Category Archives: Entertainment

Spiffchorder Progress

Posted on 2010-10-12 by pappp

As I mentioned when the parts arrived, I recently decided I wanted to build myself a Spiffchorder to play with, and, more generally, play with the VUSB Stack, which provides software USB for most AVR microcontrollers, using a few cents worth of extra passive components. This seems to be an excellent generic solution to the “Modern computers don’t have hobby-accessible I/O” problem for most applications. I’ve actually been using a VUSB device for a while since my usbtiny AVR programmer is an ATTiny2313 running VUSB with some additional support chips and code.

When I ordered parts, Newark was out of suitably-packaged ATMega168 chips, and their larger (RAM/ROM), pin-compatible sibling the ATMega328p was so close in cost I would have ordered them anyway. There is a warning(#8) about -p suffix chips (stands for PicoPower, meaning some additional power staving features) and VUSB, but it seems to be a simple problem with naming conventions in the interrupt vectors, and is fixed in recent versions.
I’ve been grabbing an hour here and there to put it together over the last week. So far, I’ve already spent some time on one of my favorite activities…
spiffwork_sm.jpg
which produced a nice tight board (The back isn’t quite as neat, and the socket I ended up using suuccckkkks)
spiffboard_sm.jpg
which, as far as I’ve discovered, had only one assembly error (the pull-up network on D- was between ground and… ground because I counted wrong), which was easily remedied.
While I was assembling I also put together a half-assed first approximation keyboard to test with
spiffkeys_sm.jpg
Which will eventually be upgraded… I’m thinking something flexible that can be clipped to the outside of my left pants pocket, or flopped on a flat surface such that the clip maintains the curvature, but I really just want to play with it and see how (un?)comfortable it is to use a chording keyboard. Maybe I’ll get bored and build a key-glove, those always look fun (and useless).

Now for the real problems… even after I fixed the wiring glitch, and touched up the code (minor fixes to make it recognize the 328p and set the fuses correctly), I wasn’t getting anything when plugged into USB. I borrowed a 168 from another project (and transparently swapped in a 328p there) to test the vanilla code, and it resulted in a board that generates a stream of errors like

usb 2-1.1.3: new low speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 15
usb 2-1.1.3: device descriptor read/64, error -32

when plugged into any of my various Linux boxes. I then decided to upgrade the VUSB version (the one the 0.98 release is built against is truly ancient), which only took a few minutes of tampering to set up the usbconfig.h (and Makefile) to work with the Spiffchorder sources and IDs. Unfortunately, this only fixed the 328p problem… it now does exactly the same thing as the vanilla 168 version, and produces a string of USB enumeration errors when plugged in.

My understanding is that -32 errors are usually something to do with devices that aren’t correctly handled by ECHI (USB2) mode controllers, but a device that requires you disable ehci mode on a modern computer is pretty much useless, and it doesn’t appear VUSB should have that limitation. This is my current working tree, it seems to be at least as sound as the distributed version; when I get it working I’ll ping the original author about the update, and replace these if it turns out to be a software problem. I’m going to hook it up to some instrumentation on campus tomorrow to see if I can find the problem, I suspect something screwy with the voltages on the USB Data lines.

Posted in Computers, DIY, Entertainment, General, Objects, OldBlog | 1 Comment

The best kind of box

Posted on 2010-10-05 by pappp

newarkbox_sm.jpg
is the kind full of TOYS (or, well, toy parts).

This order has some bits and bobs (optoisolators, limit switches, etc.) for the never-ending milling machine project, a couple spiffchorders worth of parts (more on that later), and some spare ATMega328s, because they seem to be a universal solution to “medium” microcontrollers.

This is the first time I’ve made a personal order through Newark, their “We won’t tell you exactly how much this will cost to ship until you’ve agreed to pay” policy is more than a little customer-unfriendly for small orders, and their website is the furthest thing from user friendly… I AM an electrical engineer, and picking what I want there is a challenge. I made a couple mistakes in this order: I grabbed 15.24 mm (as opposed to 7.62 mm) 28pin DIP sockets (just not reading), and apparently not all 12×12mm MCDTS2 switches can accept the caps described as “Switch Cap; For Use With:12×12mm MCDTS2 Series of Multicomp Tactile Switches; ” because the ones I ordered sure as hell don’t have attachment points for the covers like the picture in the datasheet.

