Posts tagged with links
Mucho thanks to The Cartoonist for discovering this lovely Steampunk film "Reise Zum Mars" (journey to mars, in german). Made by german film student Sebastian Binder, along with Fabien Grodde and Alexander Schumann, it's a short film based on a draft screenplay by Walter Dexel, an early 20th Century Constructivist. But don't worry, it's just music and action, so there's no need to know any german to watch it. And what's more, the lyrics to the song are in english anyway.
And you can watch it at their cool web site, which also has some interesting making-of videos.
Unfortunately they only show the video at the original size. So, if you want to watch it full screen, here is a direct download link that I hacked out of their SWF file: Reise Zum Mars direct FLV download (106MB).
Overall I have only two criticisms: one, that it needs an increase in brightness, it's quite difficult to make out what's happening. This is a simple post-production blunder. Second, the music is a little heavy. On the other hand, the silent-movie farce kind of atmosphere/acting works well.
I love steampunk, and I love this film.
A little ToneMatrix Music
Posted on December 05, 2009 at 10:45 PM
Categories: graphics, tech, links, art, infographics, film, iphone
André Michelle, inspired by the TENORI-ON, created a grid-sequencer called ToneMatrix. It's an interactive experience written in Flash 10 that merges graphics, visualization, interactivity, and music. There are also iPhone knock-offs such as the free TonePad. As for ToneMatrix, click here to check it out and create your own tunes. Here's one of mine.
Eine Kleine ToneMatrixMusik from S Woodside on Vimeo.
You can also right-click on the ToneMatrix flash app and copy/paste numerical sequences to load and save your music. The sequence for the above is:
98386,1024,4096,1024,67474,96,65540,32768,65618,1024,64,0,65618,4,65600,0
Share and enjoy.
You've got to try this.
It's like a tiny little myst adventure in beautiful steam-punk 2D flash game.
Play Little Wheel a tasty little morsel by One Click Dog.
via Das Cartoonist.
Tinselman should like this.
Intelligent online cartoons:
- xkcd. yes everyone already knows about this one. IPv4 space (notice how apple has as much space as all of japan? trust me they don't need it). how pure is your scientific discipline? frequently a bit ... odd.
- Basic Instructions. How to make a good impression at a job interview. How to converse with someone you don't want to talk to. Scott Adams experimented with him in turning it into a print cartoon but it just wouldn't fit into the restricted size.
- Savage Chickens. Peace and wisdom. Dachshund. My most recent discovery.
There's plenty of crap out there. Can you add any other good ones?
The StartupCamp Report - StartupCampWaterloo5
Posted on February 26, 2009 at 06:34 PM
Categories: tech, links, business, barcamp, startupcamp
So last night was StartupCampWaterloo5—the Original Startup Camp with the Best Format(tm). We had on the order of 60-80 people in attendance. We didn't do formal count of startups this time, but there were 12 proposed demos on the whiteboard, and I know of at least 3 other groups that were represented. As usual we had a keynote speaker: Mark Evans, who among other things runs the mesh conference in Toronto. He usually talks about social media, but he focused for us on communication, highlighting good and poor first impressions and public communications strategies of various websites.
Twelve people/groups put themselves up for doing a session, and gave 30 second pitches about what they wanted to discuss on the theme of starting up. We did our approval voting, ate food (thanks sponsors!) and had time for the top 4:
Kareem Shehata showed us his new Aeryon Labs Unmanned Aerial Vehicle—sadly he did not yet have government clearance to fly it, but it's a serious piece of kit and he had some kick ass videos. It's controlled via a Google Maps style interface. We talked about business models. http://www.aeryon.com/
I led a discussion on the subject of where to get Free Money from the government. Suggestions included SR&ED, NSERC USRA, Various OCE programs, Youth Employment Strategy, Ontario Interactive Digital Media Tax Credit, MS BizSpark, Youth.gc.ca - $15K for employee < 30, OMDC, Ontario Interactive Tax Credit, Services Canada (summer jobs)... and to look at the recent techcapital blog post.
Avery Pennarun "eql=data" a project he's working on to make MS Access databases web accessible. Business model was a bit of a question mark but interesting technology and Avery gives good talks. http://eqldata.com/
Grigory Kruglov—a UBC student current on co-op at RIM - talked about his business venture Outwick.com. It's aimed at collecting information about events like concerts, cultural events, public parties etc. and making it easy for people to find events at the time & place of their choosing using data mining, tagging etc. Very interesting, and we had a cool talk about viability, how to commercialize, etc. http://outwick.com/
We also ran a live twitter stream on the main display using #watcmp. Afterwards many of us adjourned to Molly Blooms to imbibe the beverages of our choice.
