The Pile

Draft of brochure for Enchanted Hills house

2006-09-07T14:29:00.000-07:00

Well, we now have a draft of the brochure offering our house for sale.

Our house is going on the market soon

2006-08-30T13:44:00.000-07:00

Our house will be going on the market just after Labor Day.

Police Sting

2006-06-18T11:55:00.005-07:00

San Francisco's Finest are making sure drivers stop for pedestrians.

technorati tags:San Francisco

Guerrilla Urban Micro Park

2006-06-13T08:45:00.000-07:00

You too can unfurl some turf and create a suprisingly congenial small park in an urban parking space.

Photo-Illustrated Tree of Life (Flickr/TOL Mash-Up)

2006-06-12T05:21:00.000-07:00

I have created a depiction of the evolutionary tree of life on Earth that is a simple mash-up of Flickr and the Tree of Life web project. It displays photos that have been taxonomically tagged.

Six Days at Harts Corner in 24 Seconds

2006-05-12T18:10:00.000-07:00

I created this AVI movie which shows the view from a traffic camera at Hart's Corner near where I grew up in Dublin. The action is speeded up 20,000 times.

Blood sacrifice, the left and the 1916 insurrection in Ireland - Ireland / Britain History

2006-05-11T20:05:00.000-07:00

This anarchist analysis of the 1916 rising and the Irish War of Independence has some interesting points of view that I had not heard before. The author claims for example that the reason that the British agreed to come to terms with Sinn Fein is that they were terrified of much more radical left-wing movements in Ireland and Britain.

Google Trends: irish

2006-05-10T18:47:00.000-07:00

This is the Google Trends graph for the search term "irish". Note the big peak every year on St. Patrick's day.

In Memory of David

2006-05-08T16:27:00.000-07:00

In memory of a friend, David, who died of cancer last year at a tragic young age I am helping to raise money for the Cancer Society. If you can, please donate.

San Francisco Airport

2006-04-28T06:47:00.000-07:00

San Francisco Airport
Originally uploaded by Tolka Rover.

On Sunday evening I arrived at SFO with plenty of time to spare. Unfortunately our plane to London sprung a pressurization leak and we had to wait in the airport for two hours while they brought us a new plane from Denver.

Moonlight on the Ocean

2006-02-12T10:49:00.000-08:00

Moonlight on the Ocean
Originally uploaded by Tolka Rover.

Last weekend we went down to Carmel Highlands and spent the night in the Highlands Inn where we had been married almost 14 years ago.

It was a beautiful night, and from our hotel room we could see a perfect half-moon casting light on the ocean.

Suspended Drops #1

2006-01-24T23:13:00.000-08:00

Suspended Drops #1
Originally uploaded by Tolka Rover.

It was raining as I left my wife's office building last week and in the parking structure water was running along the ceiling in lines of suspended droplets.

Golden Gate from Alcatraz

2006-01-04T22:00:00.000-08:00

Golden Gate from Alcatraz
Originally uploaded by Tolka Rover.

It was a wet, windy, gloomy day out on Alcatraz.

Using Film-Making Techniques to Synthesize Compelling Video Shows from Consumer Photographs

2005-12-19T15:14:00.000-08:00

This is what I worked on last year.

"We describe a software architecture that combines storytelling and cinematographic techniques to guide consumers in creating compelling video shows from their photographs. The software implementation of this architecture could run in cameras, consumer appliances, PCs, or web services."

Visited States

2005-12-16T12:09:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Visited States and Visited Countries for these maps of all the U.S. States and countries I have visited.

I still have a lot of the world to see!

Hovering

2005-12-14T00:02:00.000-08:00

Hovering
Originally uploaded by Tolka Rover.

I was cleaning out my hard drive today and I discovered this photo that had fallen through the cracks. It is some kind of bird of prey hovering above my house during the summer.

War, "The Price of Freedom"?

2005-12-08T18:07:00.000-08:00

War, "The Price of Freedom"?
Originally uploaded by Tolka Rover.

The slogan for the "Americans at War" exhibition at the National Museum of American History is a bit simplistic. The wars covered in the exhibit included ones that were not really about freedom: the Spanish American war which was mostly about extending American colonialism, the Mexican war which was about westward expansion, and the Indian wars which were at best ethnic cleansing, and at worst genocide. As for the Vietnam War and the current Iraq war, let's say that opinions differ on whether those were about freedom. Still the exhibit itself was in general well presented and is worth seeing.

