Monthly Archives: June 2006

Happy Anniversary to Me!

Today Carmen and I are celebrating our sixth anniversary! Thanks for putting up with all my crap honey! And now… a musical interlude.

We are off to watch the Robogames today (oooh, romantic, I know) and maybe catch some delicious food at some as yet unnamed San Francisco restaurant, maybe drop in on a BBQ, it’s all up in the air.

No doubt some pictures of robot destruction will follow though. More later.

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Carmen’s Burning Mouse

Carmen Peeks at the PCB

Carmen came down this morning with a mouse in her hand, asking “Should this thing be hot?” She of course knew the answer, “No”. I figured she needed a new mouse, but I got out a screwdriver and opened the thing up. It appears that a Zener diode on the backside of the board was overheating, which generated a rather sizeable black spot on the top of the board.

A trip to Target fetched us another six dollar mouse. If this one gets hot, I’ll be suspecting the keyboard switch that she’s plugging it into. If this wasn’t boring enough for you, here are some more pictures of the board.

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Sidenotes via JavaScript

I like the ability to create sidenotes. What are sidenotes? You can go here to find some JavaScript code that implements them. Neat.

I’m not especially fond of the existing CSS. I think boxing text that can be word-wrapped is very ugly. I might take some of the ideas embedded in this and adapt it to something closer to what I imagine.

Addendum: What do people think about the ubiquity of JavaScript? Is it hopelessly wrong to require it to view your weblog? It’s not like I am going to any special effort to make my blog particularly nice to read with small screen devices like cell phones. Should I?

Record meteorite hit Norway

Early reports are that a record explosion (measuring in the kiloton range) may have happened in Norway as a meteor crashed into it. More news when I get it.

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Addendum: If my timezone math is correct, Oslo is +2 hours to GMT. The ARCES array maintained by NORSAR (an organization apparently tasked with seismic monitoring as part of trying to ensure compliance with nuclear test ban treaties) has a nice webpage. According to the article, they registered a seismic event at 2:13am local time, and you can actually see it as a blip in the first line (occuring at 12:13 GMT of their seismic data as archived on their website.

Seismograph Data from the ARCES array

Risch algorithm

This is another one of those postings that I make almost entirely for my own benefit. Today at lunch I was having a discussion with Tom about a particular problem that I was having trouble understanding: namely, understanding why the formulas for optimal sizing of pinhole camera aperatures were, well, what they are. Where do the numbers come from and why? It turns out that you can express the problem in terms of integrals of complex exponentials defined over the aperature, which seems obvious in most respects, but left me with the desire to actually compute some analytic integrals, and let’s face it, it’s been two decades since I did anything more complicated than ordinary polynomials. Tom mentioned the Risch algorithm which I had never heard of before, and while my brain seems too tired to absorb it at the moment, it seems like the kind of thing I’ll look into later, so this is just a reminder.

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Addendum: the image generated by a point light source by a finite aperature at a given wavelength assumes the form of an Airy disk. I wrote the equations out in gnuplot to make the following graph.

The Airy Disk

How Pixar Made Cars

If you want some information about how Pixar made Cars, check out the comments on this thread on Digg. True, most of them are completely incorrect, but probably at no greater rate than the commercial news media.

Addendum: when you see totals like “17 hours per frame”, they almost certainly (and in this case do) refer to rendering a single frame on a single machine. Cars runs 1:56:00 long or so, at 24 frames per second. If we accept the 17 hours per frame, that’s 167,000 frames or so, which works out to 324 years of rendering for a single machine. Assuming 3000 machines, that’s about 40 days of rendering continuously.

This presumes that the frames are rendered only once (unrealistic) and that you can achieve 100% utilization (also likely unrealistic) and that all the machines are dedicated to the one production (also unrealistic).

Shameless plug: Cars opens tomorrow. Go out and see it. Sadly, this is the first Pixar feature which doesn’t have my name in the credits. I’m over it. Really.

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Addendum2: I fixed the broken link.

SFGate ManAddendum3: The SFgate review was suprisingly ambivalent, but ended up with the guy sitting in the seat and smiling.

Historical Articles on Pinhole Photography

While I was trying to find the formulas for picking the optimum size for pinholes in pinhole photographs, I found that Lord Rayleigh had published an article on the subject. A bit of googling revealed this treasure trove of historical articles on pinhole photography. Lord Rayleigh’s paper is actually much more sophisticated than any paper I have on the subject. Very cool.