Thanks to my co-instigators Jesse Rodgers and Mic Berman, and to our sponsors: Accelerator Centre, WatStart, Sun Microsystems, and Tech Capital Partners who provided space, support, and food!
PS And I almost forgot—Graham Hardie shot video and promises to put it online!
Lego + Eddie Izzard = Death Star Canteen
Posted on January 11, 2009 at 02:21 AM
Categories: links, film
How to program a computer, for children ... II
Posted on October 16, 2008 at 02:28 AM
Categories: links
A while ago I wrote "How to program a computer, for children". I was actually inspired by Ming's efforts along the same lines. I just read it and decided to take a slightly different tack, doing it all with math (since programming is all math anyway).
Incidentally... why has a rather bizarre system called Shoes which is apparently supposed to teach children to program but I suspect might frighten them instead. For adults, you have surely read his guide to ruby ... right?!?!?!
And here we go.
Programming a computer is a lot like writing instructions for someone really, really stupid. Imagine a person who knows nothing. They don't know how to walk, talk, read, or write. In fact, the only thing that they know to do at all is simple arithmetic. They can add, subtract, multiply, and divide any number at all. But that's all. They can't do anything else without being told how to do it in the form of math.
So, to get a computer to do something, you must turn it into math. Let's say you want to get a computer to go around the room. First you have to explain what "go" means in terms of math. Then what "around" means... in terms of math. And what is "a room" ... that's not math yet, so computers don't know what it is.
Well, let's start with "go". Let's give it a try:
How to "go":
1. increase the total number of footsteps that you have ever taken in your life, by 1.
See how I turned that into math? That's how computers think. Unfortunately, computers don't know what feet are either. But that's OK. For now, we'll assume that someone else has already built a foot for our computer, and when we tell it to increase by 1, it will know what to do. In computer language, this would be:
totalNumberOfSteps += 1
Now it's not completely true that computers can only do math. They can also repeat the same thing over and over again, like a mindless machine. It's called a "loop". If we just take one step, that's not really "going" very far. Instead let's have the computer "go" further.
How to "go":
1. totalNumberOfSteps += 1
2. do that over and over again
Since the computer is mindless, it will do this forever, so we can rewrite this into computer language like this:
1. totalNumberOfSteps += 1
2. repeat forever
OK, so now the computer goes. But will it ever stop? I don't know... if it has an atomic power plant, it might be millions of years before it stops. And in that time, it will grind its way through even the thickest of reinforced concrete walls. And it will never go "around" the room because it can only go forward.
So maybe we ought to give the computer a way to measure how far it's moved. Let's say it's got a little measuring wheel that touches the floor. Whenever it takes a step, the wheel clicks around a little more. In fact, it's just like an odometer on a car, that tells you how far the car has ever gone.
That's all fine, but how can the computer know if it moved? Remember it can only do math and repeat things. Well, the guy who made the odometer gives us two number:
odometerReadingBeforeTheStep
odometerReadingAfterTheStep
Clearly, if the "After" number is more than the "before" number, then we moved forward without hitting a wall. If not, we're stuck. We can use some fancy math to write this down:
odometerReadingAfterTheStep > odometerReadingBeforeTheStep
That just means that the number of the left is bigger (>) than the number of the right.
OK... so does that help us? How do we fit that into steps 1 and 2? Another little trick that computers can pull is to check some math before they take a step. So they can (a) do math (b) repeat things (c) check math.
It works like this:
if 1 == 1 then oneIsEqualToOne += 1
That's a pretty stupid example, but you know, 1 is "equal to" (==) 1, in math, that's true. So, oneIsEqualToOne will be put up by one number.
We can use that for our robot to. Can you see how yet?
1. totalNumberOfSteps += 1
2. repeat if ...
If what? Remember the odometer?
1. totalNumberOfSteps += 1
2. repeat if odometerReadingAfterTheStep > odometerReadingBeforeTheStep
Pretty simple. Add a step, and then do it again if the odometer shows you moved forward. If it doesn't, the computer just stops, because it has no more instructions. That's called "halting". When the program halts, you check it's progress. In this case, it will have walked into a wall. And then stopped. Always. That may not sound like much, but we're halfway to getting around the room.
