| Six months of dog |
[Jul. 12th, 2009|07:40 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | dog | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  calm | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | buzz of the swamp cooler | ] |
Mungo has now moved three times in a month: from our previous house to a hotel, to another hotel, to our current house. He has coped well, I think. He was very excited to be let loose in our back yard after spending two weeks in hotel rooms. He's taking a few more days to adjust to the house itself. We set up his portable crate in a corner of the living room and his mat next to it, and he spent most of his time there in his "safe place" for the first couple of days (we've been here for six days, five nights). One problem he has is that all the flooring is smooth, slick tile, and his feet have very little traction on it. Any time he tries to run indoors, he skids. We find this funny, but we plan to shop for an area rug later, at least for the living room. Meanwhile, it's impressive how much dog hair is on the floor in less than a week.
We're at the end of the street, and other houses' back yards border our yard in three directions. All three have dogs. In fact, I think every house on our street has a dog, although it's hard to tell. The fences are chain link, unlike the stone and cement fences at our last house, and the living room window is big, so Mungo can see what he considers his potential playmates. This means he's rather more agitated than he was in the last house. He still doesn't bark at other dogs, but he does whine and cry when he's indoors and becomes aware of interesting doggy goings-on outside.
There's an old baseball field down the road from our block that's been converted to a dog park, fenced all the way around. We've taken him there twice. Unfortunately, both times he got burrs in his feet after only a couple minutes. It doesn't seem like a good place for him to run around. Too bad; one thing I wished for at the last place was a large, fenced area to let him off leash. It is still too hot out to go walking except before 8 AM or after sunset, so the dog and I are not getting much exercise. |
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| Update |
[Jul. 11th, 2009|03:20 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | moving | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  annoyed | ] |
I've been very busy since I last wrote anything here.
Tuesday I drove Corwin to Austin and spent Tuesday night at my parents' house.
( Wednesday )
Thursday morning I did more packing and sorting stuff for our packers to pack. They arrived at 2 and finished up around 7. Dinner was fast food picked up and brought home, since we couldn't leave the packers unattended.
Yesterday was the day of BUSY. We had to go out for breakfast because all our food and dishes were packed, so left the house about 7:30 a.m. We got home last night at 9 p.m.
( LOTS and LOTS of minutiae about Friday )
( Today: Moving is progressing too slowly for our taste. )
And they're not likely to be done by the time I get "home" from work, which means Andrew and I aren't likely to get to treat ourselves to another nice dinner out to relax.
I think that brings you up to date. I'm at work this afternoon, and will be here for another 45 minutes or so. It's been a quiet day. |
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| link friday! |
[Jul. 10th, 2009|09:58 am] |
And since it's 8(!) days until the wedding, presumably my last one as a swinging bachelor.
This fascinating NY Times graphic shows the various business cycles and the recession we're in now. And maybe some hope that things will be better in 6 months.
A 60 foot Gundam robot has risen in Tokyo. I really really hope this is real.
Short article on the 40th anniversary of Stonewall. Found this surprising: In 1966, three years before Stonewall, Time, then the voice of middlebrow, middle-class respectability, published a long essay on “The Homosexual in America.” The magazine, while acknowledging that “homosexuals are present in every walk of life,” concluded that homosexuality is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life. As such it deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and, when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste—and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness.
Sacha Baron Cohen's (Borat, Ali G, etc.) new movie Bruno comes out today- this character is a gay fashion person or something. He went out of character on Letterman describing how he interviewed a terrorist. Salon thinks it's bad for the gays, Slate thinks it's good for the gays, and Ebert surprised me by liking the movie.
Ricky Gervais's The Invention of Lying looks like a good movie, and it has "every other Hollywood actor and comic in the world" (Patrick Stewart! Tina Fey! Jason Bateman and Jeffrey Tambor! John Hodgman!)
Cool jQuery plugin to dynamically make nice-looking graphs - uses the new canvas feature, like my marriage map does. Wish I had thought of this!
