On my way to the Twin lakes Java (an amazing Coffee shop at Twin Lakes, MI), I was overflown by a rather satisfied looking Bald Eagle. Satisfied, since he'd just finished off what looked like a rather large carcass of a rather unlucky hare. I screeched the car to a halt, jumped out and took a few pictures of him as he circled (!?) and flew past. Mighty pleased with myself for having bagged a good picture of a Bald Eagle, I looked through the pictures to realize to my horror, that I'd been shooting with the ISO set to "HI1". In Nikon's terminology, for the D60, "HI1" == 3200 and also "Avoid using". So there _was_ a reason I had to shoot at 1/4000 and F11 to get the correct exposure.
Feeling pretty silly, I returned and plonked down on the couch with the Rubik's cube in hand. Deciding that I had to get through the silly cube in better than my usual 1:20-1:40 minutes, I started trying to learn all 41 algorithms of the Fridrich method. Then, I came across one of the most useful webpages I've seen in recent times: http://www.freewebs.com/sirshazaam/f2l.htm
The guy has most painstakingly listed out every one of the algorithms for the F2L and has pictures of the cube, for each of them as well. Brilliant.
Having had enough, I attempted hitting the sack at about 6:45 AM, when I heard what sounded like a Warbler. Deciding that I couldn't sleep any more, I picked up the device of photographic expression and walked out. After stalking the fella for more than 20 minutes, I finally caught sight of this brown feathered chappy, chirping away in a brown tree. Perfect. Getting a clear line of sight of the guy was a tough job.
Having shot what I thought was an okay-ish picture and double-checking to make sure the ISO was not an obscene value, I walked around for a little bit, coming across another magnificent sight. Somehow, just somehow, I get the feeling that today's going pretty well for a start.
Bird brained
The gear
Pictured, is my new D60 along with a bargain Soligor 90-230mm F4.5 manual, I got off eBay, for $20.
The other glass (not in the picture), is a humble Nikkor AF-S 18-55 DX VR.
The Soligor has been my lens of choice, ever since I began understanding the concept of exposure better. Shooting without any metering whatsoever and with a manual focus is a little daunting at first (especially so, for someone new to D-SLRs), but certainly not a major hurdle.
The remote control on the right, is a Phillips universal remote, that I've programmed to use as a remote trigger for the D60.
Web widgets
So, the intarwebs is filled with these "Take the pink ponies quiz and see your score now!!!" tests. I normally avoid these abominations. The Political Compass however, is one of my favorites. The Political Compass's theory is, that the traditional Left-Right line, in itself is insufficient. Political orientation, really is a two dimensional plot, with the other axis being the Authoritarian-Libertarian line. Intrigued? Try them out at politicalcompass.org.
Also, I score as
Economic Left/Right: -1.50
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.79 . To see it on a graph, click here
Also, in order to ascertain bragging rights (Slackbot, this is for you):
80 words
Deer chase!
I was driving up to Copper Harbor on a bright beautiful Saturday, when this Whitetailed deer running alongside the road, passed me from the left, crossed over onto the right lane and then sprinted along the road for a good half a minute.
Not wanting to confuse the Deer any further, I kept a good distance away from it, but stayed right behind it, while a friend dug my camera out of the bag. During those few seconds, my speedometer read approx 35 miles an hour and the Deer was almost always a constant distance from me.
Finally when I got my camera, I flipped the wheel to "P" mode, let the camera choose everything, zoomed to 55mm and fired off a burst of shots, trying to capture the chappy, while the sunlight was still on him.
Having had enough excitement and thrill for the day (its white tail up, indicating fear and alarm), the Deer decided that discretion was the better part of valor and vanished into the woods in a blitz.
Not wanting to confuse the Deer any further, I kept a good distance away from it, but stayed right behind it, while a friend dug my camera out of the bag. During those few seconds, my speedometer read approx 35 miles an hour and the Deer was almost always a constant distance from me.