Writely Update

2005-09-22T11:39:00.000-07:00

I was wrong, writely does support hyperlinks and spell checking (as demonstrated by this posting), and they responded to my feedback very quickly. So it really is a very nice tool for writing blog posts. My experience as a very small sample usability test indicates perhaps that the UI design and help text should be tweaked a little to make the available features more obvious.

It so happens I am co-writing a paper with someone outside my company right now, so I think I will test to see if collaborative writing works. However he is on a Mac, so perhaps he will run into the Safari problem.

Writely

2005-09-21T23:32:00.000-07:00

Writely

I remember back in the dot-com boom days one of the new-new things were ASPs, application service providers, who provide hosted applications to replace enterpise and desktop applications. In fact I was one of the team on such a venture developing a collaboration tool for small businesses.

When brainstorming over what applications were good candidates for web hosting, I remember we explicitly rejected word processing as not being suitable. But that was before AJAX.

Now, I am posting this entry using a service called Writely, which is a web-hosted word processor that allows multiple people to collaborate on writing a document. I can do all the usual styling like bold, italic, underline, different fonts, and different sizes. It is a well executed application, though still missing a lot of features like, as far as I can tell, spell checking and hyperlinks.

OK/Cancel � Comic

2005-09-19T15:49:00.000-07:00

As a software developer I found the OK/Cancel � Comics a really fun and informative insight into the point of view of a user experience designer.

Common REST Mistakes

2005-09-17T16:21:00.000-07:00

Nice guidelines to REST in Common REST Mistakes. I particularly liked the closing summary:

Overall, the thing to keep in mind is that REST is about exposing resources through URIs, not services through messaging interfaces.

Human Universals

2005-08-11T21:30:00.000-07:00

I first saw Donald Brown's list of human universals as an appendix to Pinker's "Blank Slate". It is quite a stunning list of things that seem to be common to all humanity, including things you might have thought were unique to your particular culture. Thanks to Jack Fenner for putting up this slightly modified version of Brown's list.

Packed house at BayCHI

2005-08-10T19:07:00.000-07:00

Packed house at BayCHI
Originally uploaded by Stewart.

Oh look! I am in one of Stewart's photos.

Engineers need to understand how the mind works

2005-08-06T18:34:00.000-07:00

I like this point of view of Pinker (From Edge 3):

Computer technology will never change the world as long as it ignores how the mind works. Why did people instantly start to use fax machines, and continue to use them even though electronic mail makes much more sense? There are millions of people who print out text from their computer onto a piece of paper, feed the paper into a fax machine, forcing the guy at the other end to take the paper out, read it, and crumples it up—or worse, scan it into his computer so that it becomes a file of bytes all over again. This is utterly ridiculous from a technological point of view, but people do it. They do it because the mind evolved to deal with physical objects, and it still likes to conceptualize entities that are owned and transferred among people as physical objects that you can lift and store in a box. Until computer systems, email, video cameras, VCR's and so on are designed to take advantage of the way the mind conceptualizes reality, namely as physical objects existing at a location and impinged upon by forces, people are going to be baffled by their machines, and the promise of the computer revolution will not be fulfilled.

[...] [The problem is that the] machines were designed by engineers that aren't used to thinking about how the human mind works. They're used to designing machinery that is elegant by their own standards, and they don't think about how the user is going to conceptualize the machine as another object in the world and deal with it as we've been dealing with objects for hundreds of thousands of years.

Maybe available to help your project

2005-07-29T17:46:00.000-07:00

You might want to have a look at my resume if you are in the San Francisco area and looking for a senior technologist with a lot of programming and research experience.

Here are some hints as to why I might be available:

HP drops 4 research groups in downsizing (SF Chronicle)

HP Labs also decimated (The Register)

Research Unit at HP to Be Cut (LA Times)

How to capture video

2005-07-08T11:17:00.000-07:00

It looks like Capture Guide will be a good resource for me as I try to figure out the best way to capture broadcast video to disk.

IMG_0641-hawk.JPG

2005-07-05T12:12:00.000-07:00

IMG_0641-hawk.JPG
Originally uploaded by Tolka Rover.

A hawk glimpsed from our back deck.

IMG_0574-fireworks.JPG

2005-07-04T10:41:00.000-07:00

IMG_0574-fireworks.JPG
Originally uploaded by Tolka Rover.

The local school across the valley from us has a Fourth of July parade

and fireworks display every year. We have a very convenient view of

the fireworks from our deck.

fireworks

2005-07-04T10:35:00.000-07:00

fireworks
Originally uploaded by Tolka Rover.

IMG_0631-fireworks.JPG

Fireworks

2005-07-03T23:27:00.000-07:00

Fireworks
Originally uploaded by Tolka Rover.

