Watch the skies!


Today Mars is as close as its been in recorded history, the closest opposition in something like 80,000 years.
If you try to go to a local observatory, you likely will just stand in long lines, so I thought I’d give you a few Mars related llinks to sate your Mars craving.

A bit of literature never hurts, and you could do worse that reading the classic
War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, courtesy of Project Gutenberg. If you’re not up for a book, you could try listening to Mercury Theater production of War of the Worlds by Orson Wells.
If you are feeling a bit more musical, perhaps you can try Holst’s Mars, the Bringer of War

If you’d like to keep up on what Mars looks like, try the
International
Mars Watch website, and in particular its most recent pictures.


Mapping for Free


While mucking around with my GPS, I immediately thought about providing my own map capability. The question immediately arose: where can I get street level map data which can be freely used? It turns out that the US Census Bureau maintains such data for the United States and various US territories. You can order the complete set on CDROM for $450, or you could just download them from the Census Bureau or perhaps from a simpler download.

Of course, once you have this data, you need to figure out how to use it. If you’d like, you can pour through the 300+ pages of technical documentation, or you could just try to find some sample code that
reads and transforms them. I lucked out and found this page of programs written in the Icon programming language. Using them, I quickly produced the map shown on the right which is centered around the location of Pixar’s campus in Emeryville, CA.
Nifty!

I’ll probably work on translating parts of this into python and merging it with my
other GPS programming efforts. Stay tuned!


GPS programming in Python


I just recently bought a new laptop, and on a total spur of the moment bought
a Delorme Earthmate GPS to go along with it. It’s a pretty slick little unit that
plugs into the USB port. After playing with Street Atlas 2003 for a few minutes (and getting directed over speedbump after speedbump) I decided to see if I could figure out how to get data from it.

A little quick research showed that there were two drivers for this little toy: a USB one that made it look like an HID device, and a different one that made it look like a serial device that speaks the NMEA 0183 protocol. I don’t know much about the first one, but I have docs on the second from my Garmin
days, so I set to work.

I decided to use the curses module in Python to present a simple interface. It does little more than monitor the messages output from the GPS and display
them in a somewhat neat fashion on the screen. After an hour or so of hacking around, I had the display shown on the right. Not too bad, and can be adapted to my Garmin with minimal work.

There are a few warts: opening serial ports on windows really requires a bit more work to make sure that baud rates are set. Also hot plugging the garmin doesn’t always detect when using the NMEA driver. But overall, not too bad.


Music on the PDP-1

A couple of years ago, Tom Duff approached me with the notion that he was going to write a simulator for the ancient PDP-1 so that he could run SpaceWar!, widely regarded as the first real video game. We both wrote simulators for the PDP-1, and enjoyed playing around with such a bizarre machine.


Lately I’ve decided to resurrect this code and make a nice version using the Simple DirectMedia Layer library. Toward that end, I dug up
some of the old links documenting the PDP-1, but ran accross
Dan
Smith’s PDP-1 Music page. He has links to ten different mp3 files which were made from original tapes he made at the time.

I liked them enough that I made them accessible here:


Another try for a trans-Atlantic model airpline flight…

Last year a group tried to fly an 11 lb model airplane accross the Atlantic. In four attempt, they managed a maximum distance of 479 miles. They are going to try it again soon, so check out

TAM Homepage
to keep up to date.

If news is slow, you can waste some time reading about an
amateur launch of a high altitude weather balloon. It was equipped with a Linux computer from soekris, a Basic Stamp, a GPS, and a small camera. Cool stuff. Good photos!

Nifty Bootable CD

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve discovered two projects which both boot from CD, don’t install anything on the PC, and provide interesting functionality.


The first of these ix GeeXbox, which you can get from theGeeXboX HomePage
When booted, GeeXbox turns your PC into a dedicated media player. It boots a version of the Linux kernel, and then uses the popular mplayer to allow you to play DVDs, VCDs, or regular audio CDs. It also allows you to play pretty much any multimedia file from your hard drive, and is supposed to mount Samba shares as well (as yet untried). Best of all, the ISO is a mere 4.3 megabytes, so it is quick to download and burn.
Nifty!

The second of this is KNOPPIX, which is a bootable version of Linux. It runs Linux live off the CDROM, and includes mp3 players, web browsers and all sorts of goodies. I keep one around as a repair disk, since it can mount most filesystems and autodetects networking setups.
I

Both are highly recommended.