Finally when I got my camera, I flipped the wheel to "P" mode, let the camera choose everything, zoomed to 55mm and fired off a burst of shots, trying to capture the chappy, while the sunlight was still on him.
Having had enough excitement and thrill for the day (its white tail up, indicating fear and alarm), the Deer decided that discretion was the better part of valor and vanished into the woods in a blitz.
Removing quizzes from your Facebook feed
Here's how you remove annoying Quiz updates from your Facebook feed:
If you haven't already, install the Greasemonkey add on for Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748), then install the Greasemonkey script to remove the Quiz updates
You can find the Greasemonkey script at http://userscripts.org/scripts/source/44459.user.js
Louise Attaque
I recently re-discovered Louise Attaque, a French Folk rock band. I first heard them live at the Alliance Française de Bangalore sometime in 2005.
Not surprisingly, that was also the first time I'd heard rock in a different European language (I'm fairly accustomed to English!). Although I barely understood a word, I didn't feel lost or out of place. They say music doesn't have a language; perhaps they're right.
Regardless of the genre you listen to, I highly recommend giving Louise Attaque a listen. They've got catchy tunes, with interesting guitar, harmonica, violin and accordion pieces. I don't understand French, but I've been told that their lyrics are pretty interesting too.
The French are a friendly people (see note [1] below for an exception), particularly so at the Alliance Française of Bangalore. If you're in the area and you feel the parisian touch, you might want to stop by.
[1] Overheard at the Aéroport Paris-Charles de Gaulle : "Why do you presume I speak English?"
Incoming Ice Age?
Lake Superior, almost froze over 100% [1] again this season. The accepted theory, is that the Lake has a massive ice cover once every 20 years. The lake was last frozen over in 2003, nearly 100% in 1996, 96% in 1994, 100% in 1979, 95% in 1972, 100% 1962[2].
The Lake seems to have frozen over again, over the 2008-2009 winter. Between 1962 and 1979, 17 years elapsed before the lake completely froze. It took another 17 years before it froze in 1996 and another 7 years before it froze in 2003. Its only taken another 6, before the lake frozen over again in 2009.
If this statistical correlation is to be trusted and extrapolated, then we are looking at a scenario where the lake will begin to freeze over with much shorter cycles, possibly resulting in the lake freezing completely each year.
Is this a sign of the onset of an Ice Age? Most scientific bodies tend to think that this is just an anomaly and that we are in a global-warming phase. Technically, we are still in an Ice age, as Ice sheets in both Greenland and Antarctica exist.
[1] Its difficult to define "completely freeze over". Its accepted that "very little open water areas" is what is "completely frozen" could mean.
[2] Data from http://climate.umn.edu/doc/journal/superior030603.htm
One year...
... since JP Morgan bought Bear Stearns for $2 a share. I hope someone's learnt a lesson.
The iPhone camera
The iPhone's much maligned camera, with a 2 mega pixel "resolution" sensor is actually capable of taking good pictures.
The controls on the camera ("Click") certainly don't rival even the closest point and shoot cameras. But it certainly has its charm. For one, it takes all the technicality out of taking a picture and lets you concentrate on composing your picture and just your picture. The downside of course, is that you don't get to choose any aperture, speed or focus settings. But seriously, its a camera on a Phone!
Picture on this post, is from the tram at the Minneapolis airport. Post processed with the Camerabag application, on the iPhone itself. Click on the picture to see my Flickr stream, with more iPhone pictures.
The controls on the camera ("Click") certainly don't rival even the closest point and shoot cameras. But it certainly has its charm. For one, it takes all the technicality out of taking a picture and lets you concentrate on composing your picture and just your picture. The downside of course, is that you don't get to choose any aperture, speed or focus settings. But seriously, its a camera on a Phone!
Picture on this post, is from the tram at the Minneapolis airport. Post processed with the Camerabag application, on the iPhone itself. Click on the picture to see my Flickr stream, with more iPhone pictures.