IMG_0625-fireworks.JPG

Object-Relational Mapping Tool List

2005-06-23T18:55:00.000-07:00

Here is a useful list of object-relational mapping tools. I am getting fed up writing Java wrappers around SQL tables. Perhaps I can find some simple tool that can help me out.

Free background music loops.

2005-06-15T15:34:00.000-07:00

Great. I just found this source for music loops that I can use as background for my synthesized video.

Comparison of different SQL implementations

2005-06-09T11:09:00.000-07:00

Comparison of different SQL implementations is a useful reference.

I am writing some SQL that I would like to work with Sqlite, Derby, and MS Access. It turns out there is more variablility than I thought. Most annoying is that autoincrment is handled differently by each.

Private Members in JavaScript

2005-04-14T11:28:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the E-Language mailing list for pointing me to this example of why JavaScript is a much more interesting language than you might think.

Cúirt an Ṽean-Oík̃e

2005-04-04T09:25:00.000-07:00

(Caiỹdean)

(Nua)

Cúirt an Mhean-Oíche
Brian Merriman

Ba ghnáth mé ar siúl le ciumhais na habhann
Ar bháinseach úr is an drúcht go trom,
In aice na gcoillte i gcoim an tsléibhe
Gan mhairg gan mhoill ar shoilseadh an lae.
Do ghealadh mo chroí nuair chínn Loch Gréine,
An talamh, an tír, is íor na spéire
Ba thaitneamhach aoibhinn suíomh na sléibhte
Ag bagairt a gcinn thar dhroim a chéile.
Ghealfadh an croí bheadh críon le cianta—
Caite gan bhrí nó líonta le pianta—
An séithleach searbh gan sealbh gan saibhreas
D'fhéachfadh tamall thar bharra na gcoillte
Ar lachain ina scuain ar chuan gan cheo,
An eala ar a bhfuaid is í ag gluaiseacht leo,
Na héisc le meidhir ag éirí anairde
Péirse i radharc go taibhseach tarrbhreac,
Dath an locha agus gorm na dtonn
Ag teacht go tolgach torannach trom,
Bhíodh éanlaith i gcrann go meidhreach mómhar,
Léimneach eilte i gcoillte im chóngar,
Géimneach adharc is radharc ar shlóite,
Tréanrith gadhar is Reynard rompu.
...

Cúirt an Ṽean-Oík̃e
Brian Merriman

Ba ĥnáĥ mé ar siúl le ciuw̃ais na haŵann
Ar ŵáinseak̃ úr is an drúk̃t go trom,
In aice na gcoillte i gcoim an tsléiṽe
Gan w̃airg gan w̃oill ar ĥoilseaĥ an lae.
Do ỹealaĥ mo k̃roí nuair k̃ínn Lok̃ Gréine,
An talaṽ, an tír, is íor na spéire
Ba ĥaitneaw̃ak̃ aoiṽinn suíoṽ na sléiṽte
Ag bagairt a gcinn ĥar ĥroim a k̃éile.
Ỹealfaĥ an croí ṽeaĥ críon le cianta—
Caite gan ṽrí nó líonta le pianta—
An séiĥleak̃ searṽ gan sealṽ gan saiṽreas
D'~éak̃faĥ tamall ĥar ŵarra na gcoillte
Ar lak̃ain ina scuain ar k̃uan gan k̃eo,
An eala ar a ŵfuaid is í ag gluaiseak̃t leo,
Na héisc le meiŷir ag éirí anairde
Péirse i raĥarc go taiṽseak̃ tarrṽreac,
Daĥ an lok̃a agus gorm na dtonn
Ag teak̃t go tolgak̃ torannak̃ trom,
Ṽíoĥ éanlaiĥ i gcrann go meiŷreak̃ mów̃ar,
Léimneak̃ eilte i gcoillte im k̃óngar,
Géimneak̃ aĥarc is raĥarc ar ĥlóite,
Tréanriĥ gaĥar is Reynard rompu.
...

A New Irish Language Spelling System

2005-04-03T21:36:00.000-07:00

One of the nice things about the Irish language is that its spelling is very regular. However for non-Irish speakers some of the pronunciation rules can be confusing.

This is particularly true of some of the lengthened consonants which in the modern spelling are indicated by adding an “h”:

“th” and ”sh”	(pronounced /h/)
“bh” and ”mh”	(pronounced /w/ or /v/ depending on context)
dh” and ”gh”	(pronounced /y/ or a /g/, /h/ mixture depending on context)
“fh”	(silent)

I propose that we adopt a new spelling system that is more accessible to non-Irish speakers.