Otherwise, very satisfied. Low price, massive selection, and fast ship. I think I’ll add them to the list. For the curious, my parts usually come from DigiKey, Sparkfun, and AllTronics, which are broad, easy, and cheap respectively, although other vendors don’t have the cachet of the little red Sparkfun boxes.

Posted in DIY, Entertainment, General, OldBlog | Tagged | 1 Comment

Zero History

Posted on 2010-09-27 by pappp

(This should be spoiler free)
I just finished reading Zero History, slowly, both because I don’t have much time to do so, and because I was savoring it. That kind of writing is the closest thing to a religious experence those of us who don’t do faith get to have. Note that when I say “slowly” I mean “over the course of 2 weeks, since my copy arrived;” had I not been drawing it out it would have been more like two sittings.

Firstly,do NOT read it without first reading Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. A majority of the characters are common, and are thus introduced without preamble. There are also enritching references to the earlier novels throughout, including several major plot elements which are best left as surprises. On the topic of surprises, I hit an “Oh. Oh holy shit” 335 pages (of 404) in. The first time a book has surprised me in AGES, and it is a wonderful surprise that ties the Bigend trilogy together… and then, in standard Gibson style, entirely loses relevence to the narrative. The revelation is neatly enough laid that one could have figured it out prematurely, but is elegantly enough veiled to discourage such things. Imagine reading Dan Brown and NOT knowing the answer in the first few pages.

Gibson’s writing constantly pushes my vocabulary (which, as one might expect based on how much crap I get for my ordinary diction, is a very unusual thing), and my cultural knowledge (which, again, is unusual; I compulsively consume two news magizines and an unholy lot of Internet every week). I far prefer reading his more recent work with google in reach to fill in the gaps in both, something he has suggested is intentional, or at least approved of.

Looking at the whole trilogy, Pattern Recognition is still perhaps my favorite single novel, and I was disappointed when Spook Country came out, although that may be residual effects from my first attmept to read it in a codeine-induced haze; I literally got the book on the way back from having my wisdom teeth out. There is no disappointment with Zero History – it has all the marvelous locution, and fabulous collection of ethereally related plots that I read Gibson for. In fact, it makes Spook Country better, by tying all it’s plots into a greater system, making them more interesting than they were on their own, like the disinteresting constituent bits of a fascinating mechanical device. I don’t think Zero History stands on it’s own nearly as well as Pattern Recognition, but, particularly as the improved sucessor to Spook Country, it is an excellent novel.

The one nagging concern I have when I think about the Bigend trilogy is about it’s longevity: they are heavily, heavily steeped in ephemera of the moment, to the point that it is partly their topic, and it is unclear to me how well that will age. Pattern Recognition is my favorite largely out of fondness and nostalgia for the ‘now’ it was written in, although also out of a taste for it’s overt topic. It least suffers the problem simply because it predates much of the internet’s collective consciousness, despite having said consciousness as one of its chief concerns. In contrast, Zero History is made up of ecclectic references to Festo’s more eccentric products, iPhones, quadrotor drones, and ekranoplan; things renderd exciting through the fickle fascinations of the interent. Hopefully, like the Curtas and origional toilet seat iBook that filled such roles in Pattern Recogniton they will continue to stand on their own interest.

In short: Go read it, and it’s prequels if you haven’t. It is by far the best novel I’ve read (for the first time) in years, and retains all the enjoyable trappings of popular fiction, despite its literate complication.

Posted in Entertainment, General, Literature, Objects, OldBlog | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Myrias Research Corporation

Posted on 2010-09-04 by pappp

myriaslogo_sm.jpg
The current incarnation of my unhealthy love of computer history is a mild fascination with Myrias Research Corporation (1984-1990), precipitated by seeing some of their marketing materials (now misplaced) in my advisor’s collection of old computing ephemera after finding a reference to some of their programming tools in my research.

