Category Archives: General

Dorkbotlex #1

Posted on 2009-03-16 by pappp

3359235534_1cdf0bd6fd.jpg?v=0
I went to dorkbotlex last Saturday (pi day!) and just got around to flickring the (few) pictures I took. Flickr set here. There are also some videos on their tumblr page.
As always, it makes me really happy to see signs of geek culture in Lexington.

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I am Psychotic.

Posted on 2009-03-15 by pappp

I definitely just made another editing pass on a paper that I got an A on and have no plans to resubmit anywhere, just because I wasn’t happy with it. Urgh. The link is updated in the Multiracial Cognition post.

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Misc. Photoblogging

Posted on 2009-03-12 by pappp

I found a couple nifty one-off images when I was cleaning out my camera’s memory card and decided to shrink (10MP is not blog sized) and post them. Midsize images linked from images in post.

Image 1: My room has a really nice view of the Lexington skyline. Picture taken sometime during the ice storm this year. (For anyone trying to figure out where I live from the image… taking advantage of UK’s lack of a coherent privacy policy is way easier)
WinterWindow_sm.jpg

Image 2: Roughly the same view out the window, but this time in better weather, and playing with ISO/Exposure/Etc. settings on my camera (a Cannon SD770IS, with which I am quite pleased). This is the best of about 20 shots out the window, ranging from leaving the camera on full auto to manually setting the exposure length/ISO speed/color balance, and a bunch of other things I’m still vaguely surprised can be set manually on a compact point-and-shoot. Considering how bad Canon compacts tend to be in low light I’m pretty impressed with the image I got, even if it did take a while to produce it. I’d still like to figure out how to get around the noise/grain.
window_sm.jpg

Image 3: The schlumbergera I plant-napped when I moved last summer bloomed the other week. It seems to like the spot on the mantle in my room (next to an outside wall, they require cool to bloom) and watering schedule I have it on; it had a good growth cycle earlier in the year, and is now blooming. (disclaimer: All parties involved seem to consider it justified plantnapping, I had been taking care of it since before I lived with it.)
schlumbergera_sm.jpg

The latter picture is one of the rare occasions when the macro mode on my camera worked properly when presented with a significant depth of field. In a related matter, the SD770 is finally becoming supported by CHDK so I can get the awesome extra features I was presuming would happen when I bought it. As soon as I get some time I’ll have to set up one of my spare SD cards and try it out.

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Multiracial Cognition

Posted on 2009-03-11 by pappp

As promised, my CGS500/CS585 survey paper on research into cognition in multiracial individuals. (PDF) (PDF, edited)
The material is good, and the basic organization is sound, but I don’t really feel like it’s a particularly good paper; the quality of the writing and the low-level organization both feel a little sub-par. This may be because I did the last couple rounds of writing and editing while drastically overtired (illus: I misread the regression line in the graph, so the 2009 extrapolated US multiracial population is wrong, it should be 13 million). It may also just be that I have a horribly warped set of standards.

The part I really enjoyed, almost to the detriment of the paper itself, was the precursor research. Once I got into the appropriate lingo and started following references I found that there is a reasonable body of research into multiracial persons. I could have happily spent another month heading down the referential rabbit hole and wallowing in reading material. I found a great many things which were either familiar or explanatory to my own identity. In particular, it brought to mind an experience I’ve long found a little peculiar; last time I was in Hawaii, I started talking to the Pleasant Holidays rep (we bought our hotel on Oahu as a package), who was also hapa-haoli, almost as soon as I got off the plane, and had mostly re-normed to a local accent in 5-10 minutes. She was the first of several people to ask me, usually unprompted, how long I had been away [from Hawaii] as though I was local (”Local” is specially connotative there). I’m reasonably sure I’ve experienced the same effect earlier times my family has been out on the Islands, but just not been aware of it. My take is that it is an example of the hypothesis of several of the articles I read; that the lack of a same-race peer group for almost all mixed race individuals weakens our feeling of normative pressure/belonging, and causes a sort of low-level stress, so the sudden presents of other hapa-haolis puts me at ease and causes me to immediately begin conforming.