I was reading the manual for my HDTV (I know, who the hell does that?) when I noticed a GPL license notice and acknowledgment for among other things, "linux kernel". Wild.
Useful software: PDFCrack, Map.Hamilton iMapper, and Skim for PDF annotation
Posted on September 27, 2008 at 10:31 PM
Categories: links
Some miscellaneous useful software.
"Forget" your PDF password: use open-source PDFCrack. Installs easily on Mac command line (use gmake).
Looking for high-quality maps and "satellite" imagery of Hamilton? Try Map.Hamilton's iMapper. The interface takes a few minutes of experimentation to figure out, and then it's cool. Make sure you switch to Aerial Viewer (latest year) to get their ground imagery, which I think is actually generated by airplanes. It's quite a bit higher resolution than Google Earth has.
Want to annotate your PDF files? Try Skim. Seems potentially easier than using OmniGraffle... (and cheaper...)
He is apparently
Trying to sort the brilliant ideas from the lesser ones.
Unfortunately, he is not very successful. But he is trying.
He also uses SimpleLog, the best Ruby on Rails blog out there that doesn't work under Rails 2.0, has been abandoned by its author, but still works great for me.
ALL NEW "Simon Says" content RIGHT HERE
Posted on July 10, 2008 at 02:52 PM
Categories: tech, meta, links, art
Wow, WYM Editor is so cool that I can just like type in a new blog post whenever I want to. Wild!
So anyway, I've been saving up a whole load of links and stuff for months until I had this new site all sorted out. So here's something.
Hmm... where did my "stuff to blog about" folder go?
Oh, here's an awesome one. Nikkei Electronics Teardown Squad. These guys kick ass. Watch as they take apart a MacBook Air and declare "No Waste Outside, Nothing but Waste Inside".
About 30 screws were used to attach the keyboard alone. "The total number of screws in the MacBook Air was several times the number used in a PC we make," one of the engineers said.
Burn, baby, burn!
OK, here's another one from the files. Nathan Fawkes Art. He's part of a network of film animators and illustrators and concept artists who all have their stuff up on blogspot.
And I'd like to remind myself particularly about this post about science fiction.
Tinselman is the very amusing blog of the co-creator of Myst, Robyn Miller. It's a bit iffy on a daily basis ... and very eclectic. A bit like this blog, but better.
He's got this ongoing thread about the Republic of Tinselman, which appears to be something dating back to some attempt to create a fake republic on Wikipedia, or something, but whatever. It's just stuff.
He also seems to be a big fan of Walt Disney . To be particular, Walt Disney, and Disneyland. Not necessarily the Disney company or the movies per se. In fact, thinking about it, or maybe I read this somewhere. Anyway, that he wanted Myst to be a bit like Disneyland, which I think it is.
It's worth noting that Robyn Miller is the one who did the music for Myst and Riven, and he left after Riven. It's a bit obvious looking at any of the sequels after that the original spirit isn't there. With his brother Rand, he also did pre-Myst stuff like Cosmic Osmo, which was pretty cool and all done in the absolutely brilliant and amazing but now-forgotten HyperCard . In fact, did you know that the original Myst for Mac was written and deployed in Hypercard? Amazing but true.
Actually, that reminds me of a story, which is that back when Myst was first released I was working at this rather unusual place called the Southam InfoLab . Anyway, I was mainly a HyperCard hacker and pretty damned good at it if I may say so. And I managed to hack into Myst and actually look at the source code running it. HyperCard is an interpreted language, the language is called HyperTalk, and there was no compiler for it. So, they implemented this fiendishly complex system for preventing you from breaking into debug mode and viewing the code, but I managed to hack it. I don't remember doing much with it though, because the source code for Myst was way over my head at the time.
Anyway. Robyn is clearly a very interesting an unusual person. I think it would be very interesting to meet him and peer into his brain some day. Once you get past the "oh my god he's the guy who made Myst" thing then his blog seems to be quite interesting.
Linkdump: cousin Suzanne, "Me", Excel little graphs, The Grooming of the Woodside Man
Posted on August 28, 2006 at 12:00 PM
Categories: graphics, tv, links, unix, art
A bunch of links and things.
