Screenshot: A Weblog

There's a meme going around, most recently seen by me over at 50 Books in which you share your first time orderiing at Amazon. I looked it up and my first order was from June 1997 - back when you got free mugs from them at Christmas and free bookmarks in your orders - for a set of five books:

• 60 Crocheted Snowflakes, which I still use every year to make new thread snowflakes for the tree
• The Harmony Guide to Crocheting, the absolute best guide to crochet and its various stitches and techniques I've found
• Audubon Birds in Cross Stitch, a purchase born out of excessive optimism in my then-budding interest in cross stitch
• The Difference: Discovering the Hidden Ways We Silence Girls, a good discussion of the topic, if a bit of a retread of Mary Pipher's themes
• Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace, which is a nice blend of the scholarly and the personal anecdote, though I'm sure on re-reading it I would find it somewhat dated at this point

I appreciate that Amazon bothers to keep a list of all previous orders available on their site so you can look up stuff like this.....

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Via A, this is a really good and entertaining video illustrating the Double Slit Experiment. It's an animated segment of a larger film on quantum physics and discusses both the role of the double slit experiment in establishing wave-particle duality and introduces the impact of the act of observation on what is being observed. Recommended for either physics fans for the entertainment factor or for anyone who wants a low-impact way to learn a little bit about quantum physics.

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I am the excitedly proud new owner of a iRobot Create, basically a Roomba with the vaccuum parts ripped out and an attachment to let you program it in C or C++. So, first, I've got to go in to my office tomorrow and retrieve my copy of Kernighan & Ritchie. There's also a guide to WinAVR (the robot's development toolset for C/C++ programs) over at SourceForge that seems pretty good. Though - damn - I haven't had to deal with makefiles in forever...

Woooooo! Robots!!!!!!!

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There seems to have been an explosion of carnivals since the last time I browsed the Blog Carnival Index. If you haven't seen a carnival before, it is a group that arranges for people to collect and link to posts on a particular theme on a weekly or monthly basis. It's hard to imagine you won't find something to interest you if you scan through their listings. Just now I lost myself in the latest entries from the Books Carnival, the Carnival of Chocolate, and the Carnival of Game Production. Carnivals seem to come and go, but they're an interesting halfway point between a portal and social bookmarking.

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I was asked the other day why I no longer write reviews of the books that I list as "recently reading" in my sidebar. The answer is two-fold - one, I started reading books faster than I could review them and I had fallen into a compulsion to only review books in the order I read them, and two, I've never upgraded the section of my site where I store book reviews, and it's a bit of a hassle to post them there because it is all hand coded.

But, I want to start reviewing books again. And so I've told myself I will review the books I read in 2007, starting with a nice clean slate. I've also decided, in the interest of actually making this happen, to not worry about updating the "reviews" portion of my site until the summer - I'm adding a "Reviews" category to my weblog and that can be used to find my current reviews on the off chance someone is interested.

So, without further ado....

The first book that I read in 2007 was a guilty pleasure, because New Years Day really calls for spending the day curled up on the sofa with a pot of coffee and a mystery novel. I've been reading Grafton's alphabet mysteries for several years now, and picked up S is for Silence when I saw in in mass market paperback a couple of months ago. It was exactly what I had come to expect from a Grafton mystery - the plucky, loner private eye Kinsey takes a case that seems unremarkable until it turns out there is more to it than meets the eye. She takes impromptu road trips to follow a hunch, lives out of her purse, eats greasy diner food, aschews intimate relationships, and things get tense when she starts to get too close to the truth. Having read through the complete works of Raymond Chandler last summer, the refiguring of Marlowe in a modern female PI is obvious.

In this episode, a woman asks Kinsey to track down whether her mother ran away several decades earlier or if she was killed and the body was just never recovered. The writing is good enough to keep you from noticing it, and there was some fun play with flashbacks to keep the story interesting. I appreciated that Grafton got away from her recent trend of introducing a romantic interest for Kinsey into the books, and in fact focused pretty much exclusively on the mystery with very little time spent on Kinsey's friends or angst about her own dark childhood. These aren't the types of mysteries you're likely to solve on your own - you can certainly guess where things are trending but the clues don't all come out until the end. As I have with her last few books, I wish that Grafton kept the books more up-to-date; they seem to have stayed set in the 80's, when the first books were published, and it is distracting for the stories to be almost modern, except for all of the times that Kinsey would be in far less physical risk if she carried a cell phone. But, for a lazy holiday weekend, it was well executed escapist fun. A '+' for doing what it was intended to do well.

