Unfortunately, it won’t be available until the middle of the year, but Apple today announced the iPhone, which isn’t just a phone, but in fact a combination phone, iPod, and internet communication device. It really does seem amazing: the type of handheld convergence device that i was hoping for. It’s got:

• It’s a wide screen video iPod.
• It’s got Bluetooth, Wifi, and EDGE (no 3g network?)
• It uses touch screen technology to provide reconfigurable interfaces in a small space.
• It’s got a 2 megapixel camera built in.
• It apparently runs an embedded version of OS X, and has support for Widgets, Safari, and all sorts of other good stuff.

The only thing I’m not really sure of is the streaming capabilities: if it just has EDGE network, it’s a little light on bandwidth for real video transfer. Still, it looks like an amazing
gadget. I may have to upgrade when these are available.

Here’s Engadget’s Coverage of the Keynote:
Live from Macworld 2007: Steve Jobs keynote – Engadget

Digg also has a lot of people commenting.

[tags]Apple,iPhone[/tags]

During my visit last week, I scanned some of the family pictures, including this cute one of, well, me.

Honestly, how cute is this?

Well, after an extended vacation, today is my first day back at work. My desk is as messy as I remembered, and I’ve got a meeting in four minutes, and I have nearly two thousand emails to work through. Sigh.

I’ve lived in the Bay Area for almost sixteen years, but there are still many tourist-y things that I have never done. Often, it requires the intervention of guests to get you off your duff and go see the attractions which are right on your back door. Such was the case yesterday, when Carmen and I, along with our son and his girlfriend decided to hop aboard a ferry and take the tour of Alcatraz State Pentitentiary.

Alcatraz, or The Rock, sits on a 12 acre island in the middle of San Francisco Bay, about one mile from Pier 39, San Francisco’s legendary Fisherman’s Wharf. In the time of the Civil War, it was an important military fort which guarded the entrance to San Francisco Bay with state of the art cannons. Later, it became a military prison, and then was handed over to the federal government. It was a federal maximum security prison until 1963, when rising costs forced its closure. It briefly was the sight of a protest by Indians seeking the restoration of their tribal lands, but became a national park in 1972.

It was a beautiful day to go: the temperature was probably 60 or 65 degrees with no wind and bright sunshine. We took the 1:15 ferry across, and remained on the island until the last daytime ferry returned at 4:30. A single road winds to the top of the hill (about 14 stories) and when you reach the top, you can get some audio headsets and tour the legendary cell blocks, and listen to stories about life in Alcatraz. You can turn those back in, and wander around the grounds, which are the home to lots of beautiful sea birds (I saw mostly gulls, but there are also cormorants and the like). It was really quite nice, and suprisingly relaxing (although if you have spent too much time recently in front of a computer, you might find the climb a bit taxing. I was fine, except that my shins hurt a bit from climbing the hills, I’ll have to get back into the gym. For those who are more elderly, a little car can bring you from the dock area to the top of the hill.

It cost about $21 per person to go, which isn’t cheap, but it’s a nice boat ride, an interesting location, and a neat bit of history. If you are in the Bay Area, give it a visit.

Addendum: My wife is a much better celebrity spotter than I. As we were disembarking, she noticed someone climbing back into a limosine. It appeared to be San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome.

Addendum²: Here’s a link to the Yahoo! map for Alcatraz.

[tags]San Franscisco,Alcatraz,Tourist[/tags]

I was mucking around doing patent searches on Google, and came up with the following interestingly titled patent: Tactical nuclear slide rule.

A calculational aid is provided, in the form of a slide rule, to facilitate calculation of damages inflicted by a nuclear detonation. The particular apparatus permits calculation of the effects of an air blast, due to static overpressure, resulting from such a detonation. Appropriate scales, properly spaced in particular relationships, are provided on a slide rule, thus providing a means for performing the calculational functions described above. The calculations utilize five parameters, and the present invention provides an apparatus for determining any one of the five parameters once the other four are known.

I was interested in finding examples of patented nomographs. More on this later.

I got 37.

I’m not really surprised.

I upgraded this site to WordPress 2.05. It seems to have gone smoothly, but as always, if you spot something amiss, bring it to my attention by sending email to my normal gmail account and I’ll try to get it resolved quickly.

Addendum: Back to my normal brainy theme. Say goodbye to Christmas.

Addendum²: Sigh, as I sit here, availing myself of the free Wifi at PDX, I notice that 2.06 has been released.

The Hough transform is a fairly standard computer vision algorithm for detecting lines (and with extensions, more general shapes) in images. I hadn’t thought about this since my undergraduate days over 20 years ago, but a program that I’m currently working on seemed like remembering how it would work would be helpful. A Google Search turned up this typewritten paper from 1972. It’s astonishing how much you can find on the Internet.

Goodbye 2006, and good riddance. Hello 2007, be kind.

[tags]Happy New Years[/tags]

I woke up at 5:30 this morning to let the cat out (he has me trained really well) and thought that I might
have felt a minor tremor. Just now, I thought to look back and see if there was one. Yep! 2.8 on the Richter at 5:37 AM,
same location as the earlier ones, but smaller amplitude.

Recent Earthquakes – Info for event nc51177225

I’m gonna have to think about making a seismograph.

[tags]Earthquake[/tags]

Major League Baseball : News : Major League Baseball News

Left-handed pitcher Barry Zito has agreed to a seven-year, $126 million contract, according to The Associated Press and other sources.

I’m gonna have to start measuring my salary in millizitos.

Seriously though, I’m not sure whether this was a reasonable choice. Zito is on record saying that he wants to win not just a World Series ring, but in fact multiple rings. If that really is true, does he genuinely think that the Giants organization is going to be the way to do it? I’ve never been impressed by the Giants personnel moves: I can’t think of a single trade or acquisition that they made which was truly outstanding, since perhaps the acquisition of Bonds himself. The Giants frequently miss the real big name guy, and pay too much for the second best guy. Luckily, the new Barry will see an era beyond the old Barry, which I think at least will give the Giants some greater room to maneuver and to reimagine their team in a new way.

[tags]Baseball,Barry Zito[/tags]

Today I was goofing around with hooking a firewire cable to the Motorola DCT-6412 DVR that Comcast provides, and seeing if I could capture HD content onto my MacBook. I could, with some caveats. (Click on the image below to get the full resolution png file of a frame from the capture.)

The problem is that many channels (including most HD channels) are set up with copy protection. They will record, but no open source playback solution exists because of encryption. TNT and our local PBS station are
transmitted in the clear however.

I’ll play with this some more. If anyone is interested, I’ll summarize here at a later date.

Engadget had a nice guide to recording HD material onto your PC, and includes a lot of information.

I was rereading Tsai’s paper on camera calibration, and was reminded of this more recent work by Zhang at Microsoft. I thought I’d dump a link here for later consumption.

A Flexible New Technique for Camera Calibration: Zhengyou Zhang

I admit to a fascination with most methods of print making, so it’s nice to see a rather nifty treatise on wood block printing in the Japanese style make it into Project Gutenberg. It covers the basics (at least from a technical if not artistic side) and is pretty well illustrated.

Wood-Block Printing by F. Morley Fletcher – Project Gutenberg

[tags]Prints,Printmaking,Public Domain[/tags]

I found John Baez’s stuff because he mentioned Poundstone’s book Fortunes Formula, which is about the relationship between mathematics, information theory and gambling, topics which continue to interest me, at least in an academic sense. But he has pointers to a lot of stuff that seems pretty interesting, so I’m adding him to my bookmark list.

[tags]Mathematics, Physics[/tags]