California v. Texas - take that, California! Although Despite all this, it still seems too early to cede America’s future to the Lone Star state. To begin with, that lean Texan model has its own problems. It has not invested enough in education, and many experts rightly worry about a “lost generation” of mostly Hispanic Texans with insufficient skills for the demands of the knowledge economy. Now immigration is likely to reconvert Texas from Republican red to Democratic blue; Latinos may justly demand a bigger, more “Californian” state to educate them and provide them with decent health care. |
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| RIP CRT |
[Jul. 9th, 2009|08:56 pm] |
When I moved to Toronto I took a computer monitor with me, and it was an CRT that I'd already had for a few years already. This was this was the monitor I used when I applied to grad school and the monitor I used when starting Dinosaur Comics.
This monitor had served me well, but the past year or so it was clearly dying. The display would get fuzzy, and then snap back. Now I use three monitors and this was on the screen I used mainly for status stuff, so it was okay. I could still read the text when I needed to!
It was getting old though, and this morning I actually thought I was watching it finally die: the screen slowly faded to black, over the course of about 30 seconds, like a movie would fade to black over a particularly dramatic coda. These were my thoughts as I watched my windows fade away. Even the little green power light on the front of the monitor faded with everything else. My old monitor faded to black I watched it die. Goodbye, faithful hardware!
BUT THEN it faded back! You guys, it faded back just as it had faded out. It was a death-bed deke, and I was totally taken in. The monitor did this cycle a few more times, but I was wise to it now. I wasn't going to be taken in again. Eventually the monitor stopped fading out entirely, and we both got back to what we were working on before.
That was this morning. Just now, it faded to black and hasn't recovered. The power light has died with the screen too, but its switch is still in the "on" position. Okay, so just now I turned the power off and on again and the monitor recovered perfectly fine. MAN I GOT DEKED AGAIN.
Okay, so clearly this monitor is sick but doesn't want to die; it wants a peek at its obituary before it goes. Well here you go, monitor, I've moved this window over to you and I'm writing this on you and this is your obituary. If you do anything awesome after I post this I'll update it appropriately, but I think this is where our two paths diverge. You have been a good and faithful monitor and I will probably not forgot many of the things I saw through you.
You were a good monitor! |
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| Someone at Mozilla Foundation needs to be fired |
[Jul. 9th, 2009|03:24 pm] |
Somebody at Mozilla decided they need lots of 'true' random numbers.
My patience for this subject completely ran out about five years ago, so this post is going to show a complete lack of diplomacy. I would like to emphasize, in advance, that this is my honest, reasoned opinion, not said in anger, and that if you ask my opinion again in the future I'll say the exact same thing.
Once a computer has collected a small number of 'true' random bits (maybe it's 128, maybe it's 256, but regardless it's small) there's no need whatsoever for it to block on collecting more 'random' numbers. A pseudorandom number generator based on AES will be able to generate random numbers based on that seed until the end of the universe and noone constrained by the laws of physics and math will ever be able to tell the difference between that and 'true' random numbers. This is extremely well established cryptography. To require 'true' random numbers is, to use an apt analogy, wankery. It does not, and cannot, do anything to improve security, and it mostly just causes huge amounts of pain. It is (and I repeat myself, because I have a hunch people will think I'm glossing over some nuance here) of no benefit whatsoever.
My advice to the Mozilla foundation (and again, this is my reasoned opinion, not said in anger, and I won't be changing my mind later): find out who was responsible for this policy of requiring lots of 'true' random numbers, and fire them. Fire them today. They have demonstrated gross incompetence, a total lack of understanding of the very most basic concepts in security.
Some people might think that if I knew more about who was behind this and what their specific motivations are, then that might change my mind. That is incorrect. The security field is filled with people who to non-experts seem very impressive and knowledgeable, especially when they're advocating, and even moreso demanding, very painful and difficult things in the name of security. Most of these people are frauds. I have had it with paying homage to the concept of impartiality when discussing these peoples's opinions. If someone spouts a bunch of technical mumbo-jumbo to bring the conversation to a place which a lay person has trouble understanding, then they may be able to make the argument be based on pure rhetoric, but gross incompetence is still gross incompetence, and despite having found an effective way to bullshit their way through, they're still wrong.