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I've got a bunch of random integrated circuits left over from my intersession course so I think I'm going to try these tips on how to uncap/open various integrated circuits on a few of them [via Make: Blog]. The pictures in that guide aree really interesting just by themselves. Perhaps cooler is the weblog that the post is from μblog: engineering from the trenches, which is just filled up with cool geek content covering most of the spectrum of electrical engineering.

Posted by Amanda at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In a new wrinkle on security concerns about e-voting, a Diebold voting machine key is copied from a photo on the Diebold website [via Boing Boing]. According to this article, the keys for all of the voting machines are the same, are very simple, and a detailed photo was available online until this story came out. Once one has a key, the machine is open to sabatoge, including code insertion to transparently modify election results. The availability of the photo is almost an example of seemingly trivial information being potentially compromising in the wrong hands, except it doesn't seem that tricky to realize that you probably ought not put a close up photo of a key, or really any security device, on the internet. Even if you can't make a copy based on the photo, you'll learn a lot about what it will likely take to pick the lock. A company under so much scrutiny for their security really ought to know better.

Posted by Amanda at 9:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Nothing - nothing! - that I could have to post tonight could trump how proud I am of my students right now. I've been teaching an electronic design and robotics course, and they have been building line-following robots working up from resistors and transistors and comparators and motors, and with the big competition tomorrow, they look amazing. I was thrilled when the prototyped circuits worked as designed, but these guys have been pusing to get their prototypes actually on the ground and following paths. Today I've seen them tackle figure-eights, divergent paths, and complicated looping patterns. I can't wait for the official competition tomorrow - I think it's going to be incredibly exciting.

Wish you could be building robots with us? Wish you were building a killer ninja robot? Play around with Robot Rage, where you build yourself a virtual "battlebot" and steer it through battles. You won't have as much fun as we are, but it's still pretty cool....

Posted by Amanda at 8:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Two fun gravity games just came my way... Via Clicked there is Cosmic Crush, in which you are a little planet wandering the universe, eating smaller bodies to grow up into a big planet. It's fun once you get into it, but a bit dull to start. Less boring, but a little more frustrating, is Spaced Penguin! [via T] in which you shoot a penguin towards its spaceship in the presence of various gravitational bodies and other less astronomically accurate phenomenon. Spaced Penguin has been around for a while, but I haven't seen its new cousin, Doom Funnel Chasers! before - it seems to be the exact same thing, but different....

Posted by Amanda at 10:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today in class I talked a little about what makes something a robot, or an androiod, or a cyborg, but I didn't bring up the notion of an automaton. This article has a really nice description of Jaquet-Droz's writing automaton, including video [via Clicked]. The article points ot that the automaton is really closer to being a precursor of the computer than a precursor of the robot, because it can change what message it writes out based on a "program" on a wheel. Though, the "program" is not truly a program, as it does not change the essential functioning of the automaton, but simply
a specification of how to perform its one very limited behavior. Certainly, there is no true autonomy, despite the name.

If you're looking for a classic automaton story, you should read through the Wikipedia article about the mechanical Turk hoax from the late 1700's/early 1800's. It's a pretty amazing story of people's willingness to believe that machines are capable of more than they really are based on some minimal plausible evidence.

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I have relatively little to add to this hilarious post from defective yeti about the stupidity of Deal or No Deal except to agree that the show is idiotic, relying on the mathematical ignorance of its contestants and audience. It really makes me crazy that people think "the banker" actually makes decisions about what to offer based on a personal assessment of the contestant, when it is clearly a selection of an amount from an error range around the mathematical expectation of what the contestant might win. Yeti's proposed game show might be more entertaining - I'm trying to brainstorm who would be a good host. Anna Kournikova? Martha Stewart (who would never do it, but who would be hilarious to watch if she did)?

Posted by Amanda at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

WIth a major project done, the temptation hits to pick up too many new things to fill the fake void in one's schedule. I'm working on finishing off a variation of the Cheesy Love sweater with a more argyle style pattern across the front in pastel cotton. But I also spent the afternoon browsing through my latest issue of Craft and somehow only just realized that like the sister publication Make, Craft has a weblog with great links to projects and patterns. I've been trawling through the archives and the following were the standouts, some of them particularly geeky....