Myrias was, roughly, a spinoff from the University of Alberta in the early 80s, right in middle of the golden age of supercomputers*, who made moderately interesting M68k-based parallel supercomputers. What I find really interesting is their focus on programming models and tools (You know, parallel programming tools, like that thing I’m working on for my masters’ thesis…), which they built in a neat POSIX-ish (POSIXy?) environment. Also catching my interst, like many of the supercomputing vendors at the time, they had bitchin’ industrial design (Go look at Tamiko Theil’s CM-1 design for Thinking Machines for the canonical example), using chassis that appear to be enormous granite-colored corian blocks with a 45deg clip on one corner. Their major lasting impact was in their parallelizing compiler technology, of which pieces apparently still persist in several modern commercial compilers. Their software designs also seem to persist beyond their code base, in that my original interest came from noticing some striking conceptual similarities between LLVM, which I am currently working with, and the G ISA virtual machine and tools from Myrias 20some years ago.

To collect them for my reference, and for others engaged in similar clicktrances, the online resources I am aware of are:
This flickr photoset of some marketing materials from one of the original team members.
This everything2 article by the same individual.
A number of scholarly publications 1, 2, 3, 4, which are extremely informative , but not visually interesting. There are also a number of boring application (”$Pet_app on the SPS-2”) papers to be found.
I’ve also come across some, mostly passing, mentions in the computer press from the late 80s, mostly via paywalled newspaper aggregatiors.

If anyone knows where I could find pictures and/or marketing materials, particularly chassis photos of an SPS-1 and/or SPS-2, that would be amazing.

* “The golden age of supercomputing” is one of those rough consensus terms, I take it to mean from the 1960s, when technology first got small and fast enough to make serious machines, until about 1994, when less radical designs based on commodity PC hardware caught up to and mostly destroyed the market for novel machines. Of course, no one I know was involved in precipitating this transition.

Posted in Computers, Entertainment, General, OldBlog | 7 Comments

2009 Nebula Awards

Posted on 2010-05-17 by pappp

I just saw that the 2009 Nebula Award winners were announced while I was travelling, and the few I know are interesting choices. I’ve also read a few of the runners up in the Short Story/Novella/Novelette sections, which I remember as being particularly good. I’ll have to track down copies of the ones I haven’t seen, I’ve been trying to read at least most of the Nebula short form candidates for the last several years, and its always been a good experence.

The most interesting thing to me is that I had just read the Short Story winner (”Spar” by Kij Johnson) in the car on the way up to Madison … and been entirely underwhelmed, which was really surprising, since her previous successful short story “26 Monkeys, Also, The Abyss” was one of my favorites last year, and I’ve been found of most of her other short fiction. Figures that the first thing of her’s I’ve read that I didn’t like wins a Nebula. It definitely was the sort of thing that is challenging enough to be an award winner.

While talking about short stories, I want to note that I’ve always tended to like my fiction in extremely short form, or extremely long form, the past several years have mostly only afforded me time for the short form, and my main fix for the short form stuff has come from the “The Best Science Fiction And Fantasy Of The Year” series, which is excellently curated by Jonathan Strahan. I picked up the first one on a suggestion+Whim shortly after it became available, and have picked up the others as they became available because they are reliably excellent collections. I’m still working on this year’s, and am a little bit less impressed, but it is still riveting reading. My two favorites (which haven’t aligned terribly well with the various awards) in previous years have been:
Vol. 1
“Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)” by Geoff Ryman, and “D.A.” By Connie Willis
Vol. 2
“Dead Horse Point” by Daryl Gregory, and “Sorrel’s Heart” by Susan Palwik
Vol. 3
“Beyond the Sea Gates of the Scholar Pirates of Sarsköe” by Garth Nix, “26 Monkeys, Also, the Abyss” by Kij Johnson
With “Dead Horse Point” being most under-appreciated of the above.
I also like that there have been several in each, but particularly in Vol. 3, that are really rich literary riffs, references, connections or extensions with sometimes improbable famous works. As a particularly weird example, I had the powerful impression that “Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel” is a riff off of Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev, but the genesis is officially explained differently. If you like SF/Fantasy, and especially if you have a limited amount of time to spend reading, this is the annual collection to get.