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| Rolling with the punches |
[Jul. 9th, 2009|03:16 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | moonbase | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  disappointed | ] |
We were hoping to have our belongings by the end of this week, but when ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) aristeros inquired this morning as to their status, he learned that they have not even left their current location and are still 1700 miles away. Apparently someone needed him to sign and send a form but never asked him for it, or some such nonsense. We're looking at another two weeks without our stuff. (Edit: Seems that was wrong information and our goods have left their origin after all. Isn't it great when people know what they're talking about? We should have our stuff within ten days at the latest, hopefully earlier.)
On the bright side, we're in our new house. We can now go shopping or out to eat without worrying about leaving the dog in the hotel room. We had our first home-cooked supper last night: a makeshift version of ma po tofu. We stocked the fridge, we bought a bed, and as of this afternoon, we have broadband. Also, there's a cool thrift store/consignment shop here, and we scored a wooden rocking chair for $40. We're trying to decide if it would be worthwhile to buy another piece of furniture.
Before we left the last place, I bought some yarn and crochet hooks for something to do (after my other yarn and hooks had been packed and removed), and last night I began an attempt at a throw blanket. I want to model it after Lucy's Neat Ripple Pattern described here, but I made a variation, and I'm having trouble figuring out how to fit the second row on top of the first. If I make progress I may post a picture. |
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| Optimizing iTunesAnalysis: faster database access |
[Jul. 9th, 2009|09:44 am] |
The second in an occasional series
Idea: Now I'm focusing on improving the time to insert the iTunes data into database. Where we left off last time, our script took 71 seconds to run, ~50 seconds of which was database operations. The idea I had to speed this up was to batch a bunch of queries together and thus make fewer calls to the database. It turns out this actually slowed things down.
So I did a little research and it turns out if you insert data with the same query structure over and over again (but with different bind variables), the database doesn't have to reparse the query which speeds things up a lot. I tried doing this with pyPgSql but couldn't find any documentation how it was supposed to work, so I switched to using psycopg2 and changed the query for inserting the playlist data. Just switching to a psycopg2 sped things up a lot, it seems. I tried switching to a similar sort of query for inserting track data, but that actually slowed things down.
Anyway, the new script runs in 25 seconds, and it looks like only around 9 seconds for database operations. This is a 400% speedup in the database time! Overall, this step improved performance by ~180%, and since we started at 114 seconds we've improved ~350%.
Conclusion: Another big success, and I'm not sure how much more I can squeeze out of the iTunesInfo.py script. Next time I'll focus on the analyzedb.py script, which does the analysis from the database - right now it's taking between 5 and 12 minutes to run on my library of 6400 tracks.
Source files:
- old script
- new script |
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| My favorite things |
[Jul. 8th, 2009|11:31 am] |
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http://haunsperger.blogspot.com/2009/07/my-favorite-things.html With the heat outside and labor progressing enough that I have to curtail most unnecessary excursions, I'm getting to appreciate all over again how much fun it can be to just stay home with the kids.
It's amazing what will entertain them. Lucas has been busy cutting up scraps of colored paper into confetti in preparation for a "confetti party" (an idea he and a friend came up with on Monday). He and Timmy both love playing board games and doing experiment with their magnets. Timmy has been taking apart and rebuilding a large construction set, about once a day, and fighting imaginary fires with a pool noodle (which sometimes doubles as a light saber when he's a Jedi).
We've spent a lot of time just reading together (picked up 20 books at the library yesterday). Lucas read "The Cat in the Hat" to me all the way through, and I've been reading "Farmer Boy" from the Little House on the Prairie series to them at night.
Occasionally Lucas will try to earn poker chips by doing some summer lessons in phonics, reading, or math. More often he just adds up how much he's already earned, but that in itself is a math lesson in counting money. Before he can play the Wii, he has to make an entry in his journal about what he's doing this summer, and his writing and spelling have come a long way this past month.
Timmy likes to have lessons too... we trace the letters from the alphabet puzzle together and practice holding the pencil correctly. Haven't started formal lessons with him yet, but he soaks up everything like a sponge.