• Knit an iPod case out of cassette tape - wonderful and cute!
• Knit Atari Breakout and Apple Logo socks - sadly labelled "TechGuy Socks"
• Knit a donut
• Star Wars fairisle patterns for sweaters, or whatever else you like
• Make the Enterprise out of an old 3.5 inch floppy
• Knit mittens with pockets for RFID cards, designed for subway passes
• Repurpose cool tshirts into cute panties
• sew the Dana wrap skirt from the neat Fitz Patterns which provides free downloadable sewing patterns

Not everything they link is a crafty pattern. I found this guide to using a spreadsheet and Gantt chart to plan a large dinner there.

In unrelated news, D asks me to share Poke the Penguin in honor of Penguin Awareness Day...

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As part of putting together a document about the courses I have been teaching, I decided I wanted to be able to share some screen capture video. I've done next to nothing with that sort of software, so I solicited recommendations and two people pointed me in the direction of Camtasia Studio. They have a 30 day demo version which, from the little that I tried, seems to give you access to a fairly complete version. I didn't use the audio or webcam functions, but it looks like it would be really easy to combine annotation from one of those sources over a screen capture video. The screen captures themselves looked really good - mine are only a bit jerky and it looked like I could have tweaked the settings to make them even smoother if I hadn't minded the file sizes growing even more. I've also done very little video editing in the past, but the built in tools, whle probably not as sophisticated as some of the stuff out there, seemed to be fairly robust. I really only scratched the surface with the software because I had a very targeted task I was trying to accomplish, but if you have any reason to want to create a video demo of something on your computer, particularly with commentary, I'd definitely recommend trying this software out.

Posted by Amanda at 5:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So very, very busy right now, so I will just leave you with the following - a classic from Usenet that has particular appeal to me this week: MAKE.TENURE.FAST

Posted by Amanda at 7:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm getting down to the wire on a few projects, so here is some random fun to get you through the middle of the week....

I'm a huge Stephenson fan, so I'm excited that the SciFi channel is making a mini-series out of Diamond Age. It isn't my favorite Stephenson book, but I actually like it a lot - more than I think a lot of people do. I really love the idea of the instructional friend book/computer. It reminds me of some of the parts of Ender's Game I liked a lot. They're having Stephenson do the adaptation, so it might actually be good. And then maybe we'll get Snow Crash: The Movie!

More fun from the Make Blog: if you know how to wire up an LED without exploding it, you can do this Embarassingly Easy Case Mod. I have a feeling some of my readers will enjoy the radio-controlled potato gun. Finally, I must make myself this Tetris Tote Bag.

And, I must remember to tell my students about the Butterfly Amicus 3000 - a ping pong playing robot.

Posted by Amanda at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In class tomorrow we are going to talk about 5 variable Karnaugh maps, having just done 2-4 variable Karnaugh maps. I'm partial to the 5-variable versions pictured at that link with the diagonal lines to indicate the top versus bottom of the map. Working through some examples for my lecture notes today, I noticed that they look an awful lot like quilt patterns, like these traditional Nine-patch Blocks. I am now determined to design a quilt based around a five-variable boolean expression - I envision blue fabrics for true, white for false, and maybe yellow for don't cares. I just need to chose a good boolean expression, now. I'm thinking of looking for a good quote with an interesting logical structure that I can translate into an expression and go from there....

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There are tons of articles that have been written about the impact of e-mail, IM, text messaging and the link on communication, but this is the first article that I've read that discusses their impact on the scientific community [via A&L Daily]. Besides claiming that scientists communicate more informally using the internet than when written letters were the most common form of communication - a non-controversial claim - it looks at the historical impact of not having a tangible record of scientsts' communications. Analysis of conversation through letters has often been used to trace the path of ideas and ascertain scientists' original insights and though processes as compared to simply their published final product. It seems possible that this might have implications on patent cases or determination of scholarly credit as well. It's certainly the case that e-mail can be saved, but I think that most people delete messages or don't bother maintaining old archives as they move from account to account as they change jobs. Given that one can't really be sure what communications might be interesting in the future, it argues for more care being taken in electronic archival in general.

