Water Painting

Totally excellent technology. This video, which shows drawings made with carefully timed jets of water, is about five minutes, and pretty dang amazing:

Kim Komando’s Video of the Day » Blog Archive » Water Painting

______________________________________
Buy Nano-Plasm Soft Cover
© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

Original Blogs from 1997

Earliest known blog entries by me from early 1997.

Of course, they are about Microsoft and DirectX.

______________________________________
Buy Nano-Plasm Soft Cover
© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

f00f

f00f - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is priceless. The article covers a range of CPU opcodes that basically lock up the processor.

What's awesome is that the "f00f" in the title sounds like "foof" but it's also part of the opcode!

That's some awesome hexspeak.

______________________________________
Buy Nano-Plasm Soft Cover
© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

The Joy of Brutality

Apple - Get a Mac - Watch the TV Ads - Group

______________________________________
Buy Nano-Plasm Soft Cover
© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

UC Irvine Prof and student speed up Firefox by 40x

Firefox 40x speedup with new technology from UC Irvine:

"The new version of Firefox incorporates a new JavaScript compiler based on Franz and Gal's method that is up to 40 times faster than the previous version. Since Firefox is mostly written in JavaScript, the new compiler enables the browser's code to be optimized while it is running and more than doubles the speed of the browser."

(Wow - I didn't know Firefox was mostly written in Javascript. I don't know if that's great or scary.)

Okay, the 40x speedup is just for part of the browser, and the apparent visible speedup is something over 2x. Still, that's pretty sweet!


______________________________________
Buy Nano-Plasm Soft Cover
© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

SECRETARY OF STATE FILES COUNTERCLAIM IN LAWSUIT WITH PREMIER ELECTION SOLUTIONS, DOCUMENTS EQUIPMENT MALFUNCTIONS IN PREMIER VOTING MACHINE COUNTIES

SECRETARY OF STATE FILES COUNTERCLAIM IN LAWSUIT WITH PREMIER ELECTION SOLUTIONS, DOCUMENTS EQUIPMENT MALFUNCTIONS IN PREMIER VOTING MACHINE COUNTIES: "On 05–29–2008, Premier issued a product advisory notice that acknowledged the problem. Premier blamed, without evidence, the McAfee VirusScan antivirus software for the problem. Premier suggested that counties disable antivirus software on vote tabulation servers to fix the problem. However, the servers were certified with the antivirus software installed. In addition, counties frequently upload thousands of memory cards, leading to a significant amount of time the servers would be actively tabulating votes without basic antivirus protections."

______________________________________
Buy Nano-Plasm Soft Cover
© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

Cult of Mac: News and analysis for the Mac, iPod and iPhone communities » Blog Archive » ‘iMyst’ Will Bring Glories of Early ’90s Mac Gaming to iPhone

Cult of Mac: News and analysis for the Mac, iPod and iPhone communities » Blog Archive » ‘iMyst’ Will Bring Glories of Early ’90s Mac Gaming to iPhone: "Cyan games has announced that it has a three-person team working to port Myst to iPhone, a no-brainer decision that should finally provide something like a killer app game for the device. Way back in the early 1990s, Myst was briefly Mac exclusive, and it typified everything great about that era’s multimedia focus. It was HyperCard-based, it used CD-ROM, and the graphics were gorgeous. And now it’s making a comeback. Can’t wait."

______________________________________
Buy Nano-Plasm Soft Cover
© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

Intel sketches future of Nehalem chip family | Nanotech: The Circuits Blog - CNET News.com

Intel sketches future of Nehalem chip family | Nanotech: The Circuits Blog - CNET News.com

In short, in multi-core processors, cores not doing much can still use power. So, it's better to use, for example, a couple of cores more efficiently than four cores inefficiently.

Turbo mode is enabled by a "power control unit which is an integrated microcontroller which only works on power management," said Rajesh Kumar, an Intel Fellow, who spoke during Gelsinger's keynote. There are about 1 million transistors dedicated solely to power management, Kumar said.

"Turbo mode requires no operating system intervention. It is fully detected and managed by the hardware. If it has detected an idle core, it is able to reallocate that power budget to the other cores," Gelsinger said in an interview after his keynote.

