Unbecoming Levity

Distributed Computing = Distributed Responsibility = Fingerpointing

Abacquer — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 15:27:16 -0400

So this morning I tried to process an order a customer had sent me last night. I went to log into my photolab service provider, exposuremanager.com, just like I always do. Bzzzt. Can't get in. "This link appears to be broken."

Huh, maybe it's my machine. So I try my daughter's machine, nope she can't see it either. Internet down? Nope I can get my email and see all the other sites I use regularly.

So I (reasonably) assume exposuremanager is down. That's not too cool--because while it is down my customers can't place orders. So I call customer support and leave them a message that their site is down.

A little while later I get an e-mail from them stating their site is up and running fine (and by the way, nice pictures on your site!) Thanks, but I still can't get in.

So I try the DOS utility "ping" to ping their server. Sometimes it can't resolve exposuremanager to an IP address (implying a problem with a domain name server at Comcast) and other times it can resolve the IP address but gets no response. I check with WHOIS on Tucows (their registrar) to see if their domain has expired, but it hasn't. WTF?

So then I run a traceroute in an attempt to see where the communication fails between me and exposuremanager:

Tracing route to exposuremanager.com [66.254.91.235]

over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms www.routerlogin.com [192.168.1.1]

2 7 ms 10 ms 7 ms [ my IP omitted ]

3 8 ms 8 ms 6 ms ge-1-2-ur01.gardner.ma.boston.comcast.net [68.85.187.109]

4 11 ms 10 ms 9 ms te-0-8-0-2-ar01.woburn.ma.boston.comcast.net [68.85.162.93]

5 14 ms 9 ms 9 ms pos-0-15-0-0-ar01.needham.ma.boston.comcast.net [68.85.162.145]

6 15 ms 14 ms 22 ms pos-0-0-0-0-ar01.chartford.ct.hartford.comcast.net [68.85.162.70]

7 16 ms 18 ms 17 ms pos-2-4-0-0-cr01.newyork.ny.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.90.61]

8 22 ms 18 ms 17 ms Vlan546.icore1.NJY-Newark.as6453.net [206.82.132.41]

9 17 ms 45 ms 18 ms if-6-0-0-25.mcore3.NJY-Newark.as6453.net [216.6.57.41]

10 19 ms 17 ms 18 ms if-2-0.core1.NTO-NewYork.as6453.net [216.6.57.66]

11 17 ms 18 ms 19 ms sl-gw31-nyc-14-0-0.sprintlink.net [160.81.249.29]

12 18 ms 19 ms 17 ms sl-crs2-nyc-0-2-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.13.35]

13 23 ms 27 ms 19 ms sl-bb20-msq-2-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.20.74]

14 22 ms 22 ms 24 ms sl-bb21-msq-15-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.9.110]

15 26 ms 26 ms 27 ms sl-crs1-rly-0-8-5-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.20.73]

16 25 ms 25 ms 26 ms sl-bb20-dc-5-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.8.162]

17 24 ms 28 ms 25 ms sl-crs1-dc-0-0-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.15.11]

18 74 ms 73 ms 74 ms sl-crs2-fw-0-11-3-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.19.200]

19 * * * Request timed out.

20 * * * Request timed out.

21 * * * Request timed out.

22 * * * Request timed out.

23 * * * Request timed out.

24 * * * Request timed out.

25 * * * Request timed out.

26 * * * Request timed out.

27 * * * Request timed out.

28 * * * Request timed out.

29 * * * Request timed out.

30 * * * Request timed out.

Trace complete.

As you can see, the communication makes it to "sl-crs2-fw-0-11-3-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.19.200]" and then fails. Sprintlink.net is inside of the Sprint network. To get as far as I did required the services of three companies, Comcast (comcast.net), Tata Communications (as6453.net), and Sprint (sprintlink.net). None of these companies is my company (sagewoodstudios.com) or my photolab service provider (exposuremanager.com). In fact after the last hop, I don't know what the next address would be--it might be a fourth company, or another server in the Sprint network. Exposure Manager can't help me--it's not their computer. Comcast can't help me--it's not their computer either. Sprint *might* be able to help me, but I'm not their customer.

What I do know is, if I didn't have to use this route, I would indeed be able to get there. I found an online provider of the standard 'net tools (ping, traceroute, etc.) called Network-Tools.com (that's a handy link btw, you might want to bookmark it). I can get to their server to see their website, and when I ask THEM to do a traceroute to exposuremanager, they can get there just fine:

TraceRoute to 66.254.91.235 [exposuremanager.com]

Hop

(ms)

(ms)

(ms)

IP Address

Host name

1

8

6

6

206.123.69.137

-

2

9

6

6

8.9.232.73

xe-5-3-0.edge3.dallas1.level3.net

3

12

7

7

4.69.145.140

ae-3-80.edge2.dallas3.level3.net

4

8

15

6

4.71.220.14

xo-communic.edge2.dallas3.level3.net

5

10

12

9

207.88.13.122

207.88.13.122.ptr.us.xo.net

6

41

40

40

207.88.12.46

207.88.12.46.ptr.us.xo.net

7

41

40

40

65.106.1.69

65.106.1.69.ptr.us.xo.net

8

41

49

52

65.106.5.10

p0-0-0.mar2.la-ca.us.xo.net

9

46

40

40

207.88.81.170

p15-0.chr1.la-ca.us.xo.net

10

50

44

45

66.238.50.106

66.238.50.106.ptr.us.xo.net

11

53

45

47

66.254.64.1

gw1.pixelgate.net

12

53

50

47

66.254.91.235

host235.exposuremanager.com

Trace complete

As you can see, because they are starting from a different provider (level3.net) their communication path takes a different route that never involves any of the companies I'm forced to use. If Network-Tools.com provided a "browser in a browser" basically an embedded frame that I could point anywhere I want to, I'd be able to get to my photolab and process my customer's orders.

In the meantime I'm pretty stuck. I can't help my customers, and my service provider can't help me. Welcome to the Internet... where you really "can't get thar from hyar".

SQL Server 2000 - Detailed Structure Query

Abacquer — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:33:52 -0400

I spent several hours mining Google and tweaking to get this query right. This has never been a technical blog, but considering what a pain this was to chase down, I figured I should post it here for others.

This query will list all the tables and columns in a SQL Server 2000 database, including column data type, length, precision, scale, nullable flag, if the column is part of a unique constraint, if the column is part of the primary key, the foreign table referenced by the column if it is a foreign key, and the default value of the column if it has one.

The output is suitable for pasting into Excel or Word to create database reports. (Yes I'm sure there are 3rd party tools, and stored procedures to get all this info, but what I needed was ONE query which did it all and returned it as this query does.)

select T.name as TableName, C.colorder, C.name as ColumnName, TY.name as datatype,
       c.length, c.prec, c.scale, c.isnullable, UO.name as UniqueConstraint,
       IX.name as PKConstraint, SR.name as ReferencesTable, SM.Text as DefaultValue

  from sysobjects as T
 inner join syscolumns as C on (C.id = T.id)
 inner join systypes as TY on (TY.xtype = C.xtype)
  left join sysindexkeys as K on C.colid = K.colid and K.id=T.id
  left join sysindexes as I on I.id=T.id and I.indid=K.indid
  left join sysobjects as IX on IX.parent_obj=T.id and IX.name = I.name and IX.xtype='PK'
  left join sysconstraints as CO on (C.colid=CO.colid and CO.id=T.id)
  left join sysforeignkeys as FK on (T.id = FK.fkeyid and FK.constid=CO.constid)
  left join sysobjects as SR on (SR.id = FK.rkeyid)
  left join syscomments SM on C.cdefault = SM.id 
  left join sysindexkeys as UK on C.colid = UK.colid and UK.id=T.id
  left join sysindexes as UI on UI.id=T.id and UI.indid=K.indid
  left join sysobjects as UO on (UO.parent_obj=T.id and UO.name=UI.name and UO.xtype='UQ')

where T.xtype = 'U'
order by T.name, C.colorder;

You can see a screenshot of the output here.