Consonant	Lengthened, In Standard Spelling	Lengthened, In New Spelling	Example
p	ph	f̃	Gaiṽ mo f̃ardún.
t	th	ĥ	Go raiṽ maiĥ agat.
c	ch	k̃	Óik̃e w̃aiĥ.
b (+aou)	bha bho bhu	ŵa ŵo ŵu	An laŵarann tú ...?
b (+ei)	bhe bhi	ṽe ṽi	Sa ṽliain 2005 ...
d (+aou)	dha dho dhu	ĥa ĥo ĥu	Dia ĥuit.
d (+ei)	dhe dhi	ŷe ŷi	rud a ŷéanfaí
g (+aou)	gha gho ghu	ĥa ĥo ĥu	Cuireaĥ ĥá ~oclóir
g (+ei)	ghe ghi	ỹe ỹi	k̃uir an taiỹde seo
m (+aou)	mha mho mhu	w̃a w̃o w̃u	Tá fáilte row̃at.
m (+ei)	mhe mhi	ṽe ṽi	teanga a ṽíniú
s	sh	ĥ	míle bliain ó ĥin
f	fh	~	K̃un treorak̃a a ~áil

Taking Plato Out Of Software

2005-03-13T14:03:00.000-08:00

Object-oriented methods are considered the best way to build large, maintainable software systems. Languages such as C++, Java, and Python now dominate in many areas, and the conventional wisdom encourages us to do analysis and design in an object-oriented manner.

It seems pretty obvious to me that object-oriented thinking is a direct application of Plato’s philosophy of ideal types that has been the foundation of much of Western philosophy and religion. If we look outside this parochial tradition we find that Buddhism proposes that there are no such ideal types, that objects and people are constantly in flux, and have indefinite boundaries. It proposes that the perception of type, or even self, is an illusion.

Imagine there was a software methodology that was based on Buddhist philosophy rather than Plato’s philosophy. What would it look like?

Perspective Camera Transformation

2005-01-03T12:49:00.000-08:00

I am currently writing some code to render 3-D scenes to 2-D. I found this Perspective Camera Transformation applet useful for getting an intuitive feel for the concepts.

A Tedious Explanation of the f/stop

2004-12-17T17:25:00.000-08:00

I have learned and forgotton what f/stop means several times in my life. A Tedious Explanation of the f/stop, which is not at all tedius, explains it nicely. Maybe now I won't forget.

Kid Language Reference

2004-12-09T19:30:00.000-08:00

I really like Kid -- an elegant pythonic templating language.

Python Is Not Java

2004-12-09T19:11:00.000-08:00

As a long-time Java programmer who occasionally writes in Python I found this useful. Python Is Not Java warns you what Java idioms do not translate well into Python, and explains how to write more pyhonically.

Amazingly good dinner at Bayonna

2004-11-23T20:26:00.000-08:00

Quail salad, rabbit, lamb.
At base, Southern, but done in a wonderful California way. The best meal we had in New Orleans.

Wine: Chorey-Cote-de-Beaune 2001, domaine tollot beaut. like calif pinot noire

Yesterday we ate at K Pauls, the original populizer of Cajan food back in the 80's. Also a very good meal.

Notes while visiting the Ogden Museam of Southern Art

2004-11-23T10:30:00.000-08:00

George dureau, male figures, satyrs

gerald cannon, google image search

evelyn witherspoon, portraits

Loft 523 Design

2004-11-22T09:39:00.000-08:00

Agape Spoon tub. Modern fan co. Vola bathroom accessories. Fortuny lamp.

Dramatic events in the middle of the night

2004-11-22T09:13:00.000-08:00

A blaring alarm roused us, hearts a pounding, from a deep sleep at 2am. As soon as we realized that it must be the fire alarm we hurridly threw on clothes and headed down the emergency stairs and joined the other guests in the lobby.

Two Fire Department vehicles came and after investigating for a bit they declared the all clear. Apparently it had been a false alarm.

Wonderful meal in Fins

2004-11-21T20:36:00.000-08:00

Wine: La crema, Anderson Valley, 2001

Daytime in le Vieux Carre

2004-11-21T16:36:00.000-08:00

Back in our funky hotel room resting our tired feet after spending the day in the French Quarter. After a lovely brunch we wandered around listening to street musicians and exploring and exploring art galleries.

Despite being November it was quite warm and, of course very humid. During the hottest part of the early afternoon we took refuge in the Ursalines Convent, the oldest extant structure in the Mississippi valley, and took a tour. After a stop for refreshments we did a little more exploring and then took the streetcar back to the hotel.

