With the release of our movie just a couple of weeks away, you might be asking yourself “what is Ratatouille, anyway?” It’s not a very common dish anymore, I’d never had it before. But never fear! Here’s a recipe from Cooking for Engineers. I’m not a huge eggplant fan myself, but this sounds pretty good to me. 
You guys are gonna all go see it, right?
[tags]Cooking,Ratatouille,Pixar[/tags]
It’s been a while since I posted a link to anythng about making annoying sounds music, but it’s Friday, so this link is for Tom.
» Quad NAND Gate – synth, the Nandsynth
[tags]Homebrew,Computer Music[/tags]
I didn’t know how this worked. Now I do. Interesting.
Scanning my list of baseball birthday’s at the right, I see that today is the birthday of Don Newcombe. Newcombe was the subject of one of my previous postings, and was the 1956 Cy Young and MVP winner, as well as a 4 time All Star. Happy Birthday Don!
[tags]Baseball[/tags]
In an effort to try to continue to claim that I know something about computer science, I’ve been trying to find some good blogs in computer science and mathematics, and see what people who don’t spend all their time making pixels turn the right color do. The My Biased Coin blog has an interesting introduction to cuckoo hashing, which until this morning, was a term I had never heard before. It seems like a very good idea, with good (and somewhat surprising) theoretical bounds on performance.
My Biased Coin: Cuckoo Hashing, Theory and Practice : Part 1
[tags]Hashing,Algorithm[/tags]
Dijkstra once famously claimed (well, perhaps not anymore, since fewer and fewer learn BASIC):
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
The question that I asked myself last night: “Was Dijkstra right?”
I must admit, I’m one of those guys who learned BASIC as a kid, and then later went on to study computer science, get a couple of degrees, and proceed to make a pretty decent living writing what I hope are good programs. Am I just “practically impossible”? The exception that proves the rule? Or was something else at work here.
I’ll submit that Dijkstra was wrong (although I’m going to provide nothing more than simple gesticulation to back this idea up). It is certainly true that the vast majority of people who picked up BASIC as a first language never progressed beyond being anything but the most dreadful programmers. I suspect, however, that is true about almost any skill. I never became good at roller skating. I don’t possess anything but the most rudimentary skills at drawing. My ability to play the piano is limited to halting walks up and down the keyboard in tuneless exercises.
Peter Norvig has an essay about learning to program which I think hints at the fallacy in Dijkstra’s famous claim. It takes a long time to learn to program, and you have to start somewhere. You learn to program by doing, and for a short generation of programmers, the most accessible entry point was through the BASIC interpreter that came on their Apple II, their Atari or their Commodore 64. A kid with no understanding of programming could noodle around, flailing miserably, writing silly and bad programs, and most importantly figure out that he liked doing it. He could begin to read other people’s programs, and improve. He could even ultimately graduate beyond the world of BASIC, and move on to different ideas.
Dijkstra was in some sense right, but missed the forest for the trees. To get kids to learn programming, you have to get them programming. I pity the poor kid who tries to learn C or uses Visual C# as a first language. Today, languages like Python or even Perl and PHP would take the place of BASIC, and by virtue of their more powerful datatypes and structuring, generally are better choices for the beginning programmer. Yes, we see lots of really bad code written in all these languages. But from the din of mediocre achievement (itself not totally without value) a few scattered diamonds will form.
What’s your take? Was BASIC your first language? Did you turn out to be an okay programmer?
[tags]Programming,Dijkstra,BASIC[/tags]
Addendum: Interesting notes on the acquisition of expertise.
I was reading the article linked below about why WiFi enabled cameras or cards aren’t a good idea.
I think the author misses the mark on this. His reasons are:
Okay, well, that was a long diatribe. What would cause me to buy such a camera?
With this kind of feature set, you could take your camera with you on vacation, without a laptop, and snap pictures more or less continuously, with the assurance that in the evening, at either a paid hotspot or a free open one, you could backup all your photos and provide live updates to your friends about where you are and what you are doing. I think that’s pretty cool.
[tags]Photography, WiFi[/tags]
Well, it is a few days later, but here is a picture of me and the missus at the Pixar Ratatouille Wrap party. The picture simply does not convey how beautiful she was, or how goofy looking I am. Nevertheless….
Modern Device Company has an Arduino like microcontroller board for only $15 in kit form, $22 assembled. That’s just too cheap for words. Maybe my aborted robotics project will someday start again, and I’ll want this link.
It’s no secret that I believe that primary and secondary education in this country is basically abysmal, with minor pockets of competency and occasional bright flashes. We do a terrible job of educating children, particularly in mathematics and science. In my bleaker, more skeptical moments, I believe that primary and secondary schools may in fact do more to damage children than to educate them.