Chapter Three: A Dying Breed

Abacquer — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 05:44:54 -0500

NOTE: This story is chapter 3, the sequel to the previous chapter. If you have not already read the first chapter or second chapter, you may wish to check them out first.

The visit with Ellan and Tyr had been long and leisurely, thirteen wonderful years exploring the seas of Regulus-4, a world Ellan had named Ouan. Mara and Kennis had swum as merfolk, scaled the few rocky crags of Ouan with the Hooth, slothlike ursines, and had even spent a few solitary weeks relaxing on beaches of lavender sand, their lungs altered to process the chemical soup that constituted Ouan's atmosphere.

Mara wrote many books, including a meditative collection of poems about her former lover Tyr. She had been nervous that Kennis would feel slighted, but her devotion to Mara was total. "I cannot possess you my love," Kennis had said, gazing at her in the amber moonlight of a warm night on Ouan, "and I will accept whatever part of your life you choose to share with me. It would unreasonable to assume that I should own your history. Besides, Tyr is remarkable, why not write songs for her? I thought your book was lovely."

"Oh Kennis," Mara had began, but she could not finish the sentence. Kennis truly was the love of her life, and she was ever reminded of it.

"I love you too, Mara. Who knows, perhaps you shall write a book for me some day."

"There aren't words to describe this love."

As the months passed into years, eventually Mara's thoughts returned to the notion of recreating humans on another planet--with the necessary biological alterations to survive there. She began scanning the catalogues of known worlds to find a suitable candidate. Though millions of worlds had been visited by Homo imortalis, few matched the criteria she was seeking. There were some good candidates, but they were precariously close to other worlds which had thriving ecosystems and nonsentient inhabitants, and given the human penchant for warfare and conquest, Mara had no desire to create a species that would become a scourge.

There was, she realized, a fairly awesome responsibility in creating a species. She had been contacted by a number of people who had expressed a number of opinions on her books on the subject, some positive and some negative. But she was not daunted, even when she reached the end of the catalogue with no acceptable candidates. She instructed Hab to inform her of new entries in the catalog as they arose, but so far there had been no match.

As the visit with Ellan and Tyr drew to a close she mentioned to Tyr the difficulty she was having in finding a suitable world one day when they were exploring warm coastal waters in a calm cove of one of Ouan's largest islands. "You've been through the entire catalog?" Tyr asked, her fins arranged in a peculiar manner that Mara had learned conveyed surprise.

"Yes, " Mara responded, "three million, one hundred seventy six thousand, eight hundred thirteen worlds. And counting..."

"My love, you are obsessed."

"Well you know me when I get an idea."

"Indeed I do. Well what now then?"

"I suppose I shall simply have to begin exploring worlds myself. All it will take is time."

Tyr was quiet for awhile. "There may be another option, Mara."

"What?"

"Long before I met you I briefly met an immortal named Bruk, a staggeringly old being who had taken up the task of cataloging every world in the Milky Way--with the intent of eventually leaving this galaxy to begin cataloging the worlds of other galaxies."

"Well if Bruk's work is already in the catalog--"

"It is not."

"What? Why?"

"Bruk is... eccentric and something of a hermit. In my entire life I have only known two Alphans, and Bruk is one. Suffice it to say these catalogs are kept in Bruk's private library. But I suppose you could ask..."

"An Alphan!" Mara had never met one. When nanotechnology changed a subset of Homo sapiens into Homo lentus, those modified humans had much longer lifespans. But the span of Homo lentus as a species was only five hundred years, as by that time technology had advanced to the point where Homo lentus became Homo immortalis--humans with an infinite lifespan. Those humans who were born as Homo lentus and changed to Homo immortalis were called Betans, and those rare few who were born Homo sapiens and transitioned first to Homo lentus and then to Homo immortalis were Alphans, and they were very rare indeed. The typical lentus lifespan had been 350 years, an Alphan would have been extremely old when the transition to immortality became available--at that point of course the aging could largely be reversed. But the Alphan viewpoint was often very unique as it was that of a single being that had actually been three different species--to say nothing of the extreme age of such beings. Mara had been born Homo immortalis, as had her mothers Chen and Cyrce. That put her in the majority of the species, a subset known as Gammans.

As an Alphan, Bruk would be nearly two and a half million years old, and if she had indeed been cataloging worlds for much of that time, she might indeed know of a planet upon which Mara could recreate Homo sapiens.

"How do you know this being?" Mara asked.

"Bruk is one of my ancestors, by twelve generations, we met at a family reunion. It was a bizarre experience. If you decide to make contact, I'd suggest you mention me--Bruk's got a soft spot for progeny."

That evening, back in Kennis' arms, Mara had composed a brief message to Bruk.

Greetings Bruk: I am the former partner of your granddaughter Tyr, my name is Mara. She encouraged me to speak with you. I am seeking a particular world--one with an environment very similar to that of Earth when it was inhabited by Homo sapiens, but fairly remote with respect to other worlds which are inhabited. Tyr mentioned your extensive catalog and I was hoping you might know of such a world. Please contact me if you are able to help. I've attached specific criteria ranges to this message. Thank you.

After running it past Kennis, she transmitted the message through her network receiver and was surprised to receive a response almost immediately. But it was not from the Alphan, but instead was being sent by a hab.

[You (and no guests) will be received at Bruk's hab in one week's time. Come to moon three of planet five of the red dwarf star at galactic coordinates (-28599.99876, -31200.09384, 112.54015). The visit is not to exceed 90 minutes.]

"It's pretty brusque, Mara. Why does she not ask after Tyr? Why does she not contact you herself? And she permits you no guests? Why do you have to go and see her at all? Surely she could simply transmit the data if she really wanted to help."

"Well she's an Alphan... and Tyr warned that she was eccentric and reclusive. I suppose I should be grateful that she is even willing to discuss it with me. It could save me hundreds of thousands of years of exploration."

In the end, Kennis couldn't deny that point, and so over the next week they had made their goodbyes to Ellan and Tyr, and after one last swim in the seas of Ouan, had reverted their biological adaptations, returned to their own hab, and set off to find Bruk on the other side of the galaxy.

The quantum transition from Regulus to the system that Bruk's message had indicated was instantaneous. The star was a massive red giant, long past its exuberant youth and into its twilight years. The fifth planet, a terrestrial sort of world, may have at one time supported life, but the vastly expanded sun had boiled away its atmosphere and left it a darkened, scorched, cinder.

Their hab arrived as Kennis and Mara shared a bath, and at their request displayed an image of the planet on the bath wall. Mara had queried the catalog before they had set off and found the world was not on file--it seemed odd to have no name to call it by. Kennis, however, quickly supplied one.

"Perdition?" Mara asked.

