Monthly Archives: June 2007

TechShop Open House

Yesterday and today, the TechShop in Menlo Park held an open house. I had heard of this place before, but it is in Menlo Park, which is a bit more than an hour from me, so I never really seriously considered joining. I must admit, having driven down and visited the place today, I’m definitely considering doing so. It basically rocks.

They have lots of different machine tools and shop equipment available for members, but the bit of kit that I was most interested in was the laser cutter. This is a rather nifty gadget that can cut and engrave many plastics, paper, cloth, and wood (no metals really). I turns out that I have been contemplating a project where such a capability would be useful (mainly, the manufacture of a high precision Nipkow disk for a mechanical television set. As I watched one of the workshop members demonstrate the capabilities of this cutter, I felt it might be nice to try to do a test. So, I broke for lunch, drover over to a nearby Togos, had a sandwich, and in a fit of serendipity, stopped at the nearby office supply store to pick up some poster board. I then drove back. Sitting at one of their public access Ubuntu machines, I wrote a simple Postscript program that plotted the outlines of a nipkow disk, and sized it to 10 inches (the paper stock I had was 11×14″). Here’s the same Postscript file converted to a PDF. I saved it to my USB stick, then brought it into the laser cutting room. Martin (I think that was his name) then imported the file into Corel, setup the print options, loaded one of my pieces of poster board, and printed. I hit the “go button”.

And it cut a perfect version of this piece. The holes are remarkably smooth and beautiful. It’s cut with a degree of precision that I simply can’t imagine. It’s well beyond the level of any jig that I could have made. He printed another one for me, just for fun. Both of them took less than two minutes. Damn. (I tried to figure out some way to photograph the piece in a way that would show just how cool they were, but so far, no dice. Take it from me though, very cool.)

If I was going to do this for real, I’d probably cut a round backing piece out of a thicker wood stock, and then glue a perforated piece of matte board to the front to make the thing for real. But the principle is definitely there.

They have other good stuff too. Multiple lathes, including a smallish South Bend similar to the one I learned what little skill I have with a lathe that I have. Mills. Metal cutting bandsaws. TIG and MIG welders. A 3D printer. It’s just freaking amazing.

If I can get my crap together, I suspect I’ll be paying the $100 monthly fee for a couple of months. It just rocks.

Thanks to all the nice helpful people there.

TechShop is the SF Bay Area’s Only Open-Access Public Workshop –Welcome

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Whacky Computer Music Story of the Day…

Boing Boing: Symphony for old IBM mainframe

In 1964, an Icelandic IBM 1401 mainframe engineer figured out how to get the machine to emit beautiful, bassy notes, and composed a symphony for it. Now his son is touring the symphony wiht interpretive dance thrown in.

Wikipedia has a nice entry on the IBM 1401, including some details about this musical. 🙂

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Ratatouille Opens! iPhone arrives!

Phew. I was on Ratatouille for almost two years, and today it’s finally in theaters. I wonder if all you crazy people camped out waiting for your chance to buy an iPhone are going to cut into our weekend box office. 🙂

Click here to find out about all the people camping out for the iPhone. Attempts to find people blogging about camping out in line to see Ratatouille have not yielded any results, but reviews have been pretty darned good (94% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) so I hope that some of you will drag your weary bodies and shiny new iPhones to the theater and see it.

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So Long Brown v. Education…

I hope that the ghost of Chief Justice Earl Warren rises from his grave to haunt the Supreme Court. Prepare to set your clocks back fifty years.

Supreme Court: Schools can’t use race to assign students

To be fair, I haven’t read the actual decision (PDF link). I’ll try to do so tomorrow and have more commentary then.

Addendum: Sigh. The PDF above is 185 pages, and I don’t have the time at the moment to go through it and develop a more informed opinion. I surfed on over to SCOTUSblog, and read some of their commentary. From this post::

One reading of today’s decision in the race cases is that the Supreme Court has outlawed programs that seek to increase racial diversity in the schools. Justice Kennedy’s concurrence does not adopt that view, however. And because his is the fifth vote, it is controlling. The better view, I think, is that the Court today has come close to extending the Grutter model to the lower school context, holding that school districts may account for race as one factor among many in student placement.

Schneier on Security: Risks of Data Reuse

I know I’ve been a bit over the map with my postings lately, but I’ve been catching up on my blogroll, and there are some pretty diverse topics. From Bruce Schneier comes an interesting article pointing at research which shows that the Census department supplied data that enabled the internment of Japanese Americans in WWII, in violation of the law and contrary to their stated position.