I’m now forty three years old, and I must admit: I have a fairly eclectic set of interests. But underlying most of my interests is a desire to actually know what’s really going on. Take for example hybrid cars. I bought my SUV back in 1998, when I was hauling more people around, and when gas was $1.20 a gallon or so. My car is beginning to show its age, and I’m thinking of replacing it. So, I ask myself, what would be the best environmental choice to replace it? The car I bought for my son is a Civic which gets 30 or so MPG. A Prius might net me 45MPG or so. My Expedition gets 15. So, what is my best, most reasonable choice?
It’s a difficult question to answer, but a quantifiable one, if one is willing to dig and think. Maybe I won’t even come up with the right answer, but the answer will at least be rational: I will have more than just my kneejerk reaction to justify it. Sadly, most people don’t ask these kinds of questions. In fact, most people don’t even understand how you might go about asking these questions.
Well, that’s a garbled, rambling introduction, but I’ll pass you off to an open letter by Wellington Grey. Apparently the UK Department of Education has revised science standards, and not for the better. Grey is a physicist, but the new standards cover biology and chemistry as well. His basic complaint is that in an effort to make students understand how science works, they have abstracted away everything that actually shows you how science works.
An open letter to the AQA board and the UK Department for Education
There is an educational philosophy which is popular in this country that says that it is important for students to have positive learning experiences. This doesn’t sound like a bad idea, but it has become one. Let’s face it, for most people, becoming educated is hard, and hard things are often not the positive experience that you might think they are, at least not every day, and not all at once. In an effort to “remain positive”, standards have been set ridiculously low. It is a mockery of education.
Education is neither hard, nor easy. It is simply necessary. If it comes easy for a child, they are fortunate, and should be challenged even more. If it is hard, we should not abandon them, but should redouble our efforts to teach them. But in both cases, the goal is to educate, not to pander. The positive outcome for all students is that they should feel confident that they have obtained a reasonable education: one that allows them to understand the world around them.
Oh well, there’s my rant of the day.
[tags]Science Education[/tags]
Okay, since I went to the trouble of actually doing a bit of panorama stitching on Linux, I thought I’d go ahead and make a 360 degree panorama (not a spherical one, I didn’t have the patience). So, as I walked out the door at Pixar Animation Studios, I snapped fourteen handheld images using my little Panasonic, and then stitched ’em into this panorama:
Not too bad! The exposures aren’t held very closely (no way to exposure lock on the DMC-TZ1) but the overall quality of the stitch is quite good.
(If you don’t have java installed, you can at least click here to see the full panorama data)
[tags]Panorama stitching[/tags]
Yesterday, we had our group wrap-up-party excursion. We settled on a leisurely bikeride around Angel Island, accompanied by barbecued ribs and chicken. It was a stupendously nice day, warm, but not hot, and while I was feeling a bit under the weather during the first bit, I had a lot of fun. I snapped some pictures with my little Panasonic, including 7 shots that spanned the view of the San Francisco from Bay Bridge to Golden Gate. Today, under less than entirely optimal conditions, I used the programs autopano-sift, hugin and emblend to produce the following panorama:
I could probably do a bit better in keeping the horizon from curving, but overall, I’m quite pleased.
Addendum: converted to black and white, and converted to black and white.
[tags]Photography,Angel Island, San Francisco[/tags]
One of the mailing lists I was on suggested that the best way to provide network access to a neighborhood was to use a mesh architecture based upon the Meraki nodes. I seemed to have vaguely recalled seeing them before, so I went to peek. They look really interesting, and quite competitive pricewise ($99 for an outdoor node, $49 for an indoor one). I haven’t used ’em, but they look really cool. If you have the need, check ’em out.
Well, we wrapped up Ratatouille production (well, almost) with a wrap party on Saturday at the Masonic auditorium in San Francisco. Carmen had a lovely dress (REALLY lovely), I had a tux, and we had a screening followed by eating, drinking and dancing. I’ll try to get some pictures up sometime, but off the top of my head, here are some highlights:
It is kind of tough when you work in rendering: you see every single shot in the film at least a half a dozen times, and have worked on lots of them. You’ve seen the gags, you’ve watched it all play out dozens of times, and yet, when you see it for the first time all cut together with sound and music, you know that it’s good, but you can’t really see it with the same eyes that the public will see it with. Still, I bumped into a number of people who hadn’t seen it, and they all seemed to really like it. I hope that come June 29th, some of you will go out and see it too, and enjoy it as much as I did in playing my very small part in bringing it to you.
[tags]Pixar,Ratatouille[/tags]
Well, if that didn’t entice you into wanting to go see it, check out Brad in this clip from YouTube:
I was engaging in a little computer archaelogy this morning, looking up some historical information, and discovered this page chock-a-block full of interesting reading. Lots of really good stuff.