"Yes, from ancient mythology--a place of utter ruin and damnation. Why would anyone choose to live here?"

"Well, Bruk asked us to meet her here. I've no idea if this is where she actually lives."

Kennis' arms slithered around her waist from behind under the water, and drew her close. Mara smirked as Kennis kissed her ear and whispered "come meet me in the sunny flames of Perdition, there's nothing like a dead world as a setting to make a great first impression."

Mara looked back over her shoulder, cocked an eyebrow, and kissed Kennis on the lips. She returned the kiss enthusiastically. Is it me? Or did Perdition just get hotter? Kennis transmitted, and then yelped as Mara's hands found their mark, that ticklish spot just above her knee. Mara laughed then, full of mischief and easy familiarity.

"Mara! You wicked girl!" Kennis scolded playfully. It was at this point, typically, that the splashing began, and this time was no exception.

[Twenty minutes to dock]

"Hab! Kennis splashed me." Mara pretended to complain.

[I compute a 93% likelihood that this is because you tickled her. Again.]

"I fall for that every time," Kennis said, "you'd think I'd see it coming by now."

Mara turned to face Kennis and pressed up against her, her heady scent washing over Kennis. "Ah my love, of course you see it coming, and you let me do it anyway because you love me so." The kiss that followed was long and luxurious, and left their hearts thudding. Kennis gazed into Mara's hypnotic brown eyes.

"My love, if you do not get out of this bath right now, I fear you are going to be a few hundred years late for your meeting with Bruk."

"Well we can't have THAT. I get the sense that Bruk is a little preoccupied with time. 'Meet in one weeks time', 'The visit is not to exceed 90 minutes', la la la..."

Kennis leaned back as Mara rose from the bath, the water running in rivulets on her dark skin. "Well perhaps she chose such a cheery place precisely because she doesn't want you to stay too long."

Mara laughed as she reached for a freshly synthesized towel and began drying herself off. "You may be right Kennis. I suppose the location has an austere sort of beauty, but it is at the same time quite depressing. Can you imagine actually living in such a place?"

[Commencing landing procedures.]

Mara froze, and glanced at Kennis, who's face mirrored her thoughts. "Landing procedures?" she said, incredulous.

[Yes. Bruk's hab appears to be largely buried under the surface of Perdition's third moon. Docking will require landing, and deployment of the umbilicus.]

The umbilicus was a flexible docking tunnel sometimes used to connect habs when straightforward docking was not possible.

"Kennis... she DOES live here."

As the hab counted off the minutes to docking, Mara's cloud of nanos rapidly styled her hair and synthesized a satiny magenta sari for her with golden accents and, as always, decorative sandals. She spun once for Kennis.

"How do I look, my dear?"

"I think after you leave I shall have to switch from a warm bath to a cold shower."

After a brief goodbye kiss, Mara made her way to the man airlock. The hab touched down on the cratered surface of the barren lifeless satellite of Perdition. Bruk's hab was entirely buried under rocky hill, with only the upper airlock protruding from the soil. The upper airlock entrance was horizontally oriented, and would have to be entered from above via a ladder. With a whir the umbilicus extended, curving into place, and connected with Bruk's hab in a series of clacks and clinks.

Undaunted, Mara picked her way along the umbilicus and descended the ladder into Bruk's hab. The entrance chamber was dimly lit, and the floor resembled polished wood. Mara was not used to disarray, and was alarmed to see stacked rectangular objects in somewhat careless piles about the room, and everything covered in a fine layer of dust. Standing at the opposite end of the chamber was an odd looking woman dressed in a thick sweater, slacks, and boots, all black. Mara had never seen anyone like her--she was somewhat plump, her hair curly and gray, and fine wrinkles stretched across the skin of her face in various places. She was, Mara suddenly realized, old--which given the capabilities of the nanos meant that she had chosen to age. She smiled faintly at Mara as Mara walked over to her and held out her hand.

"You must be Bruk. I am Mara, I am delighted to meet you."

"Greetings Mara. Welcome to the habitat of Bruk. You have been granted limited guest access to basic habitat functions. You may call me Habitha."

It was a synth, Mara realized, an automaton composed entirely of nanos--a physical representation of the Hab itself. Seeing as Bruk lived alone, she perhaps found comfort in a synthetic companion of sorts.

"Thank you Habitha, will you take me to Bruk?"

"Yes, the master has been expecting you."

The master? Mara wondered. "Where is your master?"

"Most likely in the library. Shall we go? Master Bruk does not like to be kept waiting."

"Yes please. And do pass along the message that I have arrived in the meantime."

"I cannot. The master does not have a network receiver."

"What?"

"Master Bruk does not wish to be connected to the network."

Mara was stupefied. The network was essentially a compendium of human knowledge and experience, the idea that someone would not want access to it was mind-boggling to her. Habitha led her through several dark passages and cramped rooms, all piled with the same sorts of rectangular objects as she had seen in the entrance hall. "Habitha, why is everything covered in dust?"

"The master prefers it that way."

"Why are there piles of ... things in hallways and areas not meant for storage?"

"The master prefers it that way."

As Mara was becoming used to the odd musty scent in the air, the synth opened a hinged door and led her into a warmly lit and spacious chamber. There were a number of couches covered in worn brown fabric, standing lamps, standing shelves, and shelves lining the walls, filled with... "Books!" Mara said aloud, suddenly realizing what Bruk had scattered all over her hab. Thousands upon thousands of books, in print, on pages most likely made of a synthesized paper. "Habitha, why does..."

"The master prefers it that way." the synth said, with a trace of irritation.

"Of course." Mara said, taken slightly aback. Then the automaton began speaking louder. "Master Bruk?"

"Yes?" an odd voice responded from somewhere in the stacks.

"Miss Mara is here to see you."

Miss? Mara wondered. Nobody had ever called her 'Miss' Mara before.

"Who?" the strangely creaky voice asked.

"Miss Mara. Former wife of your granddaughter Miss Tyr?", the synth paused for a moment, but apart from the sound of rustling papers there was no response. "Whom you agreed to meet?", another pause, again met with shuffling sounds. "TODAY?" the synth tapped its foot impatiently. Mara couldn't help but smile, it was an impressive simulation.

"Dammit Habby, where did you put my notes?"

The synth glanced at Mara. "Just a minute, Mara," it said, and then wandered off into the stacks in the general direction of the voice, soon disappearing out of sight.

"If you would actually let me clean up around here, you might actually be able to find your notes."

"Don't touch anything, you'll ruin my whole system."

More frenzied rustling noises emanated from the stacks, followed by the sound of a large pile of books and papers toppling to the floor. Mara put a hand over her mouth.

"Well don't just stand there. Help me with this."

"Oh now you want my help do you?"

"Habitha..."

"I could put this entire hab in order in moments, but no..."

"Habby..."

"*sigh* Here they are. You were SITTING on them." At this there was a lengthy pause. "All part of your system?" Mara tried to stifle her laughter.

"Isn't there something else you have to do right now?" Bruk asked, clearly irritated.

The synth emerged shortly thereafter and smiled wanly at Mara. "The master will see you now, " it said, before leaving the chamber and shutting the hinged door behind it.

Moments later Bruk emerged from the stacks and approached Mara with a smile. She wore grey slacks, a powder blue button-down shirt, and a tweed jacket which had a bit of wear on it. It was immediately apparent why her voice had sounded so strange--Bruk was expressing male! For whatever reason, Bruk had expressed her male genes, causing her to have a male physique. She had chosen not only to be male, but to also be quite old... receding hairline, wispy white hair, and a neatly cropped white beard. She wore a pair of rimmed lenses over her eyes.