On another front, Intel showed the first eight-core Nehalem chip. "This is the first showing of the eight-core Nehalem-EX," Gelsinger said in his keynote. He said the chip is a monolithic design, meaning that all eight cores are on one piece of silicon.

Nehalem-EP, or Nehalem Efficient Performance, will be a quad-core chip for mainstream servers and workstations. What Intel traditionally calls two-socket servers, Gelsinger said.

______________________________________
Buy Nano-Plasm Soft Cover
© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

Some companies don't get a break ... (Microsoft)

Some companies don't get a break (Microsoft)

A BSOD during the Olympic opening ceremonies.

______________________________________
Buy Nano-Plasm Soft Cover
© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

Olympics' Fireworks were faked! WTF!?

Oh man. This is a serious rip. I really want to root for the Chinese but between this and the underage gymnastics girls it's getting pretty hard.

Sigh. Read about China's inferiority complex.

This proud prickliness has deep historical roots that involve China, the West and even Japan. As I argue in the current New York Review of Books, the most critical element in the formation of China's modern identity has been the legacy of the country's "humiliation" at the hands of foreigners, beginning with its defeat in the Opium Wars in the mid-19th century and the shameful treatment of Chinese immigrants in America. The process was exacerbated by Japan's successful industrialization. Tokyo's invasion and occupation of the mainland during World War II was in many ways psychologically more devastating than Western interventions because Japan was an Asian power that had succeeded in modernizing, where China had failed.

This inferiority complex has been institutionalized in the Chinese mind. In the early 20th century China took up its victimization as a theme and made it a fundamental element in its evolving collective identity. A new literature arose around the idea of bainian guochi—"100 years of national humiliation." After the 1919 Treaty of Versailles cravenly gave Germany's concessions in China to Japan, the expression wuwang guochi—"Never forget our national humiliation"—became a common slogan. To ignore China's national failure came to be seen as unpatriotic. Since then, China's historians and ideological overseers have never hesitated to mine the country's past sufferings "to serve the political, ideological, rhetorical, and/or emotional needs of the present," as the historian Paul Cohen has written.

But wait! There's more:

BEIJING - A 7-year-old Chinese girl was not good-looking enough for the Olympics opening ceremony, so another little girl with a pixie smile lip-synched "Ode to the Motherland," an official said.

In the latest example of the lengths Beijing took for a perfect start to the Summer Games, a member of China's Politburo asked for the last-minute change to match one girl's face with another's voice, the ceremony's chief music director said in an interview with Beijing Radio.

"The audience will understand that it's in the national interest," Chen Qigang said in a video of the interview posted online Sunday night.

______________________________________
Buy Nano-Plasm Soft Cover
© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

Ladies Olympic Showering

Sorry, but this joke I made on Twitter is too good just for Twitter:

... loved the Olympic Ladies Showering event that was interleaved with the Synchronized Diving event.

I noticed the next day that they spent a lot less time watching the men shower.
______________________________________
Buy Nano-Plasm Soft Cover
© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

Isaac Hayes Dies

Isaac Hayes Dies (last paragraph): "Hayes was as surprised as anyone that he regained star power through a cartoon. 'You work all your life, struggle for artistic excellence, and then some wack cartoon happens and you're hotter than you've ever been.' He was 65."

That, my friends, is show business in a nutshell.

______________________________________
Buy Nano-Plasm Soft Cover
© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

Circular

I was catching up on old magazines and I read this:

Professor [Richard] Taylor's paper "A Classification and Comparison Framework for Software Architecture Description Languages" has been identified by Information and Software Technology as the most cited article in software engineering articles for the year 2000. Over the last 20 years, the paper ranks fourth as most cited. The paper was co-authored by Nenad Medvidovic.

in "Innovate ICS", a newsletter from the Department of Information and Computer Science (now promoted to the Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences - since you probably can't find the magazine, you can check out the ICS news feed).

Professor Taylor was my thesis advisor and I was the first student of his to get a Ph.D. It was a great pleasure working with him at UCI.

Anyway, late congratulations to Professor Taylor!

Here's an overhead shot from Live Maps of the UC Irvine campus. Notice the circular shape. I always thought that the design of UCI was similar to the design envisioned for EPCOT at Walt Disney World. Ray Watson was the president of the Irvine Company back in the day and was also on the board of Walt Disney Productions, so I imagine there might have been some information transfer between Walt Disney Productions, The Irvine Company, and the Regents of the University of California. He lived near me in Eastbluff, Newport Beach, CA, and I interviewed him once for a class assignment when I was in high school. He was a great guy and an inspiration to me on how calm an executive can be even with a lot of responsibility.

