04.28.05
Posted in General at 9:59 pm by Steven
A friend of mine once related a story about a programming class he took in college. There was another student in the class who asked the professor on the first day: “This is all fine, but, how do we know what computers can do?”. The professor tried to give him an answer. But clearly the answer wasn’t good enough, because he asked the question each day for a few days, then dropped out of the class.
While one could have a little snicker about that story (I know I did :-)), it’s not that there was anything at all wrong with the question, it was just in an unexpected context. Had it been a philosophy-of-technology class, that would be the perfect way to lead off the semester.
Which leads me to my main point: that sort of simple question is worth pondering for oneself: “How do I know what I can do?”, or in a social context, “How do we know what we can do?”.
It’s not an easy question to answer, at least for me, but an important one, even if it’s only asked implicitly. I’m not likely to embark upon something unless, in some sense, I think it’s within the realm of possibility for me to do it. But how do I know what I can do? Having a clear understanding of where my confidence (and lack thereof) comes from would allow me to systematically probe the borders in different directions, rather than just waiting to accidentally get there by magic.
It occurs to me as I write that that the concept of confidence, and some ideas related to it, can be hollow if it is understood as some sort of a tank in a person that must be filled, but without knowing of what it is filled or how.
(Umm, this came out less well-formed than I thought it would, mainly because I’m learning about the topic as I write about it. Hope it was useful to you to read it…)
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Posted in General at 1:11 pm by Steven
I take it back: it is possible to turn off almost everything but the focus-follows-mouse behavior in the True X Gizmo (that I mentioned earlier). Here’s a .reg that sets things the way I like ‘em.
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04.27.05
Posted in General at 6:39 pm by Steven
For the lighter side of and more serious discussion of how to do consulting badly, may I suggest:
Huhcorp: We do stuff. and Compass Newsletter (see the “Naked Consulting” series).
The sort of stuff touched on on these two sites is a reason to avoid calling oneself a consultant. But I don’t have any better word yet for what I do and wanna do. I suppose, though, that if someone’s view of me is materially informed by a single word, then I’m already headed down the wrong path with that that person.
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Posted in General at 5:46 am by Steven
Some stuff I’ve started listening to: U B U W E B :: Marshall McLuhan. Always good to hear from ol’ Marshall. I had not previously been exposed to his sound-collage facet. Cool.
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04.21.05
Posted in General at 11:47 pm by Steven
Speaking of innovation and hence entrepreneurship, Lifestyle Entrepreneurs is a series of pretty interesting columns about people who have intertwined their entrepreneurship with their lives in general to get something that’s ‘not just a living’ (the title, by the way, of a book by Mark Henricks, the author of those articles (loc, amaz)).
That’s my goal with my consulting career, although there are times when that seems less possible than pithy titles would suggest. It’s nice, then, to see books and articles like these as a reminder that people can do this and also some details about how. I think there are still a few books to be written about this topic, because I haven’t been completely satisfied with any that I’ve seen yet.
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Posted in General at 11:36 pm by Steven
I saw Jeff Lindsay giving a presentation called “The Magic of Patents” at ISU. Pretty entertaining to mix in some magic tricks, woven in in a way that actually made some sense to the presentation.
I’m still not sure how much magic there is in patents, though. The deepest feeling I had coming away from the talk was that patents were going to keep me from doing great things for the world. That feeling wasn’t permanent or well-reasoned, but it was still there. The fact that it’s so expensive and time-consuming to get a patent means that it would be hard for me to get one, yet (relatively) easy for some big company to come up after the fact, get a patent on something I’ve used successfully, then use the patent against me. I guess I just have to make sure to get some prior-art evidence documented for anything I think _might_ be patentable, then worry about all that stuff if it ever gets to that level.
But, like I said, the fear was not long-lived or necessarily reasonable. That’s the way I start to feel sometimes, though, when I hear legalistic stuff in its various forms. The sharp edges give my brain papercuts.
Patents are pretty interesting, though. That they’re (ostensibly) built around the idea of forcing inventors to divulge their work for the common good in order to get the incentive of enforced exclusivity for a period is a pretty neat idea in itself. Lindsay gives that idea credit for forming the core of the power of American innovation, and it’s hard to argue against that.
However, there’s still a big part of me that feels that there’s something not quite right about the way patents work. At this point, though, I can’t clearly articulate that, so I’ll just take comfort that it all seems to work pretty well pretty often as a component of an economic engine and a social structure that I can’t pretend to understand well enough to solidly critique :-).
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Posted in General at 11:14 pm by Steven
I’m thankful for… communication networks. I wonder how different my life would be if I didn’t have ready access to such a vast variety of people and their works through a few simple portals like computers and phones.
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Posted in General at 11:09 pm by Steven
This nice little free utility does something I like very much: it does the x-mouse thing but without the quite annoying tendency for some programs (MSDev, for example) to jump to the front when they get focus. I never thought it was possible :-).
