, one of the most disappointing movies of recent memory. I give it about a 3 out of 10. See it if you must, but you’ve been warned.

[tags]Movie Review, Ultraviolet[/tags]

The World Baseball Classic

It begins today, with Korea playing Chinese Taipei at 6:30ET on ESPN. I don’t expect much from this particular game, but I must admit that I’m fairly interested in the World Baseball Classic. Teams to watch?

  1. Well, the U.S. of course.  As much as I really don’t like Roger Clemens, he’s an amazing athlete and has still got it.  Lots of good relief pitching on the American squad too.
  2. The Dominican Republic will be fielding an epic team of hitters, many of the best in the major leagues.  Soriano, Pujols, Tejada, Ortiz, Alou.  Sadly, Vlad Guerrero has stepped out because of a family tragedy, and won’t be playing.  Their pitching isn’t bad either, with Colon and Cabrera.
  3. I think the most exciting first round matchup?  Between Venezuela and the Dominican Republic.
  4. I’m also interested in watching Japan: there is a significant history of baseball in Japan, and I’d like to see what some of Ichiro’s countrymen could pull off in this tournament.  I pick them to advance in their bracket.

In Cactus League play, my home town Athletics go up against the Cubs.

Damn, I love this time of year.

[tags]Baseball,Athletics,World Baseball Classic[/tags]

Minor Earthquake

A few minutes ago, I noticed the second minor earthquake of the day. I estimated the strength to be a little lower than a three, but it was enough that my next door neighbor Sam called me and asked me what I thought it was. I was already hitting the USGS website to see what the deal was, but he reminded me that you can get even faster realtime info from a finger server at berkeley:

% finger -l quake@quake.geo.berkeley.edu
[quake.geo.berkeley.edu]
Login name: quake                       In real life: EQs? USE finger -l
Directory: /home/dc1/quake              Shell: /bin/csh
Never logged in.
No unread mail
Plan:

RAPID EARTHQUAKE LOCATION SERVICE
U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, California.
U.C. Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, Berkeley, California.
(members of the Council of the National Seismic System)

NOTE:  Information in this page is updated regularly.  If you are accessing
this page via the Web, you may need to RELOAD the page to get current data.

Below is a list of magnitude 2 or greater earthquakes recorded by the USGS
Northern California Seismic Network and the UCB Berkeley Digital Seismic
Network during the last 3 days.  All times are in UTC (Universal Time),
which is 8 hours ahead of PST and 7 hours ahead of PDT.  This catalog is
valid for Central and Northern California (approximately north of San Luis
Obispo along the coast and 37 degrees N at the Nevada border).

Magnitudes are reported as local magnitude (Ml) or coda duration magnitude
(Md) for small events.  Depth is in kilometers.  Q is location quality,
where the quality of the location solution is A=E (A=good, E=bad), and '*'
indicates the solution is from an automated system and has not been reviewed
by staff.

Note:  This is PRELIMINARY information.  Earthquakes before 00:00 UT today
which occur > ~50 km outside the boundaries of the network will not be
listed unless reviewed by seismologists.

Catalogs for other regions of the country can be obtained by using
`finger quake@computer'  for the following computers:
geophys.washington.edu (Washington and Oregon)
seismo.unr.edu  (Nevada)         scec.gps.caltech.edu (southern California)
eqinfo.seis.utah.edu (Utah)      fm.gi.alaska.edu (Alaska)
slueas.slu.edu (central US)      gldfs.cr.usgs.gov (large world-wide)
tako.wr.usgs.gov (Hawaii)

WWW access: for these lists, maps, and more go to http://quake.usgs.gov

Updated at Thu Mar  2 06:32:00 GMT 2006 a.k.a. Wed Mar  1 22:32:00 PST 2006

******************************************************************************

DATE-(UTC)-TIME   LAT    LON      DEP   MAG  Q  COMMENTS
yy/mm/dd hh:mm:ss   deg.   deg.    km
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
06/02/27 13:55:31  40.08N 123.49W   0.0 2.0Md C*  29 km E of  Redway, CA
06/02/27 14:24:41  39.72N 123.07W   2.0 2.1Md C*  19 km ESE of  Covelo, CA
06/02/27 16:43:04  37.27N 120.75W   0.5 2.2Md D*  13 km S of  Livingston, CA
06/02/27 20:46:44  36.50N 121.07W   3.6 2.3Md A*   7 km ESE of  Pinnacles, CA
06/02/28 01:09:55  39.01N 122.80W   2.6 2.4Md B*   5 km NNE of  Kelseyville, CA
06/02/28 03:32:42  35.67N 121.08W   0.0 2.2Md D*  10 km ENE of  San Simeon, CA
06/02/28 03:52:50  38.82N 122.80W   1.9 2.0Md A*   3 km N of  The Geysers, CA
06/02/28 19:39:39  37.86N 122.24W   9.5 2.3Md A*   3 km ESE of  Berkeley, CA
06/03/01 19:24:02  37.86N 122.20W   8.9 2.8Md A*   4 km SW of  Orinda, CA
06/03/01 19:34:52  37.86N 122.20W   8.8 3.4Ml A*   3 km SW of  Orinda, CA
06/03/02 00:11:55  36.55N 121.15W   7.6 3.2Ml A*   3 km N of  Pinnacles, CA
06/03/02 02:11:37  37.16N 121.55W   8.1 2.1Md A*   9 km ENE of  Morgan Hill, CA
06/03/02 04:53:30  40.48N 125.53W   2.5 3.3Ml D* 106 km W of  Petrolia, CA
06/03/02 05:11:11  38.36N 119.43W   1.1 2.1Md C*  20 km WNW of  Bridgeport, CA
06/03/02 06:08:15  37.86N 122.24W   9.8 2.9Md A*   3 km ESE of  Berkeley, CA

I just thought I’d archive that here for future reference.

[tags]Earthquake,Earthquake Server[/tags]

Gutenberg Gem: Animal Children by Edith Brown Kirkwood

Cute Squirrel

Want some cute animal pictures?  Try checking out this minor gem: Animal Children by Edith Brown Kirkwood from Project Gutenberg.   It’s got lots of really strange pictures that look like conventional animal pictures cut up and then clothing drawn around them.  Strange stuff, but oddly kind of fun too, might be fun for a kid’s craft project, and heck: they are in the public domain.

[tags]Cute Clip Art,Project Gutenberg[/tags]

Homebrew Photolab

By way of the ReadyMade Blog, check out how to use common kitchen ingredients like coffee as photographic developers.  I’ve had an interest (mostly academic and appreciative) in alternate photographic processes for some time, and while this relies on standard emulsions, the use of ordinary kitchen stuff for developers and fixes is really quite intriguing.

[tags]Photography,Developing,ReadyMade[/tags]