Ahree Lee created (or is creating?) an amazing short film. Starting in 2001 she started to take a picture of herself, every day, in the same pose. As of 2004, she created a short film called Me in which the images are flashed at you at the rate of about one week per second. If you want to download the film, you can use mplayer (like I did...) with something like this from your unix shell. (Note that the rtsp URL might change, you can get it from AtomFilms web page / View Source.) (Also note that I had to insert a backslash in front of the exclamation mark, probably inserted by atomfilms to foil script kiddies trying to use this method.) I think you could do some cool analysis of the images over time.
mplayer -dumpfile out.rm -dumpstream 'rtsp://shockreal.edgestreams.net/real.atomshockwave-secure_!/me_300.rm?auth=caEascHb6b7dRbpdudXcLbKdibBaHbDbbdP-be81D5-cOW-REAwJrGowGoHn3wlB&aifp=123&span=10800'
My cousin Suzanne Thoma finally has a website. She still sings but mostly she's now a freelance graphic designer. My opinion: website needs some work. I'm not sure that my parents would be able to navigate it.
How to create little bar charts inside the cells of an Excel spreadsheet looks useful and pretty easy to do. Generally speaking Excel's graphing sucks, and it looks like the Excel 12 graphs aren't going to get any better. Apple's iWord graphs are somewhat better but not perfect and some important graph types are missing.
Finally, let's hear it for art: The Grooming of the Woodside Man V1 by Simon Donikian and The Grooming of the Woodside Man V4 .
Enough for now...
I can't get enough of ravenblack quizzes!
Posted on August 19, 2006 at 12:00 PM
Categories: meta, links
I just can't get enough of these ravenblack.net quizzes! They're so awesome! The author is a genius!
Wait, the author is also really weird and has a RavenBlog !
While I'm here and screwing around, here's a Googlewhack: aquaplane wimax
Also, I'm redoing some fundamental bits of the XSLT that runs my site, so things might be a bit haywire for a few days.
Imagining the Tenth Dimension is a cool, flash-animated information graphic. Unlike a lot of flash graphics, this one really needs to be animated, the movement really adds to the explanation power of the graphic.
After watching it, you're supposed to understand why "String Theory" has ten dimensions and what they are. In theory, anyway.
Here's a flash app that you can test your hearing , how high it goes at higher frequencies. Best to start at the top and then notice when you can start to hear something. For me, it's 18 000 Hz which is pretty good considering how bloody old I'm getting. How about you?
This all came from a shopkeeper in england who used high frequency sound to repel teens . Fascinating and clever idea.
Oh by the way, you need a decent set of speakers or headphones to do this, otherwise you can blame your crappy speakers :-)
I'm on an enforced work holiday which gives me lots of time to blog. So aside from a lot of work on the tagging system here at Simon Says , I've been going through old bookmarks and recent news as well. Here's a good one.
Camino (the best browser for OS X) reaches 1.0 :
The Camino Project is proud to announce the Camino 1.0 web browser, the culmination of four years of work by dedicated volunteers.
Designed exclusively for Mac OS X, Camino 1.0 is built on Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine and offers one of the fastest browsing experiences available. The only browser available that combines the rendering power of Gecko with the Aqua user interface, Camino 1.0 offers superior integration with the Mac platform and a focused feature set. Among Camino’s signature features are elegant tabbed browsing, an enhanced bookmarks manager, and built-in ad-blocking.
I helped to write that announcement. Snappy eh? Anyway, my last major involvement was back in, er, let me consult my new tag browser ... 2004 when my history patch landed . I wrote a major improvement to the history panel, which was crap before that. It's still not perfect, but just after that I got awfully busy with Semacode.
However I was with the project during a rocky time in 2003/2004 when Apple launched Safari and it looked like the game might be up for Camino. But it's definitely not up. Camino is way better than Safari. It's faster, more attractive, renders better ... it's even more "mac-like" (however you want to say it). And the crowd now involved are clearly doing a good job. All around great news.
PS. The new website looks great . Also. I still administer the mailing list .
So I was just putting the finishing touches on the beginning of my wikipedia article on the History of computer science , writing about that great wronged genius Alan Turing (wronged in his own time, not ours), when I was reminded of my "famous" math NEWS cover on the subject of Turing's machine .
The cover appeared in this 1999 issue of the magazine best known for profquotes. If you've never looked before, put on your sunglasses and maybe start with The Best of mathNEWS .