Hopefully we'll have a new baby to play with soon too, but until then I'll enjoy playing with just the two of them. |
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| Optimizing iTunesAnalysis through smarter parsing |
[Jul. 8th, 2009|10:31 am] |
The first in an occasional series
Intro: A while back I wrote a script to analyze an iTunes library and find your favorite artists, albums, etc. It works pretty well and I regularly use it to update my own analysis. Unfortunately, it generally takes a long time to run, which is sort of OK for me (because I just start it running and go do something else) but less good for people who are running the analysis through the web site.
So I'd like to make it run faster, and I have a number of ideas to do so.
Idea: There are two main parts to the system - parsing the iTunes Music Library.xml file into a database, and running the analysis on the database. First I'm focusing on the parsing part.
The first version of the parsing script uses Python's xml.dom.minidom package to completely parse the library file.
After profiling the first version by running python -m cProfile -o profiledata.oldway iTunesInfo.py "iTunes Music Library.xml", I see that the whole parsing process takes 114 seconds. The major parts of this are 60 seconds for the xml.dom.minidom.parse method and 46 seconds for the database operations. Note that this only leaves ~8 seconds for figuring out the track information - clearly this is not the bottleneck!
So I'd like to improve parsing speed. There are two basic kinds of XML parsers - what we're using now is a DOM or Document Object Model-style parser, which means that the parser reads the entire file in and returns a parsed structure containing all the data. (I remember writing a simple XML parser that did this as a project in COMP 314. Ah, memories...) The advantage to this method is that after the parsing is done, it's easy to traverse the DOM tree and find the data that you're interested in. The downside is that, well, it's slow. Also, the entire document has to be read into memory which means that your memory usage is proportional to the size of the file you're processing, which adds to the slowness and can lead to out of memory problems on huge files (although we weren't seeing that here).
The other basic kind of XML parser is known as SAX, or Simple API for XML. You provide callback functions that are called whenever the parser runs across the start of a tag, end of a tag, character data, and...that's it. Whatever processing you want to do you have to do in those callback functions. So if you're just, say, counting the number of <key> tags in a document this works really well. It's also much faster than the DOM-style parser, since it doesn't have to generate a giant tree structure. But doing the sorts of processing we're doing on the library file seems a bit more tricky.
Anyway, I take a stab at it, and after a bit end up with version 2 of the script. Notice that the logic in the Handler class is a bit twisted - we have to keep track of where we are in the document (so if things get out of order we'll have problems) and use a state-based system which is a bit brittle and unclear.
But how does it perform? The old version of the script ran in 114 seconds, and this version runs in 71 seconds for a ~60% increase in speed. But really, it's better than that, because the database operations still take around 50 seconds - if we subtract that from both we get 64 seconds versus 21 seconds which is a ~200% increase in the speed of the parsing.
Conclusion: This was a big success! Most of the time is now in the database layer, which I have some ideas for speeding up next time.
Source files:
- old script
- new script |
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| Ludology in City of Heroes |
[Jul. 7th, 2009|11:30 am] |
City of Heroes has had some interesting issues with its gameplay, involving a character named Twixt using some tactics which made everybody hate him.
Several years ago I happened to be seated next to the designer of City of Heroes at an event where he won something. He was a pudgy guy, wearing big round glasses, with a white city of heroes t-shirt and a blue cape on. We got into a conversation about his game, and I asked what it was that made it compelling, and he said that it's every kid's fantasy of being a superhero, and it was very obvious that he'd based the game's design on his own. I asked him if City of Heroes is compelling as a pure abstract game, and the interesting response was that he didn't understand the question. After a few minutes of conversation he got what I was asking, and his answer, which really perplexed me at the time, was that it was a good question, but he didn't know.
Consider a game with the following semantics: You sit, unmoving, for two hours, with no user feedback, no buttons to push, nothing, completely passive, while the game plays out in front of you, exactly the same way as it would for anybody else. This sounds like a terrible game, but it's exactly what movies are, and movies are very popular and get little criticism that they're terrible games.