Brunch at Begue's.

2004-11-21T12:53:00.000-08:00

Yummy. Great buffet with lots of variety.

Arrived in New Orleans

2004-11-21T07:48:00.000-08:00

Arrived in New Orleans yesterday for a short vacation before spending Thanksgiving in Texas.

We had a reservation in the International House hotel, but when we arrived we found we had been bumped ("upgraded" in their words) to their nearby sister hotel Loft 523. We are in an ultra-modernistic room with a concrete floor and spartan furniture. Ã like it.

After exploring the French Quarter a bit, we had dinner at 201.

Film Analysis

2004-11-18T18:29:00.000-08:00

Yale's Film Analysis site is a great reference for understanding how films are made, along with lots of illustrative stills and some clips.

C# Tutorial

2004-11-09T19:05:00.000-08:00

It looks like it would be convenient to write some Windows device-access code in C#. This C# Tutorial looks like a good quick start.

Nerves are racked

2004-11-02T11:34:00.000-08:00

Man, it's nerve racking! electoral-vote.com is showing Kerry ahead by a single electoral vote. Meta-Analysis of State Polls - election.princeon.edu with somewhat more sophisticated statistical methods is predicting Kerry 311/Bush 227. The Iowa electronic market which had shown Bush ahead for the last few months is now closing towards dead even.

As a disenfranchised expatriate living in the U.S. it is frustrating not being able to vote. Though I did help the literacy student I am tutoring to register to vote, and I am going with her to the polls this afternoon to help guide her through the process. And as an extra bonus she is mostly going to vote the way I would (I was as objective in my tutoring, honest!)

A handy cheat-sheet for election night

2004-10-26T21:01:00.000-07:00

Here is a handy cheat-sheet for election night.

2004-10-23T15:13:00.000-07:00

Testing from wapblogger. Yet another way to blog from my phone.

ehcache

2004-10-17T00:33:00.000-07:00

We buillt a cache like ehcache for a previous project. Next time I think I will try using ehcache instead.

Let's see how well the Iowa futures market predicts the election.

2004-10-05T10:34:00.000-07:00

Lets see how well the Iowa futures market compares the outcome of the election compared to opinion polls as reported on electoral-vote.com

Mount St. Helens VolcanoCam

2004-10-05T10:24:00.000-07:00

Mount St. Helens VolcanoCam - Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument

How (and How Not) to Write a Good Systems Paper

2004-10-01T18:49:00.000-07:00

I came across this useful set of advice for writers of computer science systems papers. This is very very pertinent right now as I am in the early stages of writing such a paper.

2004 Electoral Vote Animation

2004-09-30T15:14:00.000-07:00

Here is a great way to visualize how the presidential race is going, using data from http://www.electoral-vote.com.

Watch those battleground states swing back and forth! In particular keep an eye on the crucial states of Florida, Ohio, and Missouri.

(Click animation to see full size on caida.org site.)

new OpenGL-based pipeline for Java 2D

2004-09-30T09:18:00.000-07:00

According to the rhw Java Buzz Forum there is a binding to OpenGL in Java 1.5 enabled by adding the VM argument

-Dsun.java2d.opengl=true

I must try this to see if it improves the performance of our Java app that does a lot of image movement on the screen.

Hello Rob from CA!

2004-09-27T21:57:00.000-07:00

Thank you Rob for subscribed to me on bloglines. Now I know someone is out there reading I had better start posting some worthwhile stuff!

J2SE 1.5 support for Eclipse

2004-09-24T10:51:00.000-07:00

J2SE 1.5 support for Eclipse

Two-Terabyte Memory Card Coming to Production : Technology : MobileMag

2004-08-17T15:39:00.000-07:00

Thanks to S. "Tetherless" Keshav, who gave a talk here today in HP Labs, for giving me a pointer to this promised Two-Terabyte Memory Card. This could change some of the trade-offs in designing distributed systems over unreliable, intermittent networks.

In Defense of PowerPoint

2004-08-09T23:35:00.000-07:00

From Computer Magazine - In Defense of PowerPoint comes an interesting approach to giving conference presentations:

conference presenters who merely recapitulate the contents of their paper place themselves in danger of putting their audience to sleep, particularly straight after lunch. A more effective approach uses the presentation to persuade the majority of the audience to actually read the paper, then devotes the question time to those few who have already read it.

and how to use bullet points:

Bullet points—PowerPoint's most vilified aspect—are the most misunderstood of presentation techniques. As far as the audience is concerned, bullet points only serve to remind them of the presentation's general context. As far as the presenter is concerned, bullet points replace the mnemonic techniques handed down from the Greeks and the more recent prompt cards hidden in the hand of a formal debater.