Here's a picture of the original layout for various part of Walt Disney World (aka "The Florida Project"). Of course, Disneyland has the same circular shape. Some games I've worked on have a hub-and-spoke layout as well (see page 6/7 of the Azurik manual - that's actually a 3D hub because there's an Air Realm and above that the Life Realm and below it all is the Death Realm with the town at the center of the hub).

UCI has changed enormously in the 22 years since I graduated. I need to visit! And to congratulate Professor Taylor in person.

(Note: also check out this view of the ICS building: when I was going to school there this building was the entirety of the ICS department. Notice the square hole in the middle! I once proposed turning the middle area into a giant aquarium! I wonder why that idea never went anywhere ...)

______________________________________
Buy Nano-Plasm Soft Cover
© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

iPhone Gem

Slate Magazine - iPhone Gem - last paragraph on page: "The LAT reports that Apple has removed an application called I Am Rich that iPhone users could have bought for a mere $999.99. So what did 1,000 bucks buy? 'Once activated, the user is treated to a large, glowing gem,' says the LAT. 'That's about it.' A total of six people purchased it. 'I am sure a lot more people would like to buy it—but currently can't do so,' the product's developer said. 'The App is a work of Art and included a 'secret mantra'–that's all.'"

______________________________________
Buy Nano-Plasm Soft Cover
© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

Chief Cranky Geek's Kid vs. Craiglist

Save CraigsFindr.com

Craigslist vs. John C. Dvorak and his child. This will be a battle to behold.

In the meantime, Dvorak, where's Veronica's Star Trek outfit?



______________________________________
Buy Nano-Plasm Soft Cover
© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

#080808

It's another fun date: this time it is 2008 / 08 / 08 or 080808 or #080808 in Twitterland.

So, enjoy that.

Tomorrow morning it will be 08 / 08 / 08 08:08:08. You'll want to enjoy that even more.

(Apparently an "8" means strength in Chinese; also my friend Rick tells me that "8" is pronounced "ba", so "88" approximates "ba ba" or "bye bye", and is suitable for ending IM conversations.)
______________________________________
Buy Nano-Plasm Soft Cover
© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

How magicians control your mind - The Boston Globe

How magicians control your mind - The Boston Globe: "At a major conference last year in Las Vegas, in a scientific paper published last week and another due out this week, psychologists have argued that magicians, in their age-old quest for better ways to fool people, have been engaging in cutting-edge, if informal, research into how we see and comprehend the world around us. Just as studying the mechanisms of disease reveals the workings of our body's defenses, these psychologists believe that studying the ways a talented magician can short-circuit our perceptual system will allow us to better grasp how the system is put together."

______________________________________
Buy Nano-Plasm Soft Cover
© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

YouLicense Gets $1 Million For Online Music Licensing

YouLicense Gets $1 Million For Online Music Licensing

This seems like the same kind of thing as the PodSafe Music Network. I think in the long run this kind of licensing will win out. It's another nail in the coffins of the record companies.

______________________________________
Buy Nano-Plasm Soft Cover
© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

Cameras

I've been thinking of getting a bitchen' new Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) camera so I can take way cool pictures. Instead of buying a Nikon D200, I bought a book about it, which only costs 1% as much as the actual camera ($14.00 vs. $1,400.00). As I read I thought about what I really want in a camera and I realized my Sony mini DV camera already does all of the things I want!

My Sony TRV80 mini DV camera shoots 2 megapixel stills as well as video. It has a lot of advantages over both simple point-and-shoot cameras and fancy DSLR cameras:

• It's pretty fast;
• The pictures are small (1600x1200), but close enough to the size of most displays, and I only look at pictures on displays these days;
  
• I already have a lot of "digital film" (memory sticks) for it;
• It has a million adjustments;
• It has a 10x zoom lens that looks really good;
• It has a night vision mode;
• Even without night vision, the low light capabilities are pretty good;
  
• It has a tripod mount;
• It can shoot little 640x480 pictures really fast;
• The battery lasts about a hundred years (like four hours of continuous shooting), plus I already have spares;
• If I have it with me, I also have a mini DV camera with me!
  