The Twixt problem was caused not so much by any one person behaving unreasonably as the game engine having a problem. There's a battle tactic which is quite effective but has the effect of wiping out an enemy without even giving them a chance to play, making it not much fun for them and it doesn't even get much credit for you. Because City of Heroes is more fantasy than game, players have a convention of not using this tactic, because that maximizes the fun of play. This is done at the expense of an individual's success taking the game as a sport, but since the game isn't a sport, people don't worry about that too much. Real sports don't involve dressing up as superheroes (except for figure skating, but that isn't a real sport). What really should be done is that the rules should be modified so that the particular tactic isn't so nasty. It's a general rule of game design that all players should get a chance to play and have fun, even if they aren't very good, and tactics which allow a better player to win without the weaker player even having a chance to try to retaliate are no fun.
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| New York Minutes |
[Jul. 6th, 2009|07:36 pm] |
I brought Ross some produce when I went to visit him in New York City this weekend. Some yellow squash, a zucchinni, three bunches of basil, and onions and garlic pulled out of the ground that morning. I made him carry the bag (a bright blue bag) as he led me through Penn station to the subway and it amused me to see the garlic tops bobbing through the city. Ross brought me a bagel with cream cheese from his local bagel shop (run by Thais) and I promptly got cream cheese all over everything. Ross was amused and one woman passing by looked at me funny, but I can almost guarantee that no one else noticed. There is an anonymity to NYC, a safety in numbers, that allows people to be absolutely free to be themselves. Such freedom is appealing.
That afternoon, we went to Queens to see "Up". Yes, there are theaters closer to the Upper West Side, but Ross had free movie passes that claimed a surcharge in Manhattan (there was a surcharge in Queens, too, but less). We got there very early, since we didn't know how long it would take on the subway, so we chose a random point on the subway map and went to Roosevelt Island. One of the ways onto this narrow island is a tram, one of those sky cars you might see at an amusement park that runs on wires strung between tall, metal pylons. We didn't take the tram, though, since I preferred to spend my extra time walking in the breeze along the Channel. There is no breeze in Queens. But there is cheap Chinese food sold by bona fide Chinese people that don't quite understand you. We had dumplings that came swimming in red oil and hand-drawn noodles that aren't quite as good as the ones in Phil'a and ginger bubble tea that made me very happy. Oh, and the movie is very good too.
That evening, we wandered through Riverside Park to the Hudson, crossing a police barricade of blue sawhorses to sit on the rocks by the river's edge and watch the fireworks. Fireworks may not be as magical as a night teeming with lightning bugs, but they are darn pretty. Cubes! Smiley faces! Hovering blobs of color! Then we bought some samosas to finish out our all-American day.
Sunday morning, we began with pastries which we ate in the park while doing the New York Times Sunday crossword. Later, we went kayaking in the Hudson River. There's a kayaking club in New York that provides kayaks at several places around the city for free on the weekends. This weekend, they also had food (pretty good food, actually). We walked back North to Ross's apt. throught the park, peering down into the rarely used subway tunnel underfoot and admiring the flower gardens that are maintained by volunteers. I haven't walked so much in a long time. It's good for me (even though my ankles are still complaining). |
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| Bandwidth fundamentals |
[Jul. 6th, 2009|04:07 pm] |
A random person asks about something they read on Wikipedia:
Example from wiki below:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Cohen
quote from site:
MojoNation allows people to break up confidential files into encrypted chunks and distribute those pieces on computers also running the software. If someone wanted to download a copy of this encrypted file, he would have to download it simultaneously from many computers. This concept, Cohen thought, was perfect for a file sharing program, since programs like KaZaA take a long time to download a large file because the file is (usually) coming from one source (or "peer"). Cohen designed BitTorrent to be able to download files from many different sources, thus speeding up the download time, especially for users with faster download than upload speeds. Thus, the more popular a file is, the faster a user will be able to download it, since many people will be downloading it at the same time, and these people will also be uploading the data to other users.
This explanation was lifted from an actual new article, which doesn't necessarily mean it's true. In fact, it's somewhere between grossly misleading and wrong. There's a classic fallacy because if one person stands up during a concert they get a better view, then if everybody stood up during a concert they'd all get a better view. This is of course is not true - they wind up slightly worse off by all standing, because they all compete with each other for a view. The same thing happens with downloading from a server. In general, web servers will give about the same rate to every client downloading from them, so if you open many more connections than everybody else you get a greater proportion of the bandwidth and hence a better rate. But you do so simply by taking bandwidth from other downloaders. The overall supply of upload is unchange, it's simply being shuffled around. If everybody does the same thing it results in overall slightly worse performance and you're basically back where you started, but with a bunch of headaches tacked on.