Gigli — A Movie Review

I’m a huge fan of what reasonably called "bad cinema". I go to see the terrible comedies, the action films, horror movies, what most serious students of film would call the bottom of the barrel. I prefer movies with guns, and hookers and firetrucks (can anyone name that movie) or scantilly clad Kung Fu fighting lady vampires (or this TV show?).

My wife, bless her heart, is mostly patient with me. I know I get to pick a lot of the films we go see, and after seeing Terminator 3, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and The Hulk, she was certainly long
overdue for picking a movie. Like most women on the planet, she seems to
think that Ben Affleck is easy on the eyes, so she selected Gigli for
our Saturday movie extravaganza. Costar Jennifer Lopez is pretty easy on the eyes, and the overall plot (if trailers are to be believed) was a sort of "two
thugs meet each other and fall in love comedy&quot. Off we went.


I remember seeing Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise together in a truly forgettable movie Far and Away.and later the unforgettably bad Eyes
Wide Shut. I should have known that actors who are romantically linked
seemingly have a knack for selecting very bad vehicles to star in together.

This movie will not be the counterexample that proves the rule.

It’s bad. Really bad. I’m going to give away spoilers, but frankly it’s the poor
writing and direction that are the real spoilers of this movie. It is as if the
" writers" and "directors" simply didn’t know what kind
of a movie they wanted to make. The resulting mish-mash is 90 minutes of painfully paced drek which seems more like 900 minutes.

Gigli is the story of New Jersy Gangster Larry Gigli, played by Mr. Affleck. He’s asked by mobster boss Louis to kidnap Brian, the retarded younger brother of a federal prosecutor, to keep the prosecutor from filing charges against a New York mob boss. Because of the monumental importance of this task, Louis also retains the services of Ricki, played by Ms. Lopez. She’s in a similar line of work, and while displays a bit more intelligent than the rather dull Gigli, seems to be without any qualifications for her rather brutal career. She’s also a lesbian. Bless those mobsters for not sexually dsiscriminating when granting contracts.

Let’s recap: New Jersey gangster, lesbian thug, and retarded young man. Woohoo! Let the hilarity ensue.

It tries to be funny. It has some sexy dialogue, which occasionally actually titillates. It’s got some faintly amusing bits. But it also taks some startlingly bad turns.

Turn number one: Ricki’s lesbian lover shows up at Gigli’s apartment, looking for her. She’s obviously brash and unpleasant, and wonders why Ricki has gone over to the other side and is now sampling men. When Ricki tells her it’s over, but has nothing to do with him, she then offers to have a threesome to help Ricki "get it out of her system&quot. When rebuffed again, she wanders into the kitchen, slits her wrists, and is treated to a quick trip to the emergency room.

Never to be seen again during the movie. Total screen time, maybe three minutes.

Gigli makes Hudson Hawk look like a hiccup, Ishtar like a minor misstep. It’s the stuff Mystery Science Theater 3000s are made of.

ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE,
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

I’m sure it’s a great break for Missy Crider to star in a movie with Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, Al Pacino and Christopher Walken: but it absolutely baffles me what
this particular sequence is supposed to reveal to us. Up until then, Ricki is portrayed as a cool, unflappable, mentally tough woman. With this scene, we are instead treated to the view of a woman who picks her sexual partners very badly, and is completely out of control. Besides taking the story off the rails, it just isn’t very much fun to watch. It isn’t exciting, even in a morbid way. It’s just another stereotypical portrayal of lesbians-who-can’t-find-happiness-without-men. Bleh.

Actors Christopher Walken and Al Pacino make almost cameo-like appearances, Walken as a slightly insane cop and Pacino as a gangster. Boy. I never saw
that coming. Who would have thought: casting Walken as a crazy cop, or Pacino as a mobster. Such bold innovation.

This movie isn’t romantic. It isn’t very funny. It doesn’t have a lot of action. It does have some pretty graphic sexual dialog (although no nudity). It does have some rather nasty violence. Ultimately, there is just not very much interesting at all, and when the plot of a movie is so bad that it makes you forget about J-Lo’s body, you know that something has gone seriously off track.

A word of advice to Ms. Lopez: stick to well written scripts, like Anaconda, otherwise you’ll have to rely on your music to stay in the public eye, and well, that doesn’t seem like a good bet either.

Update: Gigli opened in the number eight position, just below finding Nemo (now in its 10th week). Gigli made $3.8 million dollars in its opening weekend, only half as much as the underperforming Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas. That movie only spend four weeks in theaters before they pulled the plug. Bets for Gigli?