True X-Mouse Gizmo for Windows
However, I don’t really like the other features, and you can’t turn them all off… [Update: I found a way to adjust it to my liking. I should have updated this before Nathan went to the trouble of explaining this all in his comment below.] I think it may be time for me to write my own. In that vein, I found PyHook which I should be able to use to rapidly prototype the basic algorithm in a nice language.
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04.19.05
Posted in General at 11:42 am by Steven
Here’s a pretty decent list of potential ways to destroy the earth (physically demolishing it, not just screwing it up so that various things can’t live on it). How to destroy the Earth
The thing that’s not discussed in detail in the “Eaten by von Neumann machines” entry is the logistics of the ever-growing hoard. It’s not hard to imagine the first couple of generations of the machines, but I think some serious consideration would have to be made to start thinking about generations past about 20. The problem is, you have to gather the necessary mix of raw materials. Assuming that you’ve designed your machine to require the right mix in the first place, the mix isn’t uniform throughout the entire planet, and just transporting each machine to where it needs to be to gather the materials requires fuel, which has to be present in the right mix along the way to the destination… you might see what I’m getting at.
It could just be that I’m missing something obvious, but I think it would get pretty tricky to coordinate this aspect of that scenario, and further, your machines have to be intelligent enough to follow the plan, or to evolve enough intelligence in the meantime…
I think this gotcha applies to the ‘gray goo’ scenario of nanotech, too, so maybe gray goo isn’t so likely after all…
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04.15.05
Posted in General at 8:30 pm by Steven
You’ll dig this if you’re me. But you’d better hope you aren’t me. Hamburglers - Happy Meal
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04.14.05
Posted in General at 9:44 pm by Steven
Or as the site itself calls it, ‘Man Page’
I get occasional hits at my site looking for ‘pdftk manual’, so I figure as a public service I’ll give a direct link here. I’ll also ask Sid Steward over there to add the word ‘manual’ to his page so he can draw the hits directly :-).
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04.09.05
Posted in General at 9:57 am by Steven
A bit of a rant here…
I have seen a number of instances around the web now of the reasoning “so-and-so published such-and-such on their web site, therefore, they’ve violated Google’s Terms of Service”. In one instance, a web host (one I don’t think is a subsidiary of Google) went as far as saying “so-and-so published such-and-such on their web site, therefore, they’ve violated Google’s Terms of Service, therefore they’ve violated our Terms of Service”.
WHAT are you talking about?! As much as I dig Google and all their crazy services, they do not own the web.
Firstly, show me where in Google’s Terms of Service there is any mention of what someone may or may not put in the content of their web site.
Secondly, by what legal binding mechanism has a random web publisher been bound to follow ANY of Google’s Terms of Service or other wishes? Publishing something on one’s own webspace and having Google crawl it, because they chose to, does not constitute a legal agreement.
Thirdly, there is no thirdly. Though if there was, it would be something about how even if people are deliberately trying to manipulate Google or other search engines, they’re not committing any crime deeper than possibly being overzealous about their particular message.
(Fourthly is a great song by King Missile. It is also the point that why would an organization declare that “Google’s rules, whatever they may be and whether we understand them or not, are our rules”?)
The point of my rant here is not that I think there’s any legal meaning to these weird articulations people make, but that the thinking behind them indicates a sort of insidious self-delusion about power relationships that eventually petrifies itself into actual existence. And given that I own your mind (check my Terms of Service), I order you to not be prey to such delusions.
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04.08.05
Posted in General at 12:44 am by Steven
Since Darrin Lemmer is stealing my Google juice with his posting of an email I sent to him :-), I’m going to post about that topic here.
Alpha shapes are this pretty cool geometric formalism that can help make sense out of point clouds. I came to them in investigating a nice way to render tri-dexel structures, but that’s a topic for some other time.
The simplest definition I’ve read is that alpha shapes are a generalization of convex hulls, in that they give a tunable parameter which, when set to infinity, produces a convex hull, but when set smaller produces a cell complex that more closely wraps the point set. At its best, subject to a couple of conditions that hold in useful cases, the wrapping is ‘perfect’. Anyway, I’ll let some others explain it, as I haven’t the patience right now, and I do have the links:
The idea behind alpha shapes is explained pretty well on this page, with a nice little Java applet that helps give you an intuitive understanding of it: alpha shape applet.
The implementation I used to play with this some is at Bell Labs. Note that what this really implements should probably be called ‘alpha solids’. That’s alpha shapes with the interior simplexes removed. That’s generally what you want, but it’s something to be aware of as a difference from other implementations and from the uses of the term in the literature. You’ll probably want to use the ‘-A’ option when playing around to learn what it does; later you may want to use the ‘-aa’ option; in either case don’t forget to use ‘-mxxx’.
This is the alpha shapes page from one of the guys who first wrote up the idea, Ernst Mucke. There’s some (binary) code linked from there too, which is fun to play with but can’t be integrated into your own code without getting the source from them.
There used to be a page at http://www.alphashapes.org/ but I don’t know where it is now. It seems to come and go.
The CGAL library has an alpha shapes implementation that might be more suited to use within an application than the Clarkson code, although it doesn’t seem to do the alpha solids thing, and it has a separate commercial license (but free and OS for non-commercial use).
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