The other thing I really got out of this paper is the degree to which publishers are an impediment to the availability of information. Particularly disgusting is the LA Times article on president Obama’s multiracial background used for example material; the article was referenced elsewhere, which lead to a paywall, so I tried to use UK’s LexisNexis and Newsbank subscriptions… which refused to turn up a year-old article. I then put the article title into google, and the article in question came up in unencumbered full-text directly from the LA Times page. This is basically the same problem story of ILL hate from earlier in working on the paper. I don’t seem to run into this problem as much with computer and engineering topics, but I suppose that is jointly the result of us all being habituated to working around copyright, and the fact that the vast, vast preponderance of articles in the area are published by IEEE, to who’s publications I have ready access.

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Southeastcon 2009

Posted on 2009-03-10 by pappp

Some highlights of my experience:
* The robot team got owned hard. Didn’t pick up a single object during competition, although it worked pretty well during the last run on the practice field.
* Our ethics competition team took 1st, and a UK student’s paper took 3rd in the student paper competition, so UK’s student branch made out pretty well overall.
* I *can* stay up for 43 hours straight, as long as I get a few quiet minutes to put myself into a meditative state every 8ish.
* Robots can be worked on any time, any where, any state of intoxication (image).
* It is possible for every single sensor mechanism on a robot to fail catastrophically over a span of a few hours.
* It is unwise to have temperamental people working on programming, especially more than one; once that happens no one else can touch the codebase, and huge amounts of time will be wasted on hissyfits.
* It is in fact possible to fabricate a variety of effective sensors from items found at WallMart. Optical mouse bits+ laser pointer bits= optointerrupter. Thick wire + thin wire + suspension = pressure sensor.
* I really enjoy how friendly the competition is. Competing teams share tools and parts and help each other… I think we all sort of regard it as a karmic system.
*This will be updated with a link to pictures/videos which are supposed be posted when they become available, I don’t feel like cleaning and uploading mine separately, and most of the ones I’d like linked are supposed to be handled by others.

Next year’s robot will traverse a course indicated by the same RF fence used this year, on the same astroturf field, with a number of added wood and plexiglass obstacles. The difficulty will come from having to begin the round with no stored energy, and use high intensity lighting on the field to gather power. The organizers are already clever enough to put a “commercially available parts only” rule to keep schools with access to experimental solar panels from employing them, but there are still going to be issues with some schools throwing money at the problem. As much as it is a nifty task about which I have a variety of ideas… I’m not sure that I want to be involved. This year’s robot was, while fun on the technical side, an exercise in frustration mostly due to personalities on the team, and time consuming in the extreme; I’d rather avoid being on the hook for it again. Maybe in an expressly limited advisory role or something, we’re discouraged from having graduate students on the team anyway.

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Screen Printing With Bleach

Posted on 2009-03-03 by pappp

While further procrastinating, I found the ellembee shop at etsy, who sells gorgeous shirts (partly) subtractively printed by screen printing with bleach, which is a damn nifty idea. For those not attuned to that particular bit of interweb, etsy is a website for buying and selling handmade things, mostly crafty in nature, and is a wonderful place to browse for novel objects… like subtractively screen printed shirts.
Ellembee only makes womens shirts or I would already have one of the bleach + chocolate ink “floral” pattern shirts on the way. I’d consider contacting them about making a mens/unisex tee, maybe on one of those amazing universally fitted American Apparel shirts like shirt.woot uses, but I’m a little afraid of how much it would cost… it seems like something perfectly acceptable for a male to wear, but it has long been established that I have slightly effeminate tastes.

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Retro Computing

Posted on 2009-03-02 by pappp

I saw retr0bright, a hobbyist produced restorer for antique plastics go by on the geek newses(first via /.) today. It probably does do a little bit of damage to the plastics when used, but I doubt it’s much worse than another year of aging. I love antique computing tech, and this provides a flimsy excuse to ramble about it a bit instead of working on all the things I should be.