New photo gallery
It turns out, Flickr's 200 photo limit [1] for their free is actually quite measly. Especially if you're the type who likes to put up every mediocre picture online! To be fair, Flickr has a paid account, called Flickr Pro, which removes the 200 photo restriction.
I could create another Blogspot, or get a Tumblr account, all of which would let me upload pictures without restriction. Sure, searching and previews would be a pain, but then again, what in life is painless? Alternately, I could jut dump all pictures into a folder and let Apache just display a listig. Or I could add all new photos, to the already existing http://srichand.net.in/photos page. Or, I could just get a Flickr pro account...
Except of course, I already pay for a webhost, for http://srichand.net.in/ . I see little reason to pay up twice the amount I pay for it, just to host some pictures. Of course, the problem with http://srichand.net.in/photos is that, I'm running an ancient version of Coppermine. The thing I do not like about Coppermine, is its Album centric approach to photo management. Every photo needs to be in an Album, requiring me to create, learn and know an entire hierarchy of photos. I'd much rather prefer to have a "bunch" of photos and tag some of the pictures I like and mark some others as favorite. Of course, the ability to create "sets" (Similar to Flickr and Adobe LR2) is an added bonus. The other problem with Coppermine, of course, is its complexity. Somehow, just somehow, at first glance, its interface looks more complex than useful.
And so, I feel the need to move off Coppermine into a simpler gallery system. What do I need? The ability to preview _lots_ of pictures on one page (Certainly not a massive waste of whitespace, the way Coppermine does). A detailed "picture" page, that shows a picture, along with its EXIF data. And the whole AJAX thing, which I've shunned so far, is probably the ideal implementation detail here. It'd be awesome to move between pictures without reloading the page. The same goes for editing the Title, Description and the Tags of the photo, without going to an "Edit" page, for each picture. And yes, batch tagging!
I'm certainly going to look around some existing systems for a bit. I am already beginning to like the Plogger system a good bit. It might need some hacking to support what I want. If not, I'll probably just go get myself a Flickr Pro account anywho.
Image viewer for Linux
Terrible. That's the only word I'd use to describe my experience with F-Spot. Any image viewer that moves files around on the filesystem, without my explicit permission each time, is just terrible. F-Spot's instability is legendary too.
Google's Picasa 3 for Linux is okay for the most part. Except of course, Google's choice to override my Alt+Ctrl key binding for full-screen mode is irritating, to say the least. Anyone who uses multiple desktops on GNOME knows my pain. And of course, you can't upload to Flickr from Picasa directly.
KDE's Digikam has most of the right components in place. Except, that it wants me to look at my entire collection in a Folder centric view. I can't view all Folders at once.
Is there any other image viewer I should try out?
Also, WHY cannot image viewers standardize on tagging formats? I have to tag and retag my pictures each time I change image viewers.
Enough of ranting for today, time to get some sleep.
Mood: Arrr!!!
Extra topping? Black olives please!
Everyone has their own personal favorite straw man argument. Some realize that its a straw man, most don't. Here's mine.
Human-Computer Interaction is all about intelligent interfaces that feel "natural" to a Human user. We would want the computer to figure out what we want to do and do it with minimal fuss. For instance, I would want the "Computer" to be able to understand exactly what I mean when I say "I think I want to watch a movie". It would also be really nice, if the "Computer" would guess exactly what mood I'm in, figure out what movie I'd like to watch right now and play it right away. While we're at it, figure out that I'd like to eat a personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut and order it online.
Notice something missing from the above story? There was the "Human" (me), the "Computer" was right there too. Oh that's right, no "Interaction" ! But the "Computer" did guess what you wanted and did it too, you say.
The "Interaction", that seems implicit in the above story, really is a one way street. The subservient "Computer" does what it been statistically trained to do. In technical terms, the "Human" emitted a signal, which was processed by the "Computer", interpolated it to figure out what movie I wanted to watch and extrapolated it to figure out that I might want a pizza and ordered it. Notice the absence of any affirmation or negation. The "Computer" has just been transformed to a fancy glorified signal processor.