Posted in Entertainment, General, Literature, OldBlog | 1 Comment

On Intelligence

Posted on 2010-03-25 by pappp

I recently finished On Intelligence, a book on the underlying mechanism of cognition by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee. I very highly recommend it to anyone interested in brains and cognition, it is a very accessible read, with excellent content.

I’d been slowly, slowly working through the book, which should have taken me about 3 hours in two sittings, over the course of several weeks, due to lack of free time, and finally got a block of time on the bus on to the way to SoutheastCon to finish. The cohesion and detail of my understanding probably suffered from reading half of it in 10 minute sittings over the course of several weeks, and the other half on a single shot later, but it was still excellent.

The important thing is that the book has a wonderful main argument: Basically, they argue that the neocortex is running a single, simple hierarchical memory-prediction model everywhere, for all the senses, and this algorithm is intelligence. It is a beautiful, simple model, and like most such models is largely untestable with current technology. Unlike most such untestable models, the end of the book includes a list of “just out of reach” testable predictions, which shows welcome understanding and acknowledgment of the issue.

I only had a few objections to the ideas in the book. Chiefly, I object to the degree to which he rejects behavioral equivalence. I pretty firmly do believe that any system which perfectly emulates intelligence over all sets of inputs and outputs in a given domain is intelligent in that domain, and tend toward the “Virtual Mind” argument on such things. In particular feel that if there IS a single, simple algorithm for intelligence, there should be a (probably unbounded) number of “intelligencally equivalent” algorithms which yield intelligence, just as there are an infinite number of computationally equivalent mechanisms for computation. In general, it seems unlikely to me that there is only a single mechanism by which intelligence (which may be sufficiently different than our own to be difficult to recognize) can arise. This fits well with the idea of domain-specific intelligences he suggests in the latter portion of the book.

The authors themselves are neat as well; Jeff Hawkins was the founder of Palm and Handspring, and is roughly the father of handheld/ubiquitous/mobile computing. He was initially trained as an electrical engineer, then, like many other interesting EEs, decided he was more inclined to pursue his interest in intelligent machines, which has resulted in the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience and Numenta, to understand the brain and build brain-like machines. He has a TED Talk on the same topic.

I’d like to find a book (or other large body of relatively accessible text) on the “Emergent property of parallel systems” or the similar “Society of Mind” theory of intelligence, it’s the only other one I’m aware of that seems both reasonable and testable.

Posted in Computers, Entertainment, General, Literature, Objects, OldBlog | Leave a comment

last.fm

Posted on 2010-03-13 by pappp

As I’ve been telling myself I would for a while, I set up a last.fm account and attached most of my media playing devices to it:

http://www.last.fm/user/PAPPPmAc

The update behavior is …quirky… but I’m not sure if that is a symptom of my usage or the service. I had a bunch of tracks go from “now playing” to “yesterday evening” (apparently because it is confused about time zones), and a few tracks have been randomly excluded/doubled up/etc. (I think it excludes tracks it doesn’t know?), but I’m reasonably willing to call it working server-side. Client side, maemoscrobbler on the n810 is being twitchy, probably because I’ve replaced a bunch of OS pieces it interacts with with patched versions, but basically seems to work. The last.fm plugin in Rhythmbox on my media machine is much better behaved. I wonder if the squirrelyness is just because I had different clients from the same IP in rapid succession.

There are a couple behaviors that seem natural to me and don’t seem to be integrated: I’d really like to be able to export my whole music library into their connection service, and let it feed back selections to the media player via some protocol; It’s the first thing I’ve come across that even competes with my old Rio Karma’s “Rio DJ” features, and I want to be able to do the unattended “play similar music” stunt with my own music library.

Now to see how long until I leave an album muted on repeat for an entire weekend and poison the account’s history/suggestion engine.