I’m specifically interested in retr0bright for restoring the plastics on the Mac SE I yardsaled some years ago. I picked it up partly out of waning to poke around in a one-piece Mac, and partly because the case information indicates it is +/- a few months of my age, which makes it a nifty conversation piece. The machine is a fun project box as well; Mac SEs have bays for two drives, either two floppy drives or a floppy and a hard drive, I mounted a small spare SCSI hard drive into the internal frame with a little bit of EM shielding, and kept both floppies. Having grown up on Macs (the formative computer for me was a Macintosh Centris 660AV running OS 7.1. The machine is still in my parent’s attic, but I’m fairly certain its video board has died. The SE is sitting on a shelf in my old room in my parent’s house, and when last I tried it was still fully functioning. People who knew me in middle and high school will remember that one side of my room was covered in a selection of aging Apple hardware, it was a big part in making me the hacker I am today.

I am mostly unimpressed by modern Macs (although I wouldn’t mind a Mac or a hackintosh to play with), but still sometimes pine for awesome old mac software; this is what Basilisk][ is for. Coupled with an appropriate ROM image and disc or disc image (both of which I keep around), Basilisk][ can emulate a 68k mac on a Windows, Linux, OS X (and possibly others) host. This lets me reminisce, and play with old software from my childhood without having to bust out any finicky old hardware. A lot of the things I keep on the drive image are games I remember from childhood, especially a couple of old Ambrosia software titles like Barrack (a particularly awesome jezzball-like game) and the first two titles in the Escape Velocity series (which are perfect non-classical RPGs). I also keep a copy of Word 5.1, which is in some ways still the best thing Microsoft ever made, and some other productivity titles from the time. It’s always neat to see what changes and what stays the same.

In the same vein as Basilisk ][, one of my other formative experiences in geekry was learning about emulation, staring with the Super Nintendo and snes9x. The joy of “You can play all those awesome old games on your computer” has always been an almost irresistible motivator, both for myself and for passing on to others. Emulation also provides a great outlet for compulsive behavior for lots of people, especially when you start to look into the world of ROM collectors (ROM in this case refers to software copies of games, which were traditionally stored on ROMs). My interest in emulation waxes and wanes, but I always keep at least a distant eye on the scene, and have always sort of wanted a MAME Cabinet (a standup arcade cabinet with a computer that runs MAME to allow it to be all arcade games in one. Maybe now with the hacker space I can interest some others in putting one together, so that I don’t end up with a full-sized standup arcade cabinet that I have to worry about moving around with me, but can still build and play with one.

While talking about retro tech, it’s important to mention the other computer really important to my geek development the Winbook XL my parents bought me when I started middle school. It is a bog-standard, if slightly cankerous, Pentium MMX laptop (intel chipset, yamaha OPL3 sound, Chips&Tech graphics, etc.) with an awful, awful 12.1” passive matrix LCD. The machine was my first serious experience with windows, with hardware and software upgrades, with system administration, and, most importantly, with Linux. My first distro was SuSE 7.2, I then bounced around for a while, briefly settling on Slackware, and eventually finding my way to Arch, which has been my primary OS for years. As for the machine itself, some of the port covers fell off in its first few years, and the hinges failed after about 5 years. A few months ago the backlight(or backlight transformer) gave out… but the bulk of the machine still works, and has BeOS (a wonderful, beautiful OS that is a perfect example of computing that could have been) and Debian systems on it. I get it out from time to time when I need another beater box to try something on.

Obviously computer history is something I love, from the truly early stuff, (Babbage, Lovelace) and even more the World War 2 era (Mauchly, Eckert, Aiken, Von Neumenn, Turing, Zuse…) into the 70s, 80s and 90s when computing technology really began to permeate the world. The best book I know of on the topic is A History of Computing Technology, 2nd Edition, if anyone knows of something better, especially for more modern stuff, please tell me.

