Gessel On…

For the last year or so I’ve been waiting for the acceleration slidewalk at the Toronto Airport to open. One day last March I saw it running, but never since. It works a bit like an acceleration ski lift. The hand rests and the tread expand for the first 10 meters or so of the slidewalk as it starts, moving faster as they expand. It looks like it runs about twice as fast as a regular slidewalk - nearly a jogging pace. At the end it slows down as the treads compress into each other. I can’t wait until it opens.

Acceleration_Slidewalk_YYZ.MOV

I noticed that postie was doing a terrible job at resizing images.

It turns out that the default GD library isn’t super good at resizing - it does a simple subsample and the result is quite jaggy (see the GD version of this image in this post)

I think the version above looks a lot better. It should have been as easy as just turning on the “use ImageMagick” function in the postie config, but it wasn’t that simple. Two files were not where they were expected to be. The easy one is “convert” which postie expects to find at /usr/bin/convert, but under BSD is actually at /usr/local/bin/convert. This isn’t a big deal as there’s a config option to point postie in the right direction. A bit harder is ImageMagick identify which postie expects to find at /usr/bin/identify, but for which there is no config entry.

The fix for BSD is to edit around line 1768 of postie-functions.php and change /usr/bin/identify to /usr/local/bin/identify before the first run or by resetting postie to defaults. If you’ve already installed postie and don’t want to reset the defaults you may need to edit the postie config database (I did) using, for example, PHPMyAdmin and set the value of IMAGEMAGICK_IDENTIFY to /usr/local/bin/identify.

And thus one gets nice, pretty postie thumbnails.

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to a panoramic photography product under development. The sample picture they showed was from burning man and the sight reminded me of a company I started way back in 1997 or 1998 with Steve Schaffran, my brother Dan Gessel, and Ken Peters. Steve did most of the business work, Ken built the circuit, and my brother wrote a stitcher application and a fast viewer in openGL.

We made a couple of panoramic tripod heads together: an automatic one and a manual one. They were designed around the old Kodak DCS 120, a camera with a full MegaPixel of resolution.

The manual version was an indexing head that held the camera fairly rigidly and had a kinematic indexing table so that index points were, in theory, subpixel accurate. Of course that depends on the stability of one’s tripod (something we did not, alas, address).

The automatic version had a similar indexing head, but was driven by a small gear motor. The system ran on 8 AA batteries and communicated with the camera via the serial cable. There were two modes: high and low resolution.

In high resolution mode the circuit would tell the camera to zoom all the way in and then start indexing and taking pictures at each point.

In low resolution mode the circuit would zoom the camera all the way out and take a picture every other index point. We had considered doing 3 modes (with a 3x zoom lens) but the camera did not (primitive device that it was) report the actual zoom so there was no way to seek a point other than the ends.

Like the gigapan project, I found burning man an interesting subject… but that was a decade earlier and the crowds were a lot smaller.

Our camp (dis.org) was, that year, exiled some distance from the main camp, but that is a whole different story.

Why do people use windows for embeded applications? It sucks and costs money! How stupid can you be?

New Scientist had a good article in the 10 April 08 issue about the formative books of the youth of 17 leading scientists. I found the most compelling Sean Carroll’s recommendation of One, Two, Three… Infinity.

It reminded me of a book that I remember reading in 4th grade that had a huge influence on my development: The Curve of Binding Energy.

I was already interested in nuclear physics and was motivated to read it. I think the book either inspired or reinforced many things that have become central parts of me; in particular an appreciation that understanding how things actually work gives one the ability to manipulate reality in a way that people who are less aware of how things work expect. Understanding things is lifetime power and (ever more importantly as I get older) a source of amusement. It illustrated how much fun being able to solve problems could be; the subversive (not merely empirical) value of knowledge.

I also learned how to make a mediocre nuclear weapon. Something that has made me a bit of smart ass ever since: if you know how to make the most fearsome weapon on earth it’s hard to be too intimidated. I wrote a paper in 9th grade describing how to build a weapon based on what I remembered from the book. About that time a student at Princeton got a lot of press for making a model nuclear bomb but using toothpaste instead of U-235, coincidently reinforcing my sense of significance.

After high school and after working as a programmer at a health physics company for a summer (and spending some formative time at a nuclear physics lab at U-Penn in grade school) I was one of a small number of nuclear engineering students on the fusion track at MIT. The Curve of Binding Energy inspired a love and appreciation of Nuclear Physics (and a sense of knowing something special) that only an act of congress could crush. When I was a freshman congress canceled funding for TARA, the tandem mirror experiment at MIT that about half the grad students I had just met were working on. While I dropped my FORTRAN efforts in support of FULIB and turned to robotics and eventually computers, I still ended up getting a degree in physics, course 8, not too far in practice or theory from course 20. And in no small part thanks to John McPhee and Ted Taylor.