Posted by Amanda at 11:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Via Boing Boing, this article draws a pretty awesome analogy between the RIAA and 17th century French button-makers who worked to block individual innovation to protect their business interests. The quote that is getting passed around the most on this topic as the demand by button-makers to be able to search people's homes to make sure that they were not using buttons made from outside the guild. Note that the analogy does not (from what I see at least) argue that individuals should be able to rampantly appropriate others' ideas without due credit and compensation, or argue for the theft of buttons because of the outrageous behavior of the button-makers guild....

Posted by Amanda at 5:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's just a short little blurb, but report is that starting this year the MCATs are going to be graded automatically using an artificial intelligence system, rather than human graders. The MCAT, like the GRE, moved to a computerized format recently to allow more frequent administration. The essay section, though, was graded in much the same way with multiple readers scoring the writing samples and a degree of consensus being required for the final score. The claim is that the AI system is more consistent than human scorers. I've certainly read that human scoring can vary widely. The AI system, IntelliMetric has been used in a variety of settings so far, including a range of domains. I've not read through the papers on their site in detail, but it seems to be a basic learning algorithm that works from a corpus of pre-graded writing samples to match essays to be graded to various scoring catagories. I'll definitely be reading more about this, both for reference for my own research and possibly for inclusion in my spring class. I want to look into what types of errors they are getting compared to the mistakes made by expert raters, if they have that data available....

Posted by Amanda at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Oh yeah - the little clutch purses whose instructions are given here
are soooo cute and also look like the perfect way to use up a moderate amount of a pretty fabric, though the designer comes at it from more from an interest in using the cool handles you can find in craft stores. The pattern seems very scalable - make a little change purse or a full sized bag - or a set of both. I've got some awesome purple plaid silk that I'm going to made a box-pleat summer dress out of, and I'm thinking the scraps would make a really cute accessory, though I'll have to think about how the plaid will line up in that pattern...

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I was looking for fun mini-projects last night over at instructables (I made this Simple Circuit Game today but with a buzzer instead of an LED during lab today - if you're local stop by and play!) and along the way I discovered a ton of instructions for office toy guns, mostly out of K'Nex. The video on the K'Nex Gatling Gun is really awesome. But then again, K'Nex are awesome. At the least, I want to dig mine out and make a K'Nex iPod dock.

Posted by Amanda at 10:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Relating to another colleague's intersession class, I lost a lot of time browsing the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods [via Boing Boing]. The periodic table itself is pretty nice, though I found it distracting that the abbreviations were not the expected abbreviations from the periodic table of elements. What would be great would be if, in addition to getting examples of the visualization methods on mouse-over, clicking took you to a page describing the method in detail. I also find their distinction between data and information visualization interesting - they seem to use a distinction similar to the one I often use in class but stressing to a greater degree the impact information, as compared to data, has on cognition - a distinction I might choose to borrow and stress myself next semester.

Posted by Amanda at 10:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've got robots on the brain this month, so this link via J (who got it from Digg I think) is apropos - old advertisements with robots in them. I actually think that the first one on the page is my favorite; it strikes me as ironic....

Posted by Amanda at 4:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Actual Conversation:
Them: Guess what tomorrow is?
Me: What?
Them: MacWorld keynote!
Me: (sarcastic) wooo
Them: It is wooo! That's when we find out what all the cool new gadgets are.
Me: It's like a cult.
Them: Yeah - tomorrow is when we hear from our leader!
Me: I hope he doesn't tell you all to take multiple wives....

Posted by Amanda at 8:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It's the first day of the semester for me, tackling a new class which I am both insanely excited about and having the requisite new-class jitters over. One of the things I love about my school is having the opportunity to totally obsess about just one course for a month - I've been lucky and always been able to teach something I was interested in obsessing about for a whole month, which I suspect makes all the difference.

But, I'm pretty scatter-brained this morning because of that, so today I'll just bring you a smattering of random fun stuff - call it the weblog version of the traditionally hodge-podgy first lecture of a class.

It's been everywhere, but if you didn't hear, Wired labels Pittsburgh one of the top 10 tech towns, largely because of the presence of CMU but acknowledging the real growing tech industry around here. And our high complement of comic book stores...

I'm not usually a fan of puns, but User Friendly makes a math pun today that just kills me.

While such statements are usually exaggerations, it is quite possible that Digg got it right in labeling the play in this video the worst play in hockey ever.

I suspect there are two distinct groups of people: those who are unwarrentedly geeked about there being a new, and wonderfully horrible looking, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie coming out this spring and those who think it is the final nail in the coffin of our film industry. It is possible that both groups are right.