Does Wikimedia Commons take cartoons?
Some bookmarks are just too good to keep to myself. The Canadian Architect and Builder is an online archive of fully-scanned images of this journal, published between 1888 and 1908. They've got some really beautiful drawings. Run, do not walk, to the "plates" ... the rest is text & ads, which I find a bit dull. But the pictures rock. Especially if you then go and google for the buildings and see what they look like today vs. 100 years ago.
The Eden Project is a multi-biome park in England somewhere where they've built these amazing huge greenhouses for visitors using a transparent material called ETFE foil. It's a transparent polymer that's used as an architectural membrane in some new structures (although one's been around for at least 20 years) and it's tough and much, much lighter than glass. What they do is make a multi-layer pillow of the stuff and inflate it with air in the middle to give it a convex shape and good insulation properties.
I found an interesting mailing list called Greenbuilding; here are the Greenbuilding archives .
A useful concept in designing an efficient building is to know about embodied energy . The embodied energy of a material is the total amount of energy needed to create it and deliver it to you—extraction from the ground of raw material, cost of production, cost of delivery. You can use a higher embodied energy material if your building will last longer or if it will give you better efficiency in other ways (such as ongoing power costs).
Ewan Spence has an awesome podcast: The Edinburgh Fringe 2005 Show with MacHomer . MacHomer is this crazy guy who does impersonation of all the Simpsons characters talking about a production of MacBeth. It's hilarious. Ewan does a really good interview.
Actually this is the first podcast I've listened to that's good I think... the other ones I've listened always seem pompous and self-important.
And the MacHomer guy is Canadian :-)
OK, as a public service I'll see if I can find any online sources for the actual MacHomer show...
- Want to hear some of MacHomer's interesting voices?
- damn! that's all I can find. someone bootleg this sucker!
Buckminster Fuller's dymaxion map of the world
Posted on August 01, 2005 at 12:00 PM
Categories: links, infographics
Buckminster Fuller was obsessed with this word "dymaxion" which I think was supposed to be a combination of "dynamic" and "maximum". He created this "dymaxion map" of the world which was intended to have the least possible distortion of the shape of the land features. Have a good look at it.
One thing that's interesting about it I think is that Africa is really much bigger than North America. The "usual" map projection (Mercator) is really terrible because it totally accentuates the size of land masses that are close to the poles. So that N.A., Europe, and Australia are all way too big. Here you can see the truth.
Another interesting discovery for me is the small size of India. I always thought that India was a bit bigger than that. The arctic is also rather small. The Himalaya is very prominent. And I like the curving shape of the islands from Alaska down the eastern side of Asia.
You can also see how the continents all seem to almost be connected into one big island surrounded by water.
The funny shape of the map is because it's designed to be folded up into a roughly spherical shape. Here's an amazing animation of the dymaxion map folding and unfolding .
And here's the Buckminster Fuller FAQ .
Some interesting flickr keyword searches (or tags whatever)
Posted on July 25, 2005 at 12:00 PM
Categories: links
Just though of looking at some interesting words in flickr. I just saw some persons blog where they were talking about the power of words. Well, I'm a person with a fairly large vocabulary. Not that I deliberately use pedantic words (like in monty python:
[customer] I was just sitting the local library reading ... by Hugh Walpole when I came over all peckish [shopkeeper] Peckish sir? [c] esurient [s] eh? [c] eeoooungrylike [s] ahhh... hungry [c] precisely. And so I curtailed my walpoling activities and sallied forth to infiltrate your place of purvayance in order to negotiate the vending of some cheesy comestibles. [s] come again sir? [c] [very clearly] I want to buy some cheese.
So anyway... I decided to search for "symbol" since I'm so interested in the visual representation of information.
All flickr images tagged with "symbol"
"logo" might be worth looking at in more detail
"symbology" anyone? (people love to complexify words...)