Some pretty FEA output for DVR’s Parkfield project.

I’ve been getting core dumps from HTTPD since doing an update which included PHP. This happened to me before and I thought I’d try the same solution again, but it didn’t work. Pear was due an update portupgrade -ra would get to the update and error out. Attempting manually force it was a dead end:
install ok: channel://pear.php.net/Console_Getopt-1.2.2
install ok: channel://pear.php.net/Structures_Graph-1.0.2
*** Signal 11

Couldn’t find any help on pear.php.net except to say it was a PHP problem. That seemed more likely when I found that
# php -v
yielded
segmentation fault (core dumped)

Many fingers point to ZEND, and a few to recode.so but one pointed to pspell.so

I deleted that line from my .../etc/php/extensions.ini and voila:

claudel# php -v
PHP 5.2.5 with Suhosin-Patch 0.9.6.2 (cli) (built: Apr 5 2008 16:51:20)
Copyright (c) 1997-2007 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2007 Zend Technologies

I recompiled all the whole PHP dependency tree with -O2 and still it works fine and I could update pear right to 1.7.1

First, UAL has done two things that are quite good:

• The ORD RCC’s former smoking room is now the “quiet room” with big barred out cell phone logos. It is quiet, and very pleasant.
• T-Mobile is FREE at the RCC. FREE! Finally. I’ve been hassling UAL through 1kvoice etc. and the RCC comment cards since about 2001 - long before they even had T-Mobile - to provide free 802.11 to their members. Other clubs do. They got into this big provisioning contract with T-Mobile (or something) and years of comments went no where. It has been about 5 years, maybe the contract is up, but for whatever reason finally there is free WiFi at the RCC. Yay!

Truecrypt 5.1a supports sleep mode! YAY! 5.0 did not, it would crash entering sleep mode. It’s a cool thing, but crashing isn’t. I like the idea that if my laptop is stolen, my info is very likely secure, but not so much so that I can live without sleep mode, even risking a freezy RAM-cicle recovery. I sleep it getting on and off planes all the time and now I can. I’m very happy with this release.

Like many people, I have to use Outlook. It is by far not my favorite email or calendar system; I use Mulberry personally because it does not suck at all and it has a cool calendar I can use offline. I haven’t quite figured out my own webdav server, so I use Google Calendar to keep track of shared events with my girlfriends and others in my life. And everyone can use Google calendar and it does not suck either, so there’s no reason not to.

But it does create a sync issue. One which can be solved with free software and services by the following fine providers:

I end up using Google as my shared hub, sort of. Technically scheduleworld.com is the hub, but it’s invisible to everyone but me. To get there I use the Funambol outlook plug-in to sync my outlook calendar with scheduleworld.com (following these directions). It is not able to sync directly to Google yet because Google has to do it their way. Fortunately the clever man behind scheduleworld has that figured out. I also sync contacts using funambol to scheduleworld, but Google borked the contact API and so they don’t make it to Google Contacts from scheduleworld any more: scheduleworld does have an LDAP server though.

On the well-designed side, I use gcal daemon to sync my Mulberry calendars with Google (my directions here). I also subscribe to the scheduleworld LDAP server from Mulberry so I can access my outlook contacts from mulberry.

Now, oddly, Outlook’s contact databases are painfully borked and the local address book and global address books do not collaborate at all. Stupid. Unfortunately neither does Mulberry offer an option to sync the local address book to one or more remote LDAP directories, which would be very useful. I think there is still an odd disconnect on the part of developers who tend to work stationary and assume everyone has an always-on connection with very rare moments of disconnect, but as someone who gets on at least 4 planes a week can attest: this is not always the case. Even Mulberry, which is the only IMAP client I’ve found that supports a workable disconnected mode, does not make frequently disconnected mode trivial to use - neither to keep IMAP mailboxes in sync nor to provide off-line lookup of LDAP databases.

But Cyrus is responsive and I am optimistic we might, someday, have a good solution. If not, Adobe Air is pointing the way toward a viable seamless connected/disconnected (or periodically disconnected) world. I think this will become increasingly essential as the world goes to frequently interrupted wireless connectivity. Currently we tolerate wireless (WAN) interruptions because we have to, but that rules out far too much of what we’d like to be able to do and solutions thus far are generaly ad-hoc. We need an imperfect WAN connected world that is perceptively as relaible as a wired one.

Capsule summaries of the companies presenting at DEMO 08 in Palm Desert. 76 reviews continue past the break (click to expand):

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