I am not sure that Tufte would agree.

Spatial Orientation of Desktops

2004-08-08T13:41:00.000-07:00

John Siracusa has an written an excellent article on what, in his opinion, makes a good desktop shell, concentrating mostly on the Macintosh finder.

As an experiment I have set up my Windows XP folder options to to match his recommendations as much as possible.

In the folder context menu:
- Do view->thumbnails in each folder.
- Turn off the auto-arrange and the align to grid.

In the folder view→toolbars menu desect all toolbars

In the Folder Options panel
- General tab: select "Use Windows classic folders"
- General tab: select "Open each folder in its own window"
- View tab: uncheck "Display the full path in the title bar"
- View tab: check "Remember each folder's view setting"
- View tab: check "Restore previous folder windows at logon"
- View tab: click apply to all folders

It's like I have a brand new GUI on my operating system! Let's see how well I like it after using it for a while.

How to read Smalltalk if you are a Java or C++ programmer.

2004-08-08T12:31:00.000-07:00

My programming language trajectory has been BASIC → FORTRAN → Pascal → C → C++ → Java with a few diversions such as Perl and Python. On the way I have become a firm convert to object-oriented programming, and as such I always found my lack of knowledge in Smalltalk was a big gap.

Now that I sit near Alan Kay and have been impressed by Squeakand Croquet I have felt it was time to fill in that gap in my knowledge.

However, I did find initially that the syntactical differences of Smalltalk were a barrier to my understanding, one of the reasons I have created my own Java-Smalltalk cheatsheet.

So I was delighted to find Wilf LaLonde's tutorial, I Can Read C++ and Java But I Can’t Read Smalltalk.

Some nice looking Java software

2004-08-06T13:37:00.000-07:00

GeoSoft - Geotechnical Software Services has some nice looking GPLed Java software.

Non-linear Dimensionality Reduction Techniques for Unsupervised Feature Extraction

2004-08-05T09:51:00.000-07:00

Non-linear Dimensionality Reduction Techniques for Unsupervised Feature Extraction

Overview of some thechniques for dimensionality reduction.

-------------------

Update: The above HTML version is missing parts of some formulas. To see them see the compressed postscript version.

Charles Stewart's congressional data page

2004-08-04T17:22:00.000-07:00

Lots of raw data of congressional roll call votes on Charles Stewart's congressional data page. I've got some ideas of some data mining I want to try out on this data.

Wedding Anniversary

2004-08-02T09:25:00.000-07:00

Twelve years today. Wow!

We treated ourselves to a night at the Stanford Court Hotel on Nob Hill. Last night had a nice meal at Fournou's Ovens where we particularly enjoyed the wine, Panther Creek, Freedom Hill, 1999.

This was somewhat of a contrast to John Edward anniversary meal at Wendy's earlier this week. Well he has other compensations.

Mathematica Eye Candy

2004-07-28T18:34:00.000-07:00

I have been working on a little project that involves data mining some personal history. One of the things I have been trying is using principal component analysis to reduce the dimensionality of my data to something I can get an intuitive feel for, so that I can try to ficure out what are the best automated methods for pattern recognition. This image is an example reduced from sixteen variables to three. It's impressive what you can do in Mathematica.

Dinner at Scott Seafood, Palo Alto

2004-07-27T21:49:00.000-07:00

We had a nice half-bottle of Acacia 2001 pinot noir, Napa, Carneros

I had a nice salad, a tasty rare Ahi tuna, with an Illy espresso to finish. P was not so lucky, with a salad that she found overdressed, and a fish dish that both she and I found overdressed.

Applet Demos of Wolfram Cellular Automota

2004-07-27T09:44:00.000-07:00

Rudy Rucker and his class have done a good job of providing
applet versions of some of the cellular automota from Stephen Wolfram's amazing book book "A New Kind of Science".

I read the book when it first came out. It is nice to be reminded again at how amazing it all is.

SDForum

2004-07-26T15:31:00.000-07:00

Some interesting technical events sponsored by the SDForum.

Clustering Algorithms and Dimensional Reduction

2004-07-24T12:42:00.000-07:00

I am giving my self a crash course on some data mining techniques for a project I am working on. Here are some things I found useful.

