brainwagon

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 […]

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 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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]