Mara was immediately alarmed. Generally immortals only expressed male when they intended to breed, or on rare occasions for sexual play. Mara began to wonder exactly what Bruk had in mind, and immediately backed away from her.

"I'm sorry Bruk." Mara said, holding up a hand, "I did not come here to breed."

A pained look crossed Bruk's face. "Oh for goodness sake. I didn't invite you here to breed."

"Then why are you expressing male?"

"I'm not expressing male, young lady. I *am* male."

"What?"

"I'm not a Gamman like you, Mara. I was born Homo sapiens, on Earth, as a male. My parents got me into the Lentus program when I was 16, and I didn't make the transition to Immortalis until I was 492. I wasn't just born an immortal female like you."

"But don't you have a standard immortalis genome?"

"Of course."

"Well, why don't you just express female?"

"Because I'm not a female!"

"I don't understand."

"No I suppose you wouldn't. Let me put it another way. Your appearance is Indian."

"Yes, my ancestors hailed from India."

"Right, but with the immortalis genome you can express however you like, so why don't you express as caucasian?"

"Well I could but..." her voice trailed off.

"But you're not caucasian are you? Your Indian appearance is part of your identity--you might choose to express differently in certain occasions, but your natural state is as you are."

Mara wore a chagrined expression. "I'm sorry Bruk, I misunderstood."

"Well, " he said with a sigh, "you wouldn't be the first. I'm a real hit at parties."

Mara giggled.

"I suppose Tyr didn't warn you either."

"No, she didn't. Tyr thinks I place too much emphasis on physical appearance, I suspect she thought it would be good for me to meet you unprepared."

"Uh-huh. She's a fish. And she thinks YOU need help?"

Mara laughed suddenly. Tyr was right, Bruk was quite a character.

"Would you like some tea?"

"I'd love some, but we only have 90 minutes, I don't want to take up too much of your time."

"Oh that's just Habby trying to manage my schedule. I swear she thinks she's in charge," Bruk said, and then raised his voice, "Habby?" he called, and then jumped as the synth materialized next to him.

"Yes Master Bruk?"

"How many times have I told you not to pop in and out like that? You walk in and out of the door like a normal person."

"Yes of course, that's much more efficient."

Bruk stared at the synth for a moment. "Go get us some tea."

"You had six worlds slated for this afternoon."

"Extend my schedule. After you go and get us some tea."

"Yes Master Bruk," the synth said and promptly dematerialized.

The miffed expression on his face was priceless. Mara laughed again.

Shortly thereafter, the synth returned, this time using the hinged door, carrying a platter upon which was a porcelain decanter, teacups, and various other containers.

While Habitha and Bruk conversed, Mara studied the old man. The very notion of an "old man" seemed anachronistic--his mobility seemed somewhat limited, and his appearance was not youthful. But he still seemed beautiful in his own way, he had a dignity about him. Her eyes kept returning to his beard--she had never seen a person with one. Kennis had expressed male once or twice, but never long enough to have a beard--and Mara preferred Kennis in her natural state anyway. It seemed so strange a thing and yet it made Bruk appear distinguished--erudite. Now why should that be? Mara wondered. Why does a beard connote erudition?

His eyes were bright and blue and he seemed sharp and aware, but there was also an air of confusion about him. Absentmindedness was unheard of among immortals. Even if he should allow his body to age to some degree, that would not explain why he wouldn't remember his appointment with her. Or where he kept his notes. Or even why he had to take notes in the first place. The biology of the immortal brain was finite--it simply could not retain all the information in an infinite life--a large portion of the memory was stored in the data core of the hab, and maintained by a network of nanos which could transmit the information over considerable distances. The hab-core was quantum entangled to a backup core in a secure location, so in the event of the loss of a hab, the immortal's memory would not be lost. The communication between the immortal's brain, the nanos, and the habcores was essentially instantaneous--providing an infinite memory that was always accessible. To the immortal it was simply "remembering"--there was no effort involved, it simply happened--and had been designed that way, the immortal never knew whether her memories were biologically based or in "offsite storage". Even though Bruk had no network port, such a device was not a necessary component in the retrieval of memory.

"Well," Bruk said, after the tea had been set out and Habitha had departed, "before we talk planets, I imagine you have some questions for me. There are always questions. Anything else about me being male? Would you like to touch it?"

Mara thought that quite a nonsequitur and wondered just what exactly he was referring to. "Touch it?"

"My beard, " he said, "Gammans always seem to be preoccupied with it."

Mara felt a little embarrassed--she had been staring after all. "In truth, I have never seen a person with one. Yes, may I touch it?"

Bruk smiled and leaned forward to allow Mara to lightly caress his bearded chin. She wrinkled her nose slightly and drew her hand back.

"It's soft yet bristly, and it tickles to the touch. I think it quite charming."

"The ladies loved it back in the day. Anything else?"

"Why have you chosen to age?"

"Getting old is part of the human condition. I was much more "aged" than this when I made the transition to immortalis. But I couldn't bring myself to unwind all the years and go back to being the equivalent of 30 years old again. My life was almost over when I became immortal... being old was part of who I was. I wound the clock back to my 120's though, which is when I still had strength, mobility, and so forth. It would be like you going back to being an adolescent again."

"But is there not some discomfort in the age you have chosen?"

"Yes. But an eternally happy and painless existence is not natural."

"Excuse me?"

"How can one truly know happiness or pleasure, if one hasn't also known sadness or pain?"

"But a life need not have constant physical pain to make one appreciate happiness. I lost my beautiful Tyr many millennia ago and I am still saddened by it."

There was a brief mistiness in Bruk's eyes, as if he were seeing something long since gone. He came out of it almost immediately. "It pleases me to be a crotchety old fart full of discomfort. Anything else?"

"Why do you keep books?"

Bruk looked baffled. "To read, girl. Why else would I keep books?"

"You READ them?"

"Well of course I read them. How else am I going to learn what is in them?"

"But you could read them instantaneously if you had a network port, and then you wouldn't have to fill your hab with them."

"I'm a human being not a computer. Knowledge isn't supposed to just magically appear in your brain, you are supposed to work for it! Besides, I *like* reading books. Have you ever tried it?"

"Well. No not like you do. I suppose I should try it, perhaps I would like it too."

"Damn right you should. Everyone should. Why if I didn't read books you wouldn't be here."

"What do you mean?" Mara asked.

Bruk closed his eyes for a moment, and Mara instinctively took it as him sampling the network, but immediately realized that couldn't be the case. He was trying to remember something. Keeping his eyes closed, he began to recite, and Mara heard her own words coming from his mouth:

"...The truth alas I must concede
Both are blossoms, both are reeds,
Both the same, with different needs--
From the pistil comes no seed."

Opening his eyes, he took on an apologetic look "sorry if I didn't get it right."

"You read my book, Songs of Tyr?"

"Yes, and I savored every word. Marvelous poetry. It was pleasing to hear about Tyr from such a unique perspective. Poetry, there's a perfect example of something that should be experienced in its proper meter, slowly and thoughtfully. Fifty thousand years of love should not appear fully formed as a blip in the mind."

"My Kennis seemed to like it."

"Maybe SHE should read a book."