It’s easier to destroy than to build…


Occasionally I’m struck by the apparent oddness of people’s behavior. High on my list of pet peeves are people who go out of their way to destroy the works of other. Case in point: this story coming in from Mainichi, Japan. As many people know, the origami crane has become a symbol of world piece, thanks to the rather sad example of Sadako Sasaki: a young Japanese girl who believed that if she folded a thousand cranes, she would be cured of her leukemia, caused by the radiation of the Hiroshima bombing in 1945.

She died after folding 644. Her friends and classmates later completed her 1000 cranes, and built a statue to honor her and all children affected by the bombing. Now the origami crane has become a symbol of peace, and millions of cranes are offered at this monument each year.

All in all, I find it a pretty powerful symbol.

Back to our story. Some yutz decides he’s frustrated with having failed to graduate, and sets
fire to 140,000 of the paper cranes. The hopes and best wishes of thousands, reduced to ashes in seconds by just one person.

This should serve as reminder: in many situations, one person can make a difference, and not always a good one. It’s much easier to destroy than to build, and much easier to fight than to have peace.

As I think about it more, I know that the cranes are just a symbol, just paper. But each represents a person stopping in their concerns, and thinking about a small girl and how nations can brutalize children. In that sense, the
symbol has done its work, so perhaps nothing important has been lost afterall.

Okay, enough pontificating. If you’d like to learn how to fold a crane, try

here.


Holy Rat Brains, Batman!


Today, the BBC is running an article entitled Rat-brained robot does distant art. The idea is that a collection of 50,000 rat neurons in a petri dish at Georgia’s Institute of Technology is controlling a robotic arm at the University of Western Australia in Perth, and directing it to make drawings.

Does this seem just the teensiest bit strange to people?

The scientists describe the rat-brain as ‘semi-living artistic entities”. Somehow this conjures up the image of Vincent Van Gogh’s zombie corpse, staggering around chanting alternately “Brains…” and “Crayons…”.

Of course the real question is “who is funding this mad science, and how can I get in on it?”. Perhaps this technology could be applied to making sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads.

You can check out more on this project at the MEART webpage.


Quine in Python

I’ve been trying to hone my Python skills. Python has lots of nice commands for manipulating text, including standard libraries for doing base64 encoding. After a few abortive tries, I came up with.

#!/usr/bin/env python
data="""
aWYgX19uYW1lX18gPT0gJ19fbWFpbl9fJzoKICAgIGltcG9ydCBzeXMsIGJhc2U2NAogICAgc3lz
LnN0ZG91dC53cml0ZSgnIyEvdXNyL2Jpbi9lbnYgcHl0aG9uXG5kYXRhPSIiIicrZGF0YSsnIiIi
XG4nKQogICAgc3lzLnN0ZG91dC53cml0ZShiYXNlNjQuZGVjb2Rlc3RyaW5nKGRhdGEpKQo=
"""
if __name__ == '__main__':
    import sys, base64
    sys.stdout.write('#!/usr/bin/env python\ndata="""'+data+'"""\n')
    sys.stdout.write(base64.decodestring(data))

(You can download the code directly from here.) It’s very similar to one of my early C quines, but significantly shorter, and somewhat easier to follow.

For other good links on quines, try this page of quines, or perhaps this list of quines in many programming languages.

Happy Birthday to BrainWagon!


As is typical of males, I forgot a birthday! As of July 21, BrainWagon celebrated it’s one year anniversary.
Huzzah! Let the kegs of ale burst asunder, and let there much munching of delectable meats…

In the past year I’ve managed 141 entries, most of them about silly stuff. To anyone who reads this, I hope that you are enjoying it. I’ve been slacking a little bit as of late, but I’ll try to get back to putting some interesting links shortly.

Till then, have a slice of cake and put on a silly party hat.


More cool IR stuff…



I’ve been experimenting with digital photography using my
Nikon 4500, and have took some kind of cool pictures. The palm on the right was shot with a Wratten 89b in bright daylight. A little photoshopping, and it looks pretty nifty.

Anyway, I’m constantly on the lookout for new links, and ran accross SCIENCE HOBBYIST: Ten dollar Infrared Goggles, which is by that cool amateur science guy Bill Beaty. He’s got all sorts of interesting science links, and in this one he shows how you can make decent IR filters from inexpensive theater filter gels.