Posted by Amanda at 8:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Building on yesterday's post about the command-line interface, the same sorts of interface concerns play into this discussion of the renewed relevance of the vi input model when using a laptop [via Digg]. The argument is that, without a mouse and with generally poorly placed navigation keys, editing that centers on the home keys and minimizes complicated key combinations is ergonmically desirable. This actually relates nicely to an article I saw linked over at Slashdot about motivations behind the design of vi based on an interview with its creator Bill Joy. The liimiting factors back then were certainly different than those motivating a continued interest in the editor:

It was really hard to do because you've got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an upgrade. 1200 baud now is pretty slow. 9600 baud is faster than you can read. 1200 baud is way slower. So the editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting slower than you could think.

Posted by Amanda at 3:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I had a conversation a few weeks ago about frustrations that current OSs, or at least their documentation/presentation, overly obfuscate the ability of users to have a command-line interface as wll as a graphical one, reflecting an invalid, in my opinion, assumption that only hard-core power users would ever want a command-line interface. Over at Lifehacker, there is a really nice analysis of the current incarnation of the command-line embedded in our GUIs. Intuitively, this model of the merging of the two approaches to interaction feels right to me. A trivial example of my own habits is that I always call up the Windows built in calculator by hitting the Windows key, up arrow twice to Run..., and type "calc". It's faster than puttiing an icon shortcut, and I also don't want another icon floating around my toolbar. Especially for the calculator, which is something that I only use occassionally, but when I do use it I want quick access. It would be nice if the GUI defaults made it clearer to the average user that these capabilities are available to them.

Posted by Amanda at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is probably the best electronic hacker project I've seen ever: a computer-controlled push puppet for IM notifications. [via JK] How can you go wrong? You get to build a neat robot thing, attached to a cuddly puppet dog, and it contributes to your IM addiction by letting you know when your friends are around! Scroll down for the video - soooo cute! It's enough to make me switch to Linux....

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It's too bad I'm not teaching my Cyberattacks class again this January, because the Month of Apple Bugs would be a great resource. I always run that class on Windows PCs because, statistically, there are just more Windows exploits out there right now, but it's important to remember that no operating system is immune from exploits. We should definitely expect that, as Apple continues to grow their market share, OS X exploits will become more common too. What's interesting is the number of exploits that aren't just coming through traditional operating system holes anymore, but are taking advantage of online services that play some of the roles of an operating system, such as the recent Gmail address book vulnerability. None of the cases I've seen seem to require predictions of doom and destruction, but I anticpate that the next difficult push in security education is going to be educating the average user about the sheer breadth of vulnerable points in their average computer usage.

Posted by Amanda at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Today marks the third anniversary of the Mars rover Spirit landing safely, with Opportunity's anniversary coming up in just a couple of weeks, and the accomplishments of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission in that time are astonishing. Not only have they kept two robots running on the surface of a distant planet years longer than planned, but they've continued to use them to collect valuable data. The rovers have recently had their programming updated again to allow new functionality, including new recognition algorithms based on what we've been able to learn about the surface of Mars so far and what scientists now think they are looking for. To celebrate the anniversary, NASA is sponsoring a Photo Contest on their site asking visitors to vote on their favorite image collected from the rovers from the past three years - you should definitely head over and check them out, especially the final image of a sunset over Mars - beautiful!

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I've been a fan of the online comic Narbonic for quite a while now, and was sad to see it come to a close at the end of 2006, though with the strip becoming more plot-driven, and its overall longevity, it was actually a satisfying close. If you missed the strip and want to check it out, not only are the archives all available online, but starting yesterday Garrity is re-circulating the strip to her front page starting from the beginning, adding a "Director's Cut commentary" to each one - interesting back story if you don't mind the risk of spoilers. I'm looking forward to her discussion of the first appearance of Antonio Smith, Forensic Linguist!

Posted by Amanda at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If, like me, you never remember to get a new calendar until the start of the new year, you could always just print out a copy of the Classic Pulp Sci Fi Magazine Cover Calendar downloadable from the Website at the End of the Universe. [via Boing Boing] While I would generally object to what is essentially a bikini-girl calendar, I love the old sci fi art and I think it's really interesting to consider the images as historical artifacts. There are actually four years worth of calendars at the site to browse through, if you are interested in such things.

Posted by Amanda at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)