"I think she's just fine the way she is." Mara stated plainly. She did not like the implication that simply because she (or particularly Kennis) hadn't experienced something Bruk had, they were doing something wrong.

"But not Tyr." Bruk added, with a bit of challenge in his voice. Mara realized he didn't like the fact that she and Tyr were not together, and seemed to have directed that displeasure at Kennis. She found his rapid changes in direction and mood somewhat unsettling--he definitely didn't seem to think like any immortal she knew.

"I am not with Kennis because I thought there was something wrong with Tyr. As you should well know since you read Songs of Tyr, Tyr wanted something from me I could not give her. After awhile this began to make her unhappy, and I couldn't bear being the source of her unhappiness. So I let her go, and it was the hardest thing I've ever done. I will not sit here and be judged for it." She picked up a napkin from the platter and dabbed at her eyes.

"Well, " Bruk said "then you did what you thought was best for Tyr, and I can't begrudge you that. I'm sorry Mara. And she seemed quite happy with that girl... what's her name?"

"Ellan. How do you not know her name? You seem to have trouble with recollection--keeping notes, forgetting appointments, names, and so forth. Is your brain... damaged?"

"Damaged? No my brain isn't damaged. It's just not nano-assisted."

Mara's eyes widened in surprise. "You don't have nanomemory? But... how do you... remember?"

"Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I forget."

"But why would you--"

"Sometimes," he said, drawing in a pregnant breath, "you want to forget. And besides, I can't remember many of the details of my early life--this too is part of the human condition. I couldn't go from my natural state to a state of total recall. I don't need all those memories to be who I am."

Mara was speechless.

"Look. This tea we're about to have. It's a chamomile tea. Have you ever had chamomile tea before?"

"Yes, I had chamomile tea with Kennis and her friend Lispeth 113,761 years ago. We thought it might be a lark to eat a meal, so we had a breakfast of synthetic fruits and bread and listened to Lispeth's latest symphony--"

"This is exactly what I am talking about. Why do you NEED that memory? What has that got to do with anything? You're so busy data dumping the details of the event you forgot to say what the tea was like. Or if you even liked it."

"Perhaps if I had not been interrupted..." Mara said, tilting her head and cocking an eyebrow at Bruk with a little half smile.

Bruk smirked, "patience has never been a virtue of mine."

"Well, two and a half million years of impatience... it appears there's a test of wills between you and eternity."

"Yes, but I intend to win."

Mara laughed and then looked about alarmed as the room trembled slightly. "What was THAT?"

"Oh that's just the star. It will soon nova."

"Nova?!"

"Yes, at some point in the next few thousand years, it will catastrophically destroy itself, the end of its life. It's why Habitha is always after me about my schedule. I've wanted to complete my galactic survey before I die."

Mara knew that there were some rare few immortals that had chosen to die--some had simply become tired of living itself, others felt that they had accomplished everything they wanted to. Others had lost loved ones to tragic accidents and did not wish to continue existing afterward. That the alphan wished to die was nonetheless a completely alien concept to her.

"You choose to live here in Perdition because you wish to die?"

"Perdition?"

"Sorry, it's the name Kennis gave this star system--it had no name on record."

Bruk chuckled, "oh I like her, she sounds a sport. Much better than the name I chose--much better indeed. But yes, when Perdition dies, so will I."

He regarded her silently. The question was obvious but it would have been an invasion of his privacy to ask it. "You doubtless want to know why."

She nodded.

"I'm old, Mara. I don't just mean in appearance, I am incalculably old. Everything I recognize from my entire species has changed into something else. Earth itself is an alien ecosystem--there are no humans there. I've explored the galaxy for millions of years and made countless discoveries of worlds, other life forms, perplexing and beautifully complex planetary systems. I have discovered so much that the process of discovery itself holds no pleasure for me. What is there when newness itself is tedious?"

"You need not devote yourself to discovery. Why not create? Art? Music? Books? Share your discoveries with others and hear their thoughts? As it is you spend your life utterly alone with only a synth for companionship, why not seek a partner--someone to share your life with?"

"These are all arguments I've heard before, from Habitha herself. I had a partner Mara, a long time ago--another Alphan named Jyreeza. We were in the Lentus Program together, and I loved her dearly. We were both very old when the immortalis conversion became available, all of our children had undergone the process and they asked us to as well. We looked forward to seeing them grow, and an infinite future together seemed like paradise at the time."

Mara could sense what was coming--the immortalis conversion according to historical record had a 5% failure rate. "Jyreeza did not survive the conversion?"

He nodded, "and I've lived an eternity without her. I do not want another partner. I've lived a long time, Mara, and I think now, it is long enough. Death is part of what it means to be human."

She did not agree, but kept her thoughts to herself--it was an intensely private thing, and it was not her place to intrude. "I'm sorry, Bruk, I didn't mean to pry."

"That's fine. Take a sip of your tea before it gets cold."

She did so, and found it fabulously superior to the last chamomile tea she had sampled. "This is superb!"

"It's not synthetic. There's a greenhouse in my hab and I've grown the plants myself from the genetic database."

The room trembled again. Mara, are you feeling that? Hab says this star is pretty unstable. We probably shouldn't stay long. Kennis transmitted.

"Bruk, Kennis is concerned about Perdition putting us at risk."

"Tell her not to worry, Habitha has positioned an extensive network of probes around the star and she will be able to tell several hours before it goes nova."

Darling, Bruk's hab is monitoring the star closely and will be able to warn us well in advance of any actual danger. See you soon my love.

Keeping the bath warm for you... Kennis responded. Mara could almost feel Kennis smirking.

After they had finished the tea, Bruk led Mara through a series of hinged doors to another room full of bookshelves--these were filled with notebooks in which Bruk's observations of every world he had visited were recorded. Unlike the library, this room was fastidiously tidy. On a low circular table four notebooks had been set out.

"I had Habitha set these out earlier. There are several worlds in each one but among them four candidates which I think you will like of which one is my particular favorite, a world I called Shiran. Would you like to make a quick hop there to have a look at it?"

"Your hab is integrated into the mountainside... how will we do this? For that matter how have you been doing it all along?"

"Habitha is a hab within a hab, the outer hab is a relatively thin layer of infrastructure. You've been inside the inner hab for most of your time here--something I call the pod. The pod hops directly from inside the hab to any location of my choosing."

"But hops are imprecise--how do you get the pod back inside the hab?"

"The outer hab contains nanobeacons that communicate with the pod, allowing the pod to orient itself perfectly and hop back inside the outer hab."

"That's ingenious! Why have I never heard of this technology?"

"Because I haven't published it. Habitha maintains digital copies of my work which are set to be published the instant Perdition goes nova--my last contribution to my species. Now would you like to see Shiran?"

Bruk jumped suddenly as Habitha materialized. "Dammit woman, haven't I asked you not to do that?"

The synth pointedly ignored his irritation. "I've finished cleaning up the tea cups and have reorganized your schedule, master Bruk. But there is a failure in the nanobeacon network."

"A failure? What's this now?"

"The star's last disturbance seems to have disrupted the nanobeacons. I am effecting repairs but the pod cannot hop during the repair process."

Bruk handed the four notebooks to Mara. "Well, I guess you'll have to go without me then, everything you will need will be in there. Do you some good to read it."

There was another tremble, and at this a number of notebooks fell from their shelves in a heap.

"And it looks like I have plenty to do anyway." Bruk noted ruefully.