On the internet, the formula is bytes downloaded = bytes uploaded. It's that simple.
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| The Uncanny Cube |
[Jul. 6th, 2009|02:50 pm] |
From deep in the uncanny valley of the Rubik's Cube, it's the Uncanny Cube. At first blush this appears to be a slight variant, but it is quite profoundly and perversely different. |
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| Diaper shower |
[Jul. 6th, 2009|02:58 pm] |
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http://haunsperger.blogspot.com/2009/07/diaper-shower.html  The boys and I took a field trip to Doug's work for a little shower his co-workers were throwing for him. I enjoyed meeting them and I think they enjoyed seeing his family. I didn't have the camera with me, but there was a nice cake and decorations. We have lots of diapers, now we just need the baby. |
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| weekend, life update |
[Jul. 6th, 2009|01:08 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | health, links, wedding | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | okay | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Nine Inch Nails - "The Perfect Drug" | ] |
Thursday I went tubing with some people in New Braunfels. I'm generally not super excited about water activities, but it was fun and relaxing. It was also really, really hot. I didn't fully reapply suntan lotion while floating down the river (not really sure why I didn't, except that I didn't feel like I was burning) , and thus I ended up horribly sunburned on most of my chest, upper legs and feet.
I've been using some aloe lotiony stuff which helped a lot, but even still it's still sensitive and (worst of all) itchy, especially at night. Saturday night I took a Benadryl which successfully knocked me out, and last night I tried to get by with just some cortisone cream. Gave up on that after a while of itching and not sleeping and took the Benadryl, but it didn't work as well...got to sleep after about an hour and didn't sleep well. (neither did djedi, for unrelated reasons)
12 days until our wedding! Everything seems in order and we're keeping up with our todo list but I'm still generally stressed. Picked up honeymoon tickets, etc. today and I'm looking forward to that part :-)
A somewhat rambling but interesting talk by Stephen Fry about America's place in the world.
Propaganda posters for World War III. I think this one is my favorite. |
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| Update |
[Jul. 5th, 2009|09:37 pm] |
Apparently I am not yet recovered from the stress of the rest of my weekend. I don't think I would have won any mommy awards today, though I think my frustration can be mitigated slightly be the fact that I am parenting a 2-year-old who hasn't gotten enough sleep lately and may be slightly sick to boot, and whose behavior was generally difficult today, as attested to by Andrew. Today is one of those days when I am REALLY REALLY glad I'm not a single parent. It was very nice to just let Andrew deal with him when I had reached my limit.
That said, no car pictures got taken today. Sorry to anyone who is dying of curiosity.
I did get a fair number of things done today, though:
-grocery shopped; a very SHORT list since we're trying to use up food we have in the house before our move next weekend
-washed the bedsheets on our bed and remade the bed
-put away 2 1/2 loads of laundry (the 1/2 was leftover from last night)
-made tea
-did dishes
-cut the last several weeks' worth of coupons from the newspaper and took newspapers outside to go to recycling sometime this week
-went through 3/4 of the clothes in my closet and tried them on and divided up the ones that either didn't fit (too small, *sigh*) or I never wear into boxes to go to storage or bags to be donated. Need to finish off the last 1/4 tomorrow if I can manage it.
Tonight I need to order the washing machine we want at our new apartment; we've decided to just rent a dryer while we're in the apartment (they only have connections for electric ones) so that we can buy a gas one once we have our new house. [EDIT: Check! Washing machine ordered. Delivery will be Wednesday, July 15, as that is the first day one of us (me) can be in the apartment at whatever time is needed.] I also need to see if I can transfer any of our utilities online or else figure out who I need to call tomorrow.
Tomorrow I need to call our insurance agent to get the new car onto our insurance and the old one off, as well as get our renters' policy finalized for when we move. |
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groggy
geeky
content