Is anyone else scrobbling?

Posted in Announcements, Computers, Entertainment, General, Music, OldBlog | Leave a comment

Dollhouse.

Posted on 2010-01-30 by pappp

SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS!
I just got to the last episode of Dollhouse, and far from my “OK, not great ” impression when the show started: Oh Fuck Yes!

The plot got complicated in wonderful ways, the characters became interesting and compelling, and (in retrospect, probably most importantly) the acting stepped up; Eliza Dushku (Echo) and Fran Kranz (Topher) get their “crazy” roles down perfectly by the end; Echo really does seem to shift between personalities visible from the earlier episodes, and composite states thereof (the best are the composite/Caroline transitions), and Topher really does come off as a shattered genius. Even the actors I strongly associate with previous roles mostly rolled over; Eliza Dushku as Echo instead of Faye and Tahmoh Penikett as Paul Ballard instead of Karl “Helo” Agathon stopped having that weird “third character” effect for me only a few episodes into the series, and Summer Glau as Bennett Halverson instead of River Tam, and Alan Tudyk as Alpha instead of Wash were mostly de-aliased, but only mostly; partly as a function of screen time and partly as a function of the relative similarity of the characters. It’s worth noting that three of the four character aliases are from other Whedon series.

The end of the plot arc is a solid ending to almost all the threads, and it completes the way I would have liked in almost every way: Most importantly, it works out such that the solution to a technological problem is understanding and improving technology (not necessarily the same technology; in this case it was). I pretty strongly feel that way about all sorts of tech, and in particular like that it stresses that the worst thing to do is to try to hoard or hide a technology, as that is how it comes to be abused. I was also very pleased with some of the character choices; the sympathetic interpretation of Adelle is mostly affirmed (and the odd, vaguely oedipal relationship between Adelle and Topher is just neat characterization.)
I think the only big issues is that I would have liked an extra season in the middle to develop things at a more stable pace, particularly the Boyd/Rossum plot, and the redemption of Alpha, which just kind of appear in the second-to-last and last episodes respectively.

As for the closing episode itself, the aesthetic for Epitaph Two is spectacular; it cues from Fallout and Mad Max (I believe it actually made a couple of in-joke references to each), and has the same Whedon last desperate battle feel from Serenity (which, frankly, is a good look.)

A couple of my favorite quotes from the closing episode:
Topher to Adelle: “I’ll fix what we did to their heads, You’ll fix what we did to the rest of the world — Your job is wayyy harder”
Echo: “It’s just the next thing.” (on spending years underground in order for actives to retain their memories when the world is reset… and the reset itself.)

For someone watching from the start (and everyone with even the slightest inclination toward scifi really should), do watch in broadcast order. Having Epitaph One in the middle really does enrich the mystery of the second season.

Now the last (non-terrible) Sci-Fi standing (at least until Warehouse 13 and Stargate Universe come back on) is Caprica, which has just started actually running. Hopefully it lives up to its pilot, it was promising in many of the same ways Dollhouse proved to be interesting.

Posted in Entertainment, General, OldBlog | Tagged , | Leave a comment

What the Dog Saw

Posted on 2010-01-10 by pappp

I went on a binge a while ago and read all of Malcolm Gladwell’s books available at the time. They’re all pop-science pieces on sociological/psychological matters, with really spectacular breadth and readability. The only big downside is that they tend to have glaring issues with correlation v. causation and statistical rigor, which make some of the conclusions he draws a little irritating, and more than a little suspect. I enjoyed all three, so I was pretty excited when I heard he was coming out with something new.

A friend bought me a copy of his new book, What the Dog Saw: and Other Adventures earlier in the break, and I devoured it in a couple of sittings, finishing up earlier today.

What the Dog Saw is a little different than his previous books; instead of having a central topic, it is simply a collection of 19 articles he wrote for the New Yorker, broken into three loosely themed sections. Interestingly, all the articles used in the book are available in an archive on his website (along with many others), so the book is more of a convenient selection than a sole source. This decision may be an experiment to see if free availability affects sales; based on some other authors who have performed similar experiments, it probably won’t, and may actually boost sales as people get hooked and decide they would rather not read the whole thing off a screen.