"Don't touch anything," Habitha said sharply, "you will mess up my whole system." She brushed past Bruk and began sorting the fallen notebooks.

Mara laughed. "Bruk, why don't you come with Kennis and I? We'll hop to Shiran and have a look, and then bring you back."

"Well..." Bruk began.

"Oh please, would you get him out of my hair for an afternoon? That would be marvelous." Habitha said without looking up.

"Habby. You know I prefer to stay here."

"Well I suppose you and I could spend the afternoon going over your schedule, " Habitha said sweetly with a sardonic smile, "if you think you'd enjoy that more."

Bruk held up his hands "fine, fine, fine." He looked at Mara, "you're sure you don't mind?"

"Not at all. We'd love to have you. I'll just let Kennis know you are coming--she's in the bath."

Habitha made a shooing motion with her hands. "Go on, go on, I've work to do and you are in my way."

Minutes later Bruk and Mara reentered her own hab. Having been warned in advance by Mara, Kennis was not at all surprised by Bruk's appearance, but strangely he was surprised at hers. She had adorned a small tiara, gold bracelets, and necklaces of jade beads and bits of coral. Mara thought she looked lovely. Bruk thought otherwise.

"Hello Bruk, welcome to our hab. I am Kennis. Mara has told me about your visit. I'm pleased that you have decided to visit with us."

"Goodness, girl, put on some clothes!" he responded, averting his eyes.

"What?" she said glancing down at herself "Am I so repulsive?"

"Would you please dress?"

Bruk's a bit eccentric Kennis, maybe you should put something on. *I* think you are beautiful. Mara transmitted.

"Very well, if you insist. I apologize for offending you though I don't see what the problem is." She placed her hands on her hips and waited as a mist of nanos surrounded her and synthesized a satin kimono, turquoise with lapis accents. "Better?"

Bruk glanced at her, "Much. Sorry Kennis, in my day, people didn't greet guests unclothed--that was reserved for lovers."

"I apologize."

"No that's... that's fine." He seemed quite shaken, much to Mara and Kennis' amusement.

"Well it's good to know that if I get tired of your presence I have a sure fire way to get rid of you." Kennis said, with a smirk.

"Kennis!" Mara said, partly shocked but still laughing.

Bruk glanced at Mara, "Oh I *do* like her."

After the pleasantries, including Kennis touching Bruk's beard, they retired to the atrium where Bruk read the coordinates of Shiran from his notebook, aloud, and the hab disengaged from his own, lifted off and made the hop. Immediately an immense swirl of stars became visible through the windows of the atrium. Both Mara and Kennis were transfixed by it--it was a galaxy.

"Where are we?" Mara asked.

"We are in the Small Magellanic Cloud, you are looking at the Milky Way." Bruk said, "Hab, can we have a view of Shiran?"

An image appeared on the atrium wall of a terrestrial world--blue and green and dotted with white clouds.

"Shiran." Bruk said simply.

"It's beautiful, Bruk. How does it come by this environment? Is that vegetation?"

"It is. From my survey here I was able to discern that Shiran was once inhabited by a sentient species--ruins on the surface make this clear. But they were wiped out by a disease that they were unable to cure. All that remains is some limited vegetation and microbial life. The biochemistry is very similar to that of Earth--you should be able to create humans here with minor alterations to allow them to metabolize this vegetation. You could also seed the environment with various species from Earth, but of course they'll all need to be altered slightly. Gravity is 1.1 G, rotation period is 31 hours, two satellites, one very tiny (350 km diameter--probably a captured asteroid) and one much larger (2100 km diameter.) Atmospheric makeup is similar to Earth's but has enough differences that genetic modification will be required. Not too bad though. All in all it's a perfect fit for your requirements. Would you like to go down and have a look?"

"Yes! It sounds marvelous. Kennis, will you come?"

"Of course, darling."

[Proximity warning. A traveler is arriving.] Hab transmitted.

"What?" Mara said aloud, while Kennis glanced out the window.

Bruk looked at her strangely. "I didn't say anything," he said.

"Hab, Bruk has no network port, please address all common broadcasts vocally."

"Yes Mara, " the disembodied voice of the hab filled the air, " apologies Bruk, I was not aware that you were not network enabled. Welcome to the hab of Mara and Kennis, you have been granted full guest access to all hab functions."

"Thank you, please repeat your last broadcast."

"Proximity warning. A traveler is arriving. Vehicle has hopped in and is entering orbit around Shiran."

Mara was crestfallen--"could the original inhabitants of this world be returning to claim it?"

"No, I don't understand it. From my brief survey I saw no evidence of a space faring culture. Hab, can we have a view of the visitor?"

The image on the atrium wall flickered and showed an oblong vessel, roughly ovoid, with no visible markings or windows--just a pair of hatches and an otherwise featureless hull of dark gray metal.

"What is that?" Mara asked.

"The pod." Bruk said, and with sudden realization, "Damn you Habitha."

"The what?" Kennis asked.

Hab began vocalizing again, "Mara, you asked to be notified of new entries in the planetary catalog. Catalog size has just increased by 1,512,378 worlds."

"DAMN YOU HABITHA!" Bruk exploded. "Nanobeacon failure my foot! Dammit!"

"Incoming data stream from other vessel. Vessel identifies itself as the hab of Bruk, and requests access rights to manifest a synth. Mara or Kennis, will you receive this stream?" Hab announced.

"Yes." Kennis and Mara said together. Instantly, Habitha appeared in a swirl of nanos.

"Your works have been published in accordance with your wishes, master Bruk."

"They were supposed to be published in the event of my death, Habitha."

"Your specific instructions were to publish them when Perdition became a nova."

"Yes, and I was supposed to be there at the time."

"I am aware of that."

"You lied to me, Habby."

"Yes I did. I carried out my prime directive through the only means you left me."

A hab's prime directive was to protect its occupants at all costs.

"The prime directive includes a right to die clause, Habitha."

"Bruk, " the synth said, taking on an unsettlingly human tone, " you coded me to look like her, think like her, and act like her. What would she have done?"

His eyes filled with tears. "Habitha, please delete all iterations of the Kindred program."

Habitha nodded and said with a smile, "I think that's best." Immediately the synth collapsed into a cloud of nanos that streamed away through various vents.

"Goodbye Jyreeza, " he whispered softly.

Lens Cults and The Isoceles Field

Abacquer — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 19:14:59 -0500

So early this morning I couldn't sleep and I ended up writing an article on flickr in one of the many "what lens should I buy" discussions that goes on there. I have noticed, in my days on flickr, that certain pieces of equipment and certain techniques have a following, and often get recommended simply because of the following rather than because the equipment/technique is actually suited to the purpose of the person asking. In an effort to supply a counterbalancing opinion, I found myself in need of trigonometry.

The Argument

One such "cult" item is the "nifty fifty" (the EF 50mm f/1.8) lens made for Canon EOS cameras. It is very sharp, very fast, and very cheap ($80). If you are on a tight budget (or even if you aren't) it makes sense to have one for your EOS camera unless you have a better 50mm prime, or don't need a 50mm prime.

While I will not argue that it is probably one of the best value-for-money lenses, it is not versatile at all, and yet it seems to get hailed as a magic-bullet lens. I regularly see people making claims like "it never comes off my camera". And after having used it myself, I can only conclude that these people shoot one type of thing and one type of thing only, or it never comes off because they don't own any other lenses.