Posted in Computers, DIY, General, Navel Gazing, Objects, OldBlog | 1 Comment

IEEE Robot

Posted on 2009-03-01 by pappp

My extra timesink for the surrounding few weeks has been helping out with UK’s IEEE Southeastcon Competition Robot.
I spent a lot of time last semester making a never-quite-working (but very educational) vision system as a senior project; we opted not to use it (the “never-quite-working part) a few weeks ago, but the rest of the robot isn’t (wasn’t?) really in order to compete, so there have been lots of little things to take care of. This year’s robot “recycles,” it has 4 minutes to gather Coca-Cola empties (conference is in Atlanta, GA this year, of course its Coke) off of a 10×10 astroturf field, and sort them by material (glass, aluminum, plastic). Full rules are available here. The current state of the robot looks as follows, and has at least a rough software framework to drive the pictured hardware.
IEEERobot1.jpg
I don’t have an awful lot of time to dedicate to it, so I’ve been trying to take care of little things; soldering jobs, little pieces of glue code to make the software work, passing information around the group to make sure everyone stays synchronized. Hopefully it’s been useful. Indications are that there will be a reasonably competitive robot in a week, there has been a lot of a lot of people’s time and effort (not to mention a fair chunk of the UK IEEE Student Branch’s money) invested in this year’s robot, so I certainly hope so. I may even get all the OTHER things that the time spent on the robot and going to the conference proper is pulling time away from.

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RIP Philip José Farmer

Posted on 2009-02-25 by pappp

Apparently Philip José Farmer died this morning (via boingboing). Farmer has been one of my favorite (Up there with William Gibson and Kim Stanely Robinson) SciFi authors for some time, his Riverworld series is arguably one of the best efforts in world building ever, and is a wonderful widely allusive piece in it’s own right.
I’ve heard it advanced in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way that people go to whatever afterlife they believe in; if so I’ll see you at the grailstone “Peter Jairus Frigate“

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Yay Synthpop!

Posted on 2009-02-23 by pappp

Somehow I missed that Electric Valentine put out an album last November. The album is The Friends With Benefits EP and it is quite good. I went on an Amazon mp3 binge and downloaded their entire catalog… for less than the price of a normal album, and its worth listening through.
Electric valentine is made up of Lauren Baird and Chris Qualls, who are the Singer and Programmer for A Kiss Could Be Deadly. A Kiss Could Be Deadly’s self titled album was probably my favorite album of last year, and everyone with the slightest inclination toward pop/electronic/punk should give it a listen.
Seriously. Right now. Go.
The Electric Valentine tracks are generally a little less dark (the title track *isn’t* about killing a lover’s competing interest) than the A Kiss Could Be Deadly tracks. They also tend to be a little more synthetic sounding (no guitar, more “unnatural” sounds, drum machine instead of drums) and distort the lyrics more (vocoder?). That said, the fucking impeccable pop sensibilities are still there, and Lauren’s voice still manages to be at once incredibly powerful and confident, and, to borrow a phrase, make you want to say “aw honey, It’s going to be OK.” I like. Not quite as much as A Kiss Could Be Deadly, but I like it, especially “Electric Ghosts” and “A Night With You”.
In other synthpop thoughts, I gave Lady GaGa’s extraordinarily popular debut album The Fame another listen and … it’s still mediocre. It has its high points, the first single “Just Dance” is definitely catchy, and “Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say)” is a good pop song, but all told the album is merely OK for the only really breakout hit from the genre recently. I end up having the same problem, although not to the same degree, with it as when listening to Kanye West — it’s not bad, but it isn’t as clever as it thinks it is, and its terribly self involved.

I have to say I’m fairly pleased with Pop lately, some reasonably Avant-garde interesting stuff is bubbling up into the public conscious, and the indie scene is producing a lot of good things. Examples arranged from the true mainstream to stuff I’d be a little surprised if anyone else had heard of.

* Katy Perry’s One Of The Boys is an absolutely impeccable pop album and far more interesting than the drivel that was passing for pop in the 90s. Definitely my favorite product of The Matrix, who are responsible for a shocking fraction of mainstream pop in the last decade.
* The Lady GaGa Example Above
* Hellogoodbye had their improbable 15 minutes in 2006.
* Vanessa Carlton is continual favorite of mine, and always hovers around on the edge of the mainstream. Heroes and Thieves was a consummate pop album.
* I only recently became aware of Tegan and Sara, a pair of lesbian twins from Canada who write excellent pop.
* The Modern, a fluidly named British Electropop band that finally put out an album in 2008 after years of producing a scattering of catchy individual tracks.
* The A Kiss Could Be Deadly/ Electric Valentine examples above

Links to pay for albums specifically mentioned in the above post (explaining my ethics system for paying for music would be as long as this post, do whatever you do):

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