Hmm... not as satisfying a search as I thought it might be.
mailman RSS, and virtual hosts on localhost
Posted on June 21, 2005 at 12:00 PM
Categories: links, unix
In 2003, on the W3C www-rdf-interest mailing list, Dan Brickley wrote :
I just stumbled across this after an #rdfig discussion about adding RSS support to Mailman, the popular list management and HTML archiving package. Turns out the patch exists already (but wasn't intergrated yet). It took me less than 10 minutes to patch my Mailman installation and rebuild the archives for rdfweb-dev. I now have http://rdfweb.org/pipermail/rdfweb-dev/rss.xml generated automatically. See http://rdfig.xmlhack.com/2003/02/09/2003-02-09.html#1044813421.381747 for the (trivial to apply) patch and related info. Just cd into the Mailman/Archiver/ directory and do 'patch < ~danbri/rss.patch' or whatever, then re-run bin/arch on your archives. The markup exported is fairly basic, but sets things up nicely for future extensions—you could add in richer descriptions of the mailing lists fairly easily, though I'm not sure how best one would hook such information up to Mailman's www-based frontend.
Well, I can attest that it really is (still) that easy. Get the latest patch from the bug tracker - right now it's here . OK, the patch isn't perfect - you have to remove the mail headers at the top, and the file Defaults.py.in should be actually applied to Defaults.py . But aside from that it works really, really well.
The other thing I wanted to note is this article on ONLamp.com: Simplify Your Life with Apache Virtual Hosts because it explains how to set up virtual hosts on your home/development box. The trick is to edit /etc/hosts I guess.
There is one good online CVS guide and manual, and it's this one: Open Source Development With CVS . It's also a real book, and although the version I'm pointing you to may well be not the latest edition, it's still really, really good.
Massive Change is a web site + travelling museum exhibit (currently in Toronto!) about ... well ...
They say it's the Future of Global Design but a lot of what's in there I wouldn't say falls under design. They talk for example about dealing with internalization in manufacturing and they also take a walk through the light spectrum and what different kinds of images are good for. The whole thing is very scientific.
More to the point, while it at first appears superficial, it rewards a deep look at any of the subjects.
Google doesn't seem to be able to find these mailing list archives, so...
- axkit-dev mailing list archive - the only up-to-date archive of axkit-dev@xml.apache.org that I can find.
- axkit-users mailing list archive - this seems to be the best archive of axkit-users@axkit.org. There are others - the official one would be here but it never seems to be up to date at all.
I lived across the hall from Jason Garlough in first year university. In second year we stayed connected but then he kind of drifted off (to be a tin-smith, I think actually) ... didn't much like UW I guess and well, neither did I but I missed my cue. So now you know who's the wiser one.
Anyway he's back... Jason Garlough's weblog . It's ok.. some interesting pictures and layout. Garlough had the most amazing webpage back in 1997 although it has sadly passed away. This one's OK too.
photo of Chaska Potter by Paul Schreiber
Posted on February 17, 2005 at 12:00 PM
Categories: links, photos
Paul took this photo of Chaska Potter (of band Raining Jane ) and I think it's pretty good. Also see the original full-rez image .
Man, I would love to get the source for that and re-implement it in XSLT. And make it into a web service or something. Maybe I could scrape and reverse-engineer it (but copyright, copyright...).
I just added some new pics to my flickr feed. BTW, you should be using flickr. You know how picky I am. It's good stuff.
Apparently, instead of taking over Canada, Americans now want to join us.
More: Really, really funny French (from France) comedy news show Guignols de l'info analysis of the vote .
I have located the satellite imagery of the Al Qa Qaa that I was looking for while writing this timeline at Wikipedia .
GlobalSecurity.org / Public Eye Satellite Imagery of Al Qa Qaa . There are almost 50 satellite photos of the facility there, and they are from 2001.
Most notably, it clearly shows the massive scale of the complex, that the 1,100 building estimate is almost certainly correct.
DigitalGlobe has also posted satellite images of the site, this time, from late 2003 and mid 2004. (warning, 4 and 5.1 MB files)
Book-a-minute SF/F Read a science fiction or fantasy book in one minute. Pretty damned funny. This summary of "God Emperor of Dune" is good:
Leto II: Infinity. Reader: Ouch, my head just exploded.
More: The Processing gallery (I liked Tokyo).
I'm a bit of a fan of her , here's a fantastic picture I just found of Esther Dyson in her office .
Listen to my grandfather, Willson Woodside
Posted on September 27, 2004 at 12:00 PM
Categories: meta, links
I'm told that if you're old enough (like you were older than 16 when WWII broke out) and you live in Canada, you may remember the name Willson Woodside. He was my grandfather and gave a five-minute report every evening on the news for the CBC, from Europe, about the status of the war. He died when I was I was young, and was sick for a long time before that, but this voice out of the past still has a somewhat familiar sound (and familiar mannerisms definitely). It's an archived report on the CBC from 1950, where he analyses the Korean War. I'm happy to say that his foreshadowing of an escalation of that war failed to occur! I also just wrote an article in Wikipedia about him, and it's incomplete, so fill in the details if you know them (or email them to me and I'll do it). (Fast forward to time index 4:32 to hear him.)