Interaction is a two way street. Interaction , in the technical sense requires more than one participant (entity) , to receive, process, understand and emit signals. Imagine the same scenario as before, but replace the "Computer" with another "Human". The outcome, is no longer influenced just by the sheer observation of one participant : "I think I want to watch a movie". The outcome, is now the result of an Interaction, between the two participants. This Interaction, will likely entail speech, hand gestures, facial expressions, discussion of similar events from the past ("Oh that Spielberg guy can't direct for nuts, remember ET?") and possibly, a compromise on choices. It is very possible, that at the end of this scenario, both our participants decide to ditch the idea of watching a movie and play a game or go out on a drive.
In the first example, one participant generated a single verbal signal while the other participant was only passively involved in the Interaction. The passive participant only processed the only signal received and acted. In the second example, both participants were involved in active interaction. Both participants generated a wide range of signals, processed each others signals, analyzed them and emitted a reply signal.
Clearly, the second form of Interaction transferred a lot more information. We could model two-participant Interaction to be a control process (Disclaimer: I don't know enough of control theory or signal processing to be certain though). It could be said, that the choices and opinions of both participants in the second example, were different at the end of the Interaction than before. Some would even use the adjective "enriched".
In either case, it can be certainly expected, that this Interaction would have a very strong influence on future Interactions. This is a critical difference between modeling HCI as signal processing, versus modeling HCI as a control system (see disclaimer above). The essence I'm trying to capture, is that for HCI to be successful, we should expect and _demand_ that the "Human" actually interact with the "Computer". Every software that incorporates AI in some form, has a "training phase", where the explicit interaction is the "Human" teaching the "Computer". I would argue, that this really isn't HCI.
[ I work on "intelligent" [1] Sketch recognition systems, with a special interest in collaborative sketch interfaces. I'm certainly no expert though.]
Brandon Paulson and Tracy Hammond of the Sketch Recognition Lab at Texas A&M argue in their paper, [2] that forcing users to learn the system, rather than the system learn the user's intentions places constraints on the user. I would think that both extremes are undesirable, but a balance between the two is important. When both the user and the system are able to understand each other, the equilibrium achieved is termed "natural", in the sense used in the very first line of this post.
Do I have a straw man? I don't know.
[1] I wish I knew what "intelligent" meant, with respect to sketch recognition. I suspect no one knows either.
[2] This isn't an attack on their work, but an example of the sentiment I seem to encounter in many HCI publications. To add, the SRL at Texas A&M produces some awesome sketch recognition work.
Coercion, bribe or ... election promises?
A big problem, in any election (electronic or off line), is the problem of coerced or bought-out votes. In general, no elections system or electoral authority can completely eliminate voter-coercion. If a voter chooses to sell his vote and actually carry out his end of the deal, then it must be considered part of the due process of election and his vote must be honored. If on the other hand, the agent of coercion is unable to convince the voter , then a forced vote is anomalous in the process.
Although not evident at first, the line between a "valid and freely chosen vote" and "invalid and coerced vote" is very thin. Finally, how does one different between coercion and campaigning? Try the following two statements:
"If you vote for me, I will pay you $100."
"If you vote for me, I will cut your taxes by $100."
Are they different? If so, how?
Steve and Barry's closing out
If you look carefully, you'll see a "Store Closing" banner on the left, and a "New Styles Arriving" banner on the right. They're the same store, mind you!
Java and Scientific Computing
Lately, I've been using Java for something I never imagined I would: Running time bound simulations and collecting statistics. This started from an Advanced AI homework, which required us to evaluate different strategies for solving the 8 Puzzle.