In my opinion two of the articles stand out above the rest; John Rock’s Error, which discusses the public health implications of some strange decisions by birth control pioneers and Million-Dollar Murray, which discusses fundamental issues with the way social service issues are handled. The other thing I really enjoyed is that reading through the set, a large number of the articles work together to form a ringing and very thorough condemnation of the goals and methods of modern business culture, from risk perception, analysis and handling, to hiring practices, which agree with my feelings on the matter (feelings which form a part of my inclination to remain in academia on a permanent basis).

The book is both better and worse for lacking a central theme; worse in that it doesn’t have the depth of the earlier books, better in that it avoids the overwrought, dubiously justified conclusions that made the last bit of each of its predecessors painful to read. Not an extraordinary book, but fun, and way better for you than reading more Internet garbage. Certainly worth reading (as are his other three) if one has the time.

Posted in Entertainment, General, Literature, OldBlog | Tagged | Leave a comment

Musical Clicktrances

Posted on 2010-01-05 by pappp

I’ve spent a disgusting fraction of my winter break embarking on various clicktrances, in to all manner of vaguely embarrassing and totally useless topics (The Elder Scrolls Lore? Rimfire Rifles? The hunt for new Electropop?). I’d really love to know the etymology for “Clicktrance;” it gets used on BoingBoing frequently, but I’m not sure if that is where it was coined. For those unfamiliar with the phrase, a clicktrance is a common (and my favorite) term for the situation where one finds something marginally interesting/attractive/etc. online, and, hours later, discovers they’ve been intently link following from it. The phenomenon still always makes me think of the Eugen Roth quote I posed a while ago while griping about Distractability.

As for the last clicktrance topic, lately I’ve been noticing the only way to actually find interesting music on the Internet is by finding some weird little scene and browsing in it. The last round of unusual finds I listen to consistently (A Kiss Could Be Deadly, Electric Valentine, Hyper Crush) are all out of the same Southern California scene that I stumbled upon via Pandora, then clicktranced through their mutual linking. Another more recent (for me) example of the phenomenon: earlier in the break I found my way into a link cluster for some British pop starting (Warning: The following links may consume hours of your life)here, and here. Most of what turned up ranged from unremarkable to truly awful, but had a few gems. These include
Ellie Goulding – A pretty good, synth-dressed version of the “Girl and a Guitar” archetype.
Little Boots – Imagine if the “Girl and a Piano/Guitar” archetype were translated to “Girl and a bunch of bitchin’ synthesizer gear” in the best way possible.
Example – His older pure storytelling hip hop is terrible, but he has found quality pop hooks, and produced the following two tracks, which are pretty amazing. Apparently there is a whole album like that coming, and I will obtain it on first opportunity.
Loebeat – Noise meets Pop, it’s truly something different. The “Dicey $Verbs” videos are fascinating, basically ambient/noise with storytelling value. The player on their website includes direct links to the MP3s so you can make it portable for when the odd sounds haunt you hours later.

Later in the same foray, I got off the British common thread and found a couple other winners. The pick of that batch was from the always exciting electronic, girly, and morose vein: Fan Death, who are probably named for the very, very weird Korean superstition. They only have a handful of tracks available (including creepy-awesome videos for 3 of them), but they are all excellent, and there is supposedly an album coming. Also, the leads’ names are captivatingly ridiculous: Dandelion Wind Opaine, who is apparently a fixture in the Vancouver techno scene (?) and Marta Jaciubek-McKeever.

In general, I’m so pleased the Kid + Pop Sensibilities + Synthesizer = Electropop/Synthpop genre is being legitimized by acts like Owl City. His current tour mate, Lights, is pretty fun as well, but a little too saccharine for my tastes.

All the links in this post should be copyright-legit; it would be irresponsible to just link easily available torrents for everything with a published album…which is irritatingly only about half of the bands listed.

Posted in Entertainment, General, Music, OldBlog | Leave a comment