In Matteo Matteucci's site at Politechnico di Milano is a nice little introductory tutorial on clustering algorthms, complete with interactive demos. A similar page is Tariq Rashid's University of Bristol page

Also François Labelle at McGill has a nice overview of reducing the dimensionality of multivariate data using Principal Component Analysis, also with interactive demos which give a nice intuitive feel for the technique. Mathematica supports principal component analysis, so given a data matrix with the each observation in a row, and each column a dimension I found could do the following to get a nice two dimensional view of the multi-dimenstional data:


<<Statistics`MultiDescriptiveStatistics`

rotated = PrincipalComponents[Transpose[data]];

rotated2d = Table[ {rotated〚i,1〛, rotated〚i,2〛}, {i,1,n}];

ListPlot[rotated2d]

Whale watching

2004-07-20T16:53:00.000-07:00

Just back from an amazing whale-watching boat trip on the straits between San Juan Island, Washington State and Vancouver Island, British Columbia. We were lucky in that all of the local pods of Orca had come together to socialize and hunt for the salmon sheltering from the strong ebb tide currents in coves along the coast. We saw lots of the orca swimming along in family groups, splashing about as they herded the salmon, and popping their heads out of the water to keep an eye on the boats.

Reconstructing grammars from sequences

2004-07-13T21:29:00.000-07:00

Interesting. I thingk I might be able to use this in my "personal data mining" experiments.

Memory footprint of Java Objects.

2004-07-06T11:54:00.000-07:00

A C/C++ programmer, used to using sizeof, might be suprised how hard it is to figure out the memory footprint of Java object. Of course relying on memory sizes is very bad for portability, but sometimes when tuning applications you do need this information.

This article walks through some measurments that reveal:

Object	Size (bytes)	Overhead (bytes)	Overhead (percent)
Object	8
Integer	16	12	300%
Long	16	8	100 %
int[n]	16 + 4*n	16
char[n]	16 + 2*n	16
String, length n	40 + 2*n	40

Blogging from my phone.

2004-07-04T23:22:00.000-07:00

Just testing to see if I can post to this blog from my phone.

Glimpses of the surface of titan.

2004-07-04T22:27:00.000-07:00

Finally we are starting to be able to see some detail of Titan's surface through the haze of its atmosphere.

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA06407

2004-06-29T10:09:00.000-07:00

Got an gmail account a few days ago. So far I like the interface a lot better than yahoo. As is usual with Google it is very clean and uncluttered. So far the targeted ads are unobjectionable, and the "related links" might actually be useful.

Control Room

2004-06-16T11:30:00.000-07:00

Last night we saw the film "Control Room", a behind-the scenes documentary of Al Jazeera covering the initial invasion of Iraq.

I watched some coverage of the war from the Arab side on the Mosaic news program so there was nothing really new factually in this film for me. It was still well worth seeing however as it, for example, demonstrated the complicated realities of how journalists, whether from Fox News or Al Jazeera, unavoidably bring a point of view to their coverage, however committed they are to reporting the "truth".

One of the compelling characters in the film was a press officer at Central Command whom Salon reports is being muzzled by the Pentagon.

2004-06-15T17:20:00.000-07:00

Well, I did a quick look around on the net and most people seemed to think that w.bloggar is the best blogging tool. So here is my first attempt to post with it.

Peering at Phoebe

2004-06-14T18:20:00.000-07:00

From
JPL:

Shown here is a mosaic of seven of the sharpest, highest resolution images taken of Phoebe during Cassini's close flyby of the tiny moon. The image scales range from 27 to 13 meters (90 to 43 feet) per pixel.

Open up this full-res image, turn off the browser image shrinking and pan around in the image, imagining yourself flying just a few kilometers above the surface. It's quite exhilarating.

New home for my blog.

2004-06-08T22:25:00.000-07:00

Well, the upgrade of my obrain.com home server from an ancient version of Redhat Linux to the latest stable version of Debian Linux had mixed result. After struggling with a somewhat confusing installations process I eventually succeeded in getting things up and running, but in the process I lost my old entries for the Movable Type blog I was hosting. So here I am re-starting the blog again, but this time hosted on blogger’s own servers. Hopefully I can trust Google with my data more that I can trust myself.

All the previous entries in the blog were hand-entered by copying from the Google cache or the wayback machine copies of my pages. It is not complete but hopefully it should include the more popular pages (otherwise the Google and wayback machine spiders would not have saved them).