Depth First and Breadth First search -- the most brute force of them all -- are real processor hogs. They take a good amount of time to get through solutions. I set up my simulations to try 8 puzzle combinations in groups. Each group had members which were an equal number of moves away from the solution. I'll call this the "distance" of a group from the solution. I started looking at groups with distances 1 through 10. The idea was to see how depth first search scaled with distance, while using multiple boards to average out the time (since boards were randomly generated). The simulation started out fine, but somewhere half way through, Java ran out of heap space causing me to lose half an hour worth of simulations. Terrific. So I fixed the heap space with a JVM switch to allocate 768 M. This time, Java didn't seem to die on space, but for some reason, started halting randomly. Here's a section of the simulation output. The first column is the distance of the board and the second is the run time in microseconds.
4 4.265305
4 0.399163
4 8058.812957
4 0.495941
4 4.762955
Now, the simulation is set up, to repeat a given run 5 times, to average out run times. So, the same board configuration is run 5 times for a given algorithm. The numbers above are the run times of the same algorithm on the same damn board! What gives!? A 4 microsecond difference is probably justifiable, but a full 8000 microseconds?
Now, I'm not sure if Java / the JVM is entirely to blame for such random spikes. In order to validate that, I'd have to rewrite this simulation in C++ and post similar numbers. Somehow, I doubt that the deviation in run times will not be this high. As of now, I'm treating this as an open problem. I'm certainly not assigning blame to Java, but its definitely complicit!
More to come.
[And no, there were no other CPU hogging processes running on the box at simulation run time. Certainly none that would cause such spikes.]
Cubaholics Anonymous
Lately, I've been involved with a 3 dimensional species of puzzle that involves moving square shaped tiles around. Also known in technical parlance as "The Rubik's Cube". Up, down, right, away and right inverse goes my head. My fingers accordingly flex, extend, adduct, abduct and rarely circumduct (If you didn't understand those terms, go look up a kinesiology book (no I'm not a kinesiology major (and no, I do not like Lisp))). Such motion is usually accompanied by the creaking sounds of my aging cube.
Recently however, said creaking sounds have been replaced by their more intellectually acoustic cousins, called "speech".
"Hey, look at that guy. Think he's he okay?"
"You think he's gesturing at me?"
"Oh gosh, the poor fellow must be suffering from one of those diseases I heard about on TV!"
"You keep doing that son and next time, even if you have a cube with you, I'll give you a ticket." [1]
Yes, I am now a victim of Imaginary Cubesolveritis. To cut a long story short, if my fingers aren't already solving a cube, scribbling equations on a sheet of paper, typing away at a keyboard or stuffing food down my throat, then they're restlessly trying to solve an imaginary cube.
Its almost as though the urge to twist and turn faces and slices in a cube, is a wholly natural and evolutionary response to huge stacks of work lying right in front of me. The larger my pending work gets, the more I want to solve the cube. Till now, the only levee that deterred me from expending large swathes of time on the cube, was the fact that I did needed the cube to work on it.
This Saturday however, disaster struck this little home in Houghton, MI. The levee broke, releasing large amounts of solution attempts at my fingers. Who would have known? Katrina, Gustav, Ike and then ... Rubik. Tragedy I tell you, Tragedy.
... to be continued.
[1] The comment therein, is a result of a wholly unfortunate interaction between me, an imaginary cube, my car, a police officer and a stop sign (in that order) late Sunday night.
Note to self: Never take the stop sign overly seriously again. Not serious enough to wait a little more than a minute anyway.
Perhaps...
... I should just continue blogging here? Yes, all previous attempts of mine to work on my own blog scripts have been a terrific disaster. I hardly ever remember any of them leaving pre-alpha stages even.
Just perhaps.
Cluster for Coffee?
Came across this link which explains how to build a cluster in your drawing room in minutes!
Got to try it out sometime!
6000+ page views in 20 days!
That's right!
My photogallery views, and bandwidth consumption have gone through the roof!
6000+ views, and nearly 1000 MB of bandwidth!
If you haven't already, then check it at http://srichand.net.in/photos !
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