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More proof that Microsoft is just evil…

As if more were actually needed…

It seems Steve was at a friend’s wedding reception when the bride’s father complained that his PC had slowed to a crawl and would Steve mind taking a look.

Allchin says Ballmer, the world’s 13th wealthiest man with a fortune of about $18 billion, spent almost two days trying to rid the PC of worms, viruses, spyware, malware and severe fragmentation without success.

He lumped the thing back to Microsoft’s headquarters and turned it over to a team of top engineers, who spent several days on the machine, finding it infected with more than 100 pieces of malware, some of which were nearly impossible to eradicate.

Among the problems was a program that automatically disabled any antivirus software.

“This really opened our eyes to what goes on in the real world,” Allchin told the audience.

If the man at the top and a team of Microsoft’s best engineers faced defeat, what chance do ordinary punters have of keeping their Windows PCs virus-free?

Ballmer and Allchin didn’t get to be such wealthy executives by ignoring a business opportunity, so last week, Microsoft launched Windows Live OneCare.

There aren’t many companies that have enough balls to see their own defective products as a business opportunity. Here they are, admitting that a team of their most crackerjack engineers can’t keep viruses and spyware off the computers of the thirteenth richest man in the world, and yet they are going to charge you $66 dollars a year… for what, precisely?

Quick summary of Ubuntu “Dapper Drake”

I spent some time getting Ubuntu’s new Dapper Drake release installed on my HP AMD64 box. It seems to work fine now, but it wasn’t flawless to install.

  • The desktop install ISO crashed just after booting while mounting the root fs from the CD. Hard to tell what was going on, but the kernel seemed to be crapping out in some of the CD kernel routines.
  • I then tried the “alternate install disk”. I tried a text mode install, and it went through flawlessly. Very nice.
  • I tried to get the system to a state that would play DVDS using the 3.0 release of EasyUbuntu, a script that is supposed to install lots of useful packages. No dice.
  • Automatix worked fine, and I installed the accelerated ati drivers and totem-xine, which worked fine.
  • Overall, I really like Ubuntu (but I liked Fedora Core 5 too).

Identify this tree!

In Emigrant’s Pass, I stopped to take some photos from their stunning vista point. One of my pictures included this tree (click on it for a larger view).

Identify this tree!

Look closely. Can you identify the species?

Yep, it’s one of these.

Addendum: I didn’t notice that it was this particular variety until I got the picture home and viewed it on my monitor. I took it at near the limit of the zoom range of my Panasonic DMC-TZ1, which is pretty remarkable.

Engines of Creation available online

In the late eighties, I was fascinated by the possibilities of nanotechnology as raised by Eric Drexler. Here we are twenty years later, and I get the feeling that the early promise and enthusiasm have largely been blunted by some hard realities, and I’ve been meaning to go back and reread the book again, perhaps trying to understand why that happened to be so. It turns out that I don’t have to try to dig up my dead tree version: it’s now available online.

Engines of Creation – K. Eric Drexler

If I didn’t have a queue six books deep on books I’m already working on, I’d probably try to reread it again soon, but this post will serve as a placeholder.

Unboxing The Past: The Nintendo Virtual Boy

Podcasting inspiration Josh Bancroft has a new venture entitled unboxing.com, a veritable shrine to gadgetitis, with all sorts of pictures of people unboxing their latest toy acquisitions. I must admit, I’ve done my fair share of this, but lately I’ve been trying to clean up my office and get rid of some of the older boxes. While doing so, you occasionally run across some actual treasures: such as the one I’ve got here: functional Nintendo Virtual Boy. I hadn’t turned the thing on in nearly a decade, since in a move I had misplaced my budding collection of Virtual Boy game cartridges. But while I was going through some boxes in my garage, I found five of them, so here we are.

Unboxing a Virtual Boy

I spite of the fact that I had stored the game with batteries installed, it didn’t have any major leaks or problems. I hooked up the unopened AC adaptor that I also found, and turned it on. Voila! It still works!

The games I have are Mario Tennis, Galactic Pinball, Golf, Virtual Boy Wario Land and Mario Clash.

These things actually seem to go for a pretty good amount on eBay. Perhaps I should pass this on…

After playing it a bit.

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