Fossil Sites in California

2004-01-24T12:11:00.000-08:00

Fossil Sites in California

Some sites near me:

"Capitola, near Santa Cruz -- The beach is a good site for Pliocene fossil collecting. Clams, snails and sand dollars. They are in the sandstone of the sea cliffs and in the talus that falls on to the beach. Go at low tide, walk a few hundred yards south of the Esplanade at Capitola past the sewage outfall. "

"Jack's Peak near Monterey -- there are fossils of little leaves and shells in shale a hundred yards down the trail from the west parking lot. Also, there's lots of jasper at Point Lobos, 5 miles south of Monterey. "

"Pleasanton, Alameda Co. -- upper Miocene brines sandstone -- Go south on Highway 680 from Pleasant, turn right on to Castled Rd., then left on Pleasanton Sunol Rd. Go approx. 1.2 miles, pass under railroad passover, stop at large hill cut for railroad on left side (east) of road and rail tracks. The whole cut, plus the road banks and down slope to right of road is brines sandstone with huge assemblage of miocene marine fauna. Watch out for trains -- Stay away from the railroad tracks! This is one of the best exposures in area."

Copied from old blog.

2003-12-27T15:12:00.000-08:00

From a trip down to the Central Coast of California just after the earthquake.

2003-11-12T11:28:00.000-08:00

J2ME Profiles

Personal Basis Profile vs. Personal Profile: What's the Difference?

Recently, however, two new CDC-based profiles were finalized. These profiles, the Personal Basis Profile (PBP) and the Personal Profile (PP), replace the PersonalJava platform, which is no longer under active development. Like PersonalJava, they provide the classes necessary for building interactive applications. This article describes the two profiles, and compares them to each other and to the PersonalJava platform.

{Recovered from old blog.)

Quantitative data on distributed computing economics.

2003-08-25T12:51:00.000-07:00

Some interesting quantitative data from Jim Gray's Distributed Computing Economics:

$1

= 1GB over WAN

= 10 Tops (10¹² CPU instructions)

= 9 hours of CPU time

= 1 GB disk space

= 10 M database access

= 10 TB disk bandwidth

Computation/network break-even point is

= 10k instructions per byte of network traffic

= 1 minute CPU time per MB of network traffic

Copied from old blog

Satellite Image of the Big Blackout

2003-08-22T13:53:00.000-07:00

From Earth Science Picture of the Day:

Sometimes the emergent behavior from a distributed system is not what you want.

Copied from old blog.

Space-based programming (blackboard communication) on top of JMS

2003-08-16T13:28:00.000-07:00

Using Space-Based Programming
For Loosely Coupled Distributed Systems"

(Copied from old blog)

Space-Based Programming

2003-03-21T09:18:00.000-08:00

ONJava.com: Space-Based Programming [Mar. 19, 2003]

This is a nice overview of the distributed programming paradigm in which applications simply read and write from a shared "tuple-space". Invisibly to the application programmer, a distributed middlerware layer takes care of the replication and consistancy of the data between the processors. The article demonstrates how much simpler this model is than the RPC paradigm that is used for most distributed programming.

Copied from old blog.

MIT initiative on technology and self

2003-02-09T15:33:00.000-08:00

I am currenly listening to a Cambridge Forum speech by Sherry Turkle on our local public radio station. She is the director of the MIT initiative on technology and self.

Interesting stuff. She is talking about the reality and implications of people forming emotional attachments to computation devices ("relational artifacts") like robot pets and dolls. I wonder how much this extends to the ubiquitous computation world that we are exploring in our research?

Copied from old blog.

Trinity College Prof In Our Space

2003-02-05T12:47:00.000-08:00

Dr. Vinny Cahill

This guy is working in the same general area as us.

Recovered from lost blog.

Scalable, Structured Data Placement over

2003-01-20T17:32:00.000-08:00

Scalable, Structured Data Placement over
P2P Storage Utilities

How to overlay a hierarchical namespace on to a flat peer-to-peer namespace. Agile would like to do this.

Copied from old blog.

Basic Czech phrases

2002-12-17T09:46:00.000-08:00

Cheap accommodation in Prague - basic czech phrases

Useful for upcoming trip to Prague.

Copied from old blog.

Yanbin Ben Zhao

2002-11-25T17:17:00.000-08:00

Yanbin Ben Zhao

Tapestry guy at Berkeley. I am probably attending a talk of his tomorrow.

Copied from old blog

My Business Card

2002-11-25T17:10:00.000-08:00

ecardfile - card display

Copied from old blog

Messing around with Java byte code at runtime.

2002-11-25T16:38:00.000-08:00

crazybob.org

Creating classes on the fly. Wow!

Copied from old blog

New JDK 1.4 socket timeout control

2002-11-25T16:33:00.000-08:00

Core Java Technologies Technical Tips


  int timeout = 500; // half a second

  SocketAddress socketAddress = 

    new InetSocketAddress(host, port);

  Socket socket = new Socket();

  socket.connect(socketAddress, timeout);

From an archive on my old blog