• It has a nice big display, which is also touch sensitive, for easy menu access.

And so I decided to skip the D200 mega-bitchen' camera. But one result of my investigations was a renewed interest in hauling my mini DV camera around and shooting some pictures. Here are some pictures of Enatai Beach Park that I shot over the last few days.

I think one thing that started me thinking about a new camera was the fact that I don't like my current Sony DSC-S500 point-and-shoot camera that much. It's five megapixels but slow. Sheesh. It's such a pain to hold still. Whereas I can hold the the mini DV with both hands with the viewfinder right up against my eye and keep it still while shooting at 10x zoom. This is very nice! I can turn the resolution on the S500 to lower values but it doesn't seem to improve the camera speed - it probably still takes the same size picture and then reduces it.

I guess I decided that if I was willing to haul around a D200, then I should be willing to haul around my mini DV camera, which is probably about the same weight, especially with a good lens on the D200.

My friend KichiGuy says modern cameras are slow because they are processing the pixels and doing a lot of color and brightness balancing after they shoot, and that I should consider getting a newer one, because it will have a faster processor. I suppose that's a good idea, but all cameras are like 8 megapixels minimum now! The only advantage from those extra megapixels is you can crop and keep the resolution up ... which is nice but with my mini DV I simply frame the picture I want from the start! I like that better. The pictures at Enatai Beach Park are unprocessed (except I might have cropped one or two). It's all good to say "I'm going to shoot RAW images 'cause then I can fix 'em up anyway I want ..." but really, who has the time? It's better to shoot the right picture at the time.

So, I'm sticking with the Sony TRV80 until it dies, which should be quite some time from now, as it's pretty solid.

I'll finish with this shot of a bumble bee taken with my TRV80 - the kind of shot for which I thought I would need a D200:



Click for 2 megapixel version


______________________________________
Buy Nano-Plasm Soft Cover
© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

Kaizo Mario World LP - Special Stage 2 - First Time

The site Let's Play" has recordings of people playing video games. It is responsible for the massive increase in bandwidth usage at our house.

This video contains a massive amount of swearing: Kaizo Mario World LP - Special Stage 2 - First Time. I have been known to swear this much.

My kids were watching it and brought it my attention. My thirteen year old boy says, "Who's Bill Cosby?", who is referenced in the video. I can't explain it. "He had a TV series," I say. And he says, "And?" I guess having a TV series is not notable enough. *Sigh*.

My favorite line in the video is, "I'm enjoyed myself today. I guess I'm going to have to say 'F*&* YOU' more." Really, it's funny, watch the 18 minute long recording of this guy's torture, and you'll find out for yourself. And then, if your children find out about it, they will increase your bandwidth usage by about 10 gigabytes a day. I'm not fucking kidding. 10 GIGABYTES. A DAY.

If Comcast succeeds in limiting usage, I am screwed, and I will be using words like the guy in the video uses.

A note about the video: it's made by video taping an emulator. So the guy can restore the complete game state at any time, including his motion. He saves a zillion times in order to make it through the level. The actual level is a "ROM Hack" where the level has been altered by, in this case, a sadistic bastard, or more generally, just someone who wants to make a level. Most ROM Hacks are hard, my seventeen year old tells me, because you're expected to play on an emulator.

I remember an old argument about game saves. The argument, which was wrong, was that everytime you saved your game, especially in Doom and Quake, you were removed from the immersiveness of the game. I thought, "WRONG!" Saving and restoring is a huge part of the game! It defines the gameplay! Games were you don't die, and just generally get your health back are okay too, but sometimes the life/death cycle is part of the game, and should be respected.

And then there is Kaizo Mario World, where respect has nothing to do with anything at all.


______________________________________
Buy Nano-Plasm Soft Cover
© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.

Robot solves Rubik's Cube

I used to be able to solve Rubik's cube. I've forgotten how, sadly. I was inspired to learn how and get fast at it by Douglas Hofstatder who came to UCI to tive a talk and I ended up going to a special lunch with him, where he whipped it out (the Rubik's Cube) and solved it, generally, in about a minute.

I bought one recently but never got around to relearning how to solve it. It used to sit on my desk as a conversation piece. What happened to that thing ...
______________________________________
Buy Nano-Plasm Soft Cover
© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.