Schneier on Security: Risks of Data Reuse

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Morse v. Frederick

First of all, I’d like to just say one thing:

BONG HITS 4 JESUS

How many of you felt that this phrase was trying to convince you to use illegal drugs? What if it were on a banner held by teenagers?

The majority of Supreme Court justices thought this rather comical phrase was a sufficient enticement to encouraging illegal drug use that schools were entitled to confiscate such a banner and suspend a student for holding such a banner at “a school sponsered and sanctioned event” which was apparently to stand on the side of a street as the Olympic torch passed by.

When did we become such a nation of pansies? That the merest mention of something which which we might disagree requires that we squash it by rejecting all legal precedent and tossing our First Amendment rights onto the fire?

Justice Stevens writes in the dissent:

In my judgment, the First Amendment protects student speech if the message itself neither violates a permissible rule nor expressly advocates conduct that is illegal and harmful to students. This nonsense banner does neither, and the Court does serious violence to the First Amendment in upholding—indeed, lauding—a school’s decision to punish Frederick for expressing a view with which it disagreed.

Justice Stevens’ dissent is in fact very good, and (while I’m no law student) I think draws on precedent to a much larger and more thorough degree that the majority opinion. I urge you all to read this decision.

Morse v. Frederick – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Addendum: BoingBoing has a replacement banner for you students that would seemingly avoid the issues that Justice Roberts raised in the majority opinion.

Lord, let there be one more tech boom, I promise not to blow it this time…

Over on Eric Wolf’s blog, he writes an interesting post about the Internet boom phenomenon: Lord, let there be one more tech boom, I promise not to blow it this time…

I have a slightly different take.

We all like to jump on the bandwagon when something is new and exciting. I’m a lucky man: I chose to be educated in a field which has been the source of many of these new trends, namely computer science. More than that though, I tried (and continue to try) to monitor what’s new, what’s coming down the pike, what trends are gonna be big. I’m an early adopter. I have yahoo and gmail identities without digits in them. I’ve been through six generations of cell phones. I created one hundred podcasts, and then got off the bandwagon. And you know what? It hasn’t really helped me make any money (other than perhaps my salary) because ultimately I don’t buy into the hype nearly as much as the masses.

As we sit poised on another of these “boom” product release (the impending release of the iPhone) and my livelihood continues to be dependent upon the boom of an impending movie release (Ratatouille), I can’t help but ask if we could develop a society which moved at a slightly more leisurely pace, which didn’t rely on the herky-jerky motion of “progress” to get us out of bed every morning.

In Japan, there are cultural movements which are a reaction to the breakneck pace of advancement that Japan has acheived over the last century. They want to adopt a different style of life, a slower pace, by choice. This “Slow Life” philosophy is governed by the following principles:

SLOW PACE:
We value the culture of walking, to be fit and to reduce traffic accidents.
SLOW WEAR:
We respect and cherish our beautiful traditional costumes, including woven and dyed fabrics, Japanese kimonos and Japanese night robes (yukata).
SLOW FOOD:
We enjoy Japanese food culture, such as Japanese dishes and tea ceremony, and safe local ingredients.
SLOW HOUSE:
We respect houses built with wood, bamboo, and paper, lasting over one hundred or two hundred years, and are careful to make things durably, and ultimately, to conserve our environment.
SLOW INDUSTRY:
We take care of our forests, through our agriculture and forestry, conduct sustainable farming with human labor, and ultimately spread urban farms and green tourism.
SLOW EDUCATION:
We pay less attention to academic achievement, and create a society in which people can enjoy arts, hobbies, and sports throughout our lifetimes, and where all generations can communicate well with each other.
SLOW AGING:
We aim to age with grace and be self-reliant throughout our lifetimes.
SLOW LIFE:
Based on the philosophy of life stated above, we live our lives with nature and the seasons, saving our resources and energy.

(From this article).

We tend to admire growth. We crave the excitement of explosions, of boom and bust. We have accelerated our lives to the point that each of us will likely have multiple careers. We will make and squander fortunes. Marry, divorce and marry again. When we make a plea to have another boom, perhaps we should take a step back, slow down, and figure out what will really make us happy.

Oh, by the way, I’ve got $50 for anyone who will stand in line for me at AT&T…

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SIGGRAPH 2007 Papers

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