There is a certain love affair with the 50mm focal length because it was the standard focal length for 35mm film for decades. But in the age of digital SLR cameras, things are different for the less expensive consumer DSLRs. These DSLR's tend to use an image sensor that is smaller than 35mm film. The APS-C style sensor, or crop sensor, does not render the entire image cast by a standard lens, but only a smaller piece in the center. This results in an apparent magnification factor of 1.6. Hence if you put a 50mm lens on a crop-sensor camera, it's like working with an 80mm lens (50 x 1.6 = 80). The end result is a smaller-than-expected "field of view" (FOV).

On an old Canon 35mm film camera, a 50mm lens has a FOV of 46°. But on a crop-sensor camera the FOV is a hair under 29°. This loss of over a third of the FOV means that on crop-sensor cameras the EF 50mm f/1.8 lens has distinct limitations as to how much you can fit in the frame.

Fortunately, on my EOS 5D the 50mm behaves as expected. Because the 5D is a full frame camera, its sensor is the same size as a 35mm film frame. So I get 46° out of my EF 50mm, just as nature intended.

The "nifty fifty" on crop-sensor cameras is often described as a "portrait lens". With the crop factor, the 50mm lens behaves like an 80mm lens, and 80mm is ideal for portraits. But if you want to shoot anything larger than a head-and-shoulders portrait with the EF 50 1.8 on your Rebel XT or 30D, you'd better have a lot of room behind you, because you are going to need to back up... a lot.

But how much?

The Trigonometry

Well that's where the trig comes in (you can skip this section if you don't want to see how I figured it out). In order for me to say how much, I needed to be able to reliably compute the distance necessary to view an object of a given width. But how? I started by drawing a diagram like this one:

V is my viewing angle. Okay it's not 29° (or 28.98333° which is the actual FOV of the nifty fifty on a crop sensor), but close enough. The legs of the triangle extending out from V represent the edges of my FOV as the distance to the subject (marked by the dashed line, d) grows. The base of the triangle (marked as w) is the width of the field of view at the distance d. Basically this is a representation of the wedge or cone of that falls within a particular FOV, in this case 30°.

I can pick any distance I want for d, but what I really need is a way to say what d should be to accomodate a subject of a certain width. In other words, to fit a subject 10 feet wide in my viewfinder, how far back do I need to stand with the nifty fifty on my EOS 30D camera? I supposed that given a formula for that, I could solve the formula for the width so that one could also compute the maximum width viewable given a distance.

The triangle depicted above is an isoceles triangle, as both the legs are the same length, and consequently the angles where the legs meet the base is also to the same. I spent some time looking online for computations for isoceles triangles, but what I was looking for didn't appear (namely, given the length of the base, and the angle of the peak, what is the height or altitude of an isoceles triangle?)

I studied trig over 20 years ago so I remember very little of it, but I did remember there were a lot of simple equivalences for right triangles (that is, triangles where one of the angles is 90°). And I realized while looking at my diagram that the line I had drawn to represent the distance, bisected V and split the triangle into 2 right triangles, each of which looked like this:

Bisecting V gives me a 15° angle (V'), and a base width exactly half of what it was before (w'). So if I could take a given distance d and come up with a formula for w', then I should be able to solve that formula for either d or w', keeping in mind that V' is V/2 and w' is w/2.

Doing a quick check online I found the two rudimentary trignometric equivalences for right triangles: for either of the angles other than the 90° one, the sin of that angle is equal to the length of the opposite side divided by the length of the hypoteneuse, and the cos of that angle is equal to the length of the adjacent side divided by the length of the hypoteneuse. Here are those equivalences for the right triangle above:

Sin V' and cos V' I can get with a pocket calculator, and I'm going to pick a value for either d or w' and solve for the other. I can solve the equation on the left for w' [w' = (sin V') * h] and I can solve the equation on the right for d [d = (cos V') * h], but both of these solutions require me to know what the hypoteneuse of this triangle is.

But in order to get w' from d or d from w' I need to do more work, mostly because I am not going to know what the hypoteneuse is. I'm only going to be starting with either V' and w' or V' and d. So what I need to do is solve one of the equations for h, and then plug that into the other equation. That should give me a formula I that I can use to solve for either d in terms of w' and V' or w' in terms of d and V'. So I picked the equation on the right. Solving that for h gives h = d / (cos V').

So I should be able to substitute d / (cos V') in the equation on the left, like so:

Now I'm good. I know what V' is, I can get sin V' or cos V' from my calculator, and I am going to pick either d or w'. So now I can solve for either one, like so:

Done, right? Well, yes, if I want to know what the appropriate distance is for half the width of my subject using a lens with half the field of view. Now I want to substitute in the equivalences that w' = w/2 and V' = V/2. In the equation on the right that will put w/2 on the left of the equal sign, so I will multiply both sides by 2 to solve the equation for w. That gives me:

Okay they probably aren't the cleanest formulas in the world, but they work and let you get the height of an isoceles triangle from its base width and peak angle, or vice versa. Using these formulas I could handily compute the needed distance for a given width in a given field of view, and this allowed me to present something more concrete than "gee whiz, that EF 50mm 1.8 is awfully confining on a crop sensor camera."

Back to the Argument

So how confining is that nifty fifty?

5 feet wide = 9.7 feet away
10 feet wide = 19.3 feet away
15 feet wide = 29 feet away
20 feet wide = 38.7 feet away
25 feet wide = 48.4 feet away

Pretty confining! If you are trying to capture 3 people sitting on a couch which is 8 feet long all in one shot, you need to stand 15 feet 6 inches away. Better have a big living room, or one where there isn't a TV 10 feet from the couch. Or maybe if you moved the couch outside... that would be cool for an album cover, but for Aunt Bea, Uncle Joe, and Granny, it is probably less so.

Working with the EF 50mm f/1.8 is a good exercise though for learning how to push a lens to do what you need, and it's plain old good exercise, because you're going to be backing up a lot. You can get that 8 foot couch in shot if you shoot from an angle, but then you will need to stop your aperture down to widen up the depth of field so that everyone will be in focus... which means you can't shoot low light anymore so you might need lamps or a flash. Or you could give up on that shot and shoot the people individually.

Or, you could simply not get the EF 50mm 1.8 in the first place, if you are not planning to shoot primarily portraits. If you want to consider the traditional FOV that the great 35mm film artists shot with, you need a lens that gives a FOV on a crop-sensor camera similar to a 50mm lens on a 35mm film camera (i.e. 46°). The closest bet would be a 28mm lens, like the EF 28mm f/1.8 or EF 28mm f/2.8. These have a crop-sensor FOV of 47.25°. With one of these lenses the width to distance figures look like this:

5 feet wide = 5.7 feet away
10 feet wide = 11.4 feet away
15 feet wide = 17.1 feet away
20 feet wide = 22.8 feet away
25 feet wide = 28.6 feet away

Much more reasonable. And quite interesting how the distance to subject is almost the same as the width of the subject. No surpise that the 50mm lens became the standard on the cameras of old.

The Experiments Continue...

Abacquer — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 23:37:10 -0400

The 24$ Pentax K-Mount to Canon EF-Mount adapter came in the mail today, and when I got home I took out Dad's old Chinon CE-4 camera, removed the Chinon 50mm 1.9 lens and attached it to my 400D using the new adapter.

It would be an understatement to say that I am impressed with the results.