This is really cool. It's called Block Jam and it's a sony design project . There's a video you really should watch but maybe play with the flash demo first. My comments: It's hard to learn, but once you do, it's really neat the way it works. Use lots of starter blocks to get the cool effects.
Why lisp .
I don't know Lisp, ever since the middle years of my CS degree. I was forced to learn Scheme in a week, and it didn't take. I failed miserably. I never understood it, and generated a program that looked to me like a sea of parantheses that did I didn't know what.
But every once and a while I hear people who seem to be great programmers say that Lisp is the best thing ever. I've never heard good reasons why this should be so, but I was sucked into reading about Lisp because of this article Revenge of the Nerds about pointy haired bosses (PHBs) vs. programmers.
Did Steve Forrest start a livejournal ? Yes he did. It seems however to be mostly about the elections so I am not sure if he will ever use it again.
picturephoning writes about Fujitsu's "new" technique for embedding a barcode into an otherwise normal looking image. It has, however, already been done. At least one example, Dataglyph , was developed at least as early as 1995 (see citeseer ) and maybe earlier, I haven't tracked it all the way down yet. These techniques all amount to essentially the same thing, which is steganography . The main disadvantage of this technique for the kind of applications that Fujitsu, PARC, and others imagine is a simple matter of UE, user experience . If the users can't see the message, how do they know it's there?
Finally some series 60 flip phones are coming out. Weighing in at only 95g is the panasonic x700 and the dimensions are 87 x 47 x 24 mm, 80 cc. It's a kind of standard silvery phone and it has a small external screen which is nice. Next up we have the just-announced Nokia 6260 at a much heftier 125g. Also it's kind of a monster for a flip phone, 102mm x 49mm x 23mm, 109cc. I'll have to see them both in person before I can really decide if the nokia is just too big, but I'm thinking that one of these phones is a phone that I would actually buy, for my own, personal use. That's saying a lot, since the last phone that really caught my eye (and I'm still using it) is the moto startac. All in all, it looks like the Panasonic has the advantage.
This Scopetime is a nifty flash gizmo. It's like a new way of displaying time. I like the presentation as much as the idea. I don't think we really need new ways of displaying time, but on the other hand, I think this idea does actually work, which is pretty unique in this category of "inventions". In other words, I could actually see having a clock that works like this. Anyway, I like the flash.
ACCESS ... check this out! by Marie Sester
Hamlet meets Scooby Doo . Rather funny I thought.
Jon Udell is trying to figure out how to get random access to video streams off the net. He seems to have gotten somewhere using, amazingly, SMIL .
explanation of how Mail.app's LSA-based spam filter works
Posted on May 25, 2004 at 12:00 PM
Categories: tech, links
How Mail.app's LSA-based spam filter works . Finally an explanation I was able to comprehend. It's data mining after all :-)
"Here's a little song I wrote the other day while I was out duck hunting with a judge... It's a new song, it's dedicated to the FCC and if they broadcast it, it will cost a quarter of a million dollars."—Eric Idle
Fuck you very much the FCC Fuck you very very much for fining me Five thousand bucks a fuck, so I'm really out of luck That's more than Heidi Kleiss was charging me. [...]
semacode made it to the Daypop Top 40 Links today. We're number 18 right now. With an up arrow. And some green bars below. I have no idea what that means. But other people have blue and red bars and some gray ones. I think green is probably good.
Update: Made it as high as 15. 
The blue bars are your existing score. Red bars are a decrease since the last update. Green bars are a gain since the last update. I also caught "semacode" as a wordburst, in position 17. 
I released semacode a few days ago. And it's been pretty well received so far. Here's a round up of the coverage.
Reiter's Camera Phone Report was first out of the block. I like Alan and his weblog so I put him in the first wave of announcement emails. He emailed me back with some questions which he added to the report. And my name is in the headline :-) Next up was Smart Mobs . I emailed Howard Rheingold but he must be busy because it was posted by someone else. Howard's been a fan from early on of the whole idea. Rafe at All About Symbian gave me a write up and posted a semacode for their site too.
The second wave had Boing Boing with a short write up. Probably most of today's hits came from there. It's a pretty popular site. Although I haven't actually checked yet. Also the story was picked up by TheFeature's Eric Lin which is cool because I like thefeature. And I didn't directly contact them myself so that's a good sign too. They also provided some highly accurate background info which was missing from other coverage so far. I was also contacted today by heise.de so we'll see if something comes from them. Since my site is still operational I'm assuming there's no /. link yet. So far AxKit is holding up just fine which is great.
A little bit more. Some linkage and commentary from MobileWhack : "Semacode is about as cool an app as I've come across ... You can be sure I'll be sporting the semacode equivalent of http://www.mobilewhack.com/ on the back of my scooter helmet—talk about mobile whackery." engadget has a story also.
Here's some brilliant stuff from Bob Myers on Kuro5hin (who thought anything useful would ever show up there???). It's a primer for Japanese for Geeks . It presents the japanese language in BNF form and wow, it makes so much sense. You know, I took a year and a half of japanese and never understood the grammar half so well as I'm starting to now. Here's the second part and let's hope that he soon delivers part III... and maybe even more?
I was doing a quiz over at FunTrivia (which is very cool, and run by Terry Ford ), and I found out about these amazing trees, the Mountain Ash (Eucalyptus Regnans) . They grow up to 100 m tall. In this picture (left) you can see them relative to a car.
Ever since the Hachette dictionnaire francais disappeared I've been hoping to find a replacement. There are plenty of good translation dictionaries available. For example there's the incomparable Grand dictionnaire terminologique where you can find technical words translated and categorized by field of endeavour. Fantastique. But now I found another source for a straight french dictionary, with definitions in french: Tresor de la langue francaise informatise . Surprisingly it's not in DMOZ yet.
It's just an anecdote, but
When I was working with the White Marline Porpoise Circus in Port Aransas, Texas, I watched a dolphin there, named Pete (a bottlenose from Florida) do a similar thing. There was a pelican that would steal his fish if we threw them in the wrong direction, so it seemed Pete was tired of this. One day between shows, we noticed about 8 fish, about 2-6 inches under the surface, in a circular ring, fairly evenly spaced. As they would sink, Pete went around to each one, pushing each one in turn, to the surface. The pelican appeared interested and wary. After about 10 minutes of this, the pelican flew and dove for one of the fish—Pete grabbed him, and took him to the bottom and drowned him. First time I had thought of this as "tool use". This shows that the behavior occurs in tursiops as well.
The author seems to be an unusual person as well (and a PhD).
How fast can dolphins swim? Very fast, as fast as the fastest boats. What's their average cruising speed? According to [1] it's about 8 km/h. They do sleep and when they sleep they don't move much. It is difficult to track dolphin travel over long periods of time but lately there's been some progress it seems. Check out this graphical view ("Track the dolphins") of three dolphins around Bermuda. Even with tracking the crew reported difficulty in actually finding the animals with their boat.
Day 3 Satellite transmission received from Ace Boy at 7:00 am placing him near the south west of Bermuda. The next transmission told us he was headed north east around Bermuda. We tried to catch up with him but we could not find him.
[1] Rohr, J. J. et al. Observations of Dolphin Swimming Speed and Strouhal Number. Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Technical Report No. 1769 (Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, San Diego, 1998)
It's not the dolphins. It's the people who study them. The whole field of people who are interested in dolphins are slightly weird. It doesn't take much googling to divide into some special camps: the protesters, the romantics, the healers, the fun-seekers. The noise makes it difficult to find useful information on the web.
With that said, hopefully this article about dolphin basics will succesfully encapsulate some hard scientific evidence in an easy-to-read format. And yes, I found peer-reviewed papers for all of the claims that are in there.
New way to speed read, and Axkit OS X update
Posted on February 14, 2004 at 12:00 PM
Categories: links, mac
This is amazing: A Speed Reader for some books by Cory Doctorow. It's based on some kind of PARC research. Try it out. Then compare how far you went in the normal book form. I was really surprised.
Also, I just updated my OS X HOWTO for AxKit on Panther.
Ludovic Hirlimann has a weblog where he talks about Camino sometimes. And for the rest, practice your French ;-)
Sudhakar "Thaths" Chandra posted some amazing pics of his visit to Kenya . Wow! Via silklist