What a terrific piece of glass this is! If you go on eBay you can buy this very lens for under twenty bucks and yet it takes amazing pictures! My friends, if you have been considering getting a DSLR but have been put off by the price of the glass, and believe me, there's a lot to be put off by, and you don't mind setting the aperture manually and focusing manually, you may definitely want to consider old manual lenses on a new SLR body.

As for me, well I already have a fast 50mm prime, but I really wanted to see Dad's lens in action again. I was not disappointed.

Frankenstein's Lab

Abacquer — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 14:58:18 -0400

As you might recall I decided to sell my old Nikon gear off to Adorama and parlay it into new lenses. Over the phone Adorama quoted me about $250 for my Tamron lens, and $200 for my 28mm Nikon lens. The camera body is now worth a pittance (like $30), and there was the 400mm Sigma telephoto which they wanted to examine before giving an estimate on, but I was expecting at least $100 for it. It was never a great lens but it wasn't total junk either, and it went for $600 when it was new. So for the whole kit I was expecting $500-$600.

Upon receiving the gear Adorama took over two weeks to get back to me and then (after I chased after them for a couple days) offered me $175 for the entire kit. I could see from looking at their own used equipment inventory page that they would sell the Sigma alone for almost $400. Yeah. So like, um, no. I told them to ship it back to me on their dime. They offered $200 if I would consider trading it in on a purchase, but I wasn't biting. I was planning to finance my 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS lens with this old kit, but given that the new lens was $550, if I ditched my entire Nikon kit at their offer I'd STILL be $375 short. Not worth it.

Instead I sold my MtG Online account which had a pretty decent collection of virtual cards in it. I got $510 for that and that ended up financing my telephoto lens (with which, I am totally in love.) Meanwhile the Nikon gear came back and got stacked next to my old camera bag, into which I had stored my Dad's old Chinon gear, which my Mom had given to me. Dad's gear included 2 lenses (of which one is infested with fungus and therefore history) but combined with my old Nikon gear that is four lenses that once took beautiful pictures:

Nikon Nikkor 28mm f/2.8
Tamron 90mm f/2.5 (for Nikon)
Sigma 400mm f/5.6 APO (for Nikon)
Chinon 50mm f/1.9

Nikon cameras for ages have used the Nikon F-Mount. In fact the mount was introduced in 1959 and is still in use today (though it was extended when autofocus came on the scene.) So as long as one is prepared to use them in a manual fashion, one could attach lenses 1 to 3 to a modern Nikon and go... no additional equipment necessary. Many camera manufacturers created completely new mounts when moving to autofocus, to howls of disapproval from customers who had invested in lenses, but not Nikon. The other notable exception is Pentax. The K-Mount was created in 1976 and is still standard on Pentax cameras. I bring it up because the Chinon CE-4 uses an old K-Mount which means lens #4 in the above list should fit on any modern Pentax camera, although it would probably only function in a manual fashion.

So I began to wonder if I could find adapters that would let me use these lenses on my Canon EOS 400D. People have been saying for awhile that it is not possible with Pentax K-lenses, until a working adapter was invented awhile back. But for Nikon lenses the adapters have been around awhile and are available cheaply, so I picked one up from an ebay seller in China for the hefty sum of $7.99 (plus $8.01 shipping) and it arrived the other day... and I spent a couple hours playing Dr. Frankenstein, attaching old dead lenses to my EOS 400D.

Nikkor 28mm f/2.8:

I only tried a few shots with the 28mm. I was surprised by how hot the colors were from this lens. I can tell it is a good one and with practice I should be able to get some nice pictures with it. This is one I'd like to throw on the camera and just go out shooting for awhile with it. It was fairly wide, and therefore I could stand comfortably close to my subjects while shooting with this lens.

Tamron 90mm f/2.5:

The colors out of the Tamron were also very hot, though not quite as hot as the 28mm. This and the Sigma are the only large primes I've ever owned, so they take some getting used to. I found that the body of the lens isn't in the greatest shape, the focusing wheel would sometimes slip and turn a little on its own, so I sort of had to hold it in place. I really took my time with this lens and did a number of shots. I did notice a lot of flaring (I was shooting without the hood) so I don't know if the lens has an internal issue, although I did a long exposure low light shot that came out looking just fine.

Given the slippery focus, I don't think I'd use this prime too much in the field, but for still life at home where I have a lot of control it still can produce nice pictures. I'm willing to bet I could send it out to be cleaned and have the focusing ring tightened up. I may try that... the picture quality is definitely worth it.

Sigma 400mm f/5.6 APO:

As expected this beast was the touchiest of the three. If I ever end up getting that EF Canon 100-400mm someday, this lens will end up on eBay. I need to do a head to head test with the 70-300mm I own at some point, but I'm willing to bet the newer lens will win.

At 400mm the lens magnifies hand shake extremely, and it was never a very clear lens in the first place. But I found if I baby it enough (and use a tripod) I can still get some very nice shots out of this lens, like these pretty magenta flowers here which required a half-second exposure even though it was a bright sunny day. Granted, they were in the shade... but a half second???

All in all it was a successful experiment. I'm sure I will use the Nikkor 28mm and the Tamron 90mm on my EOS 400D. The Sigma... maybe, I need to experiment with that one some more. This was pretty fun, and it was nice to see these lenses in action again. With no electrical contacts the lenses were strictly manual... manual focus, and aperture had to be set manually as well using the controls built into the lenses. As far as the 400D was concerned, there was no lens on the camera when I took the test shots you see above.

One note about the adapter though, it is extremely thin and getting it on and off is tricky. It's probably easier to just buy one for each Nikon lens you are going to use and then simply leave the adapter on the lens (note, you'll need to buy a lens cap for each lens you do this to... once the adaptor is on, the lens cap that came with the lens won't fit.) I've ordered both a Pentax-K adapter for my Dad's old Chinon lens and an M42 style adapter for possible future use. (There are some really high quality lenses out there which are made to fit the M42 screw-mount, and they can be had very inexpensively. I think I may want to try some of those one day... the Carl Zeiss Flektogon 4/20mm springs to mind as does a bunch of Takumar lenses.)

Wedding Gear...

Abacquer — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 09:00:00 -0400

So while sitting around yesterday trying to work from home, aching and dealing with my swollen face, I considered the sort of kit I would need to take quality wedding/portraiture photos.

It occurred to me that if I had 10 grand kicking around, I could put together an amazing kit for doing wedding photography and portrait work. In a moment of idle dreaming I listed it out on Amazon using their "Listmania" service. You can see it in great detail here. I don't see how I could come up with that kind of dough unless I sold off my collection of Magic: the Gathering trading cards. It probably wouldn't get me all the way there, but it might get me far enough along to build a useful subset of the gear.

A serious wedding photographer brings a spare camera body on a job--both because the primary camera could break down, and also because it can make switching between lenses much quicker, so I would want a more serious body to be my primary camera and my XTi would be my backup body. Then I would need a couple high quality zoom lenses and a flash for the new camera. That would be the basic wedding kit.

Basic Wedding Kit
EOS 5D 12.8 mpx Camera	$2,643
EF 24-70mm f/2.8L lens	$1,139
EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS lens	$1,699
580 EXII Speedlite	$430
TOTAL:	$5,911

In order to do serious portraiture these lenses plus those I already own would probably suffice, but there is a little more equipment I would need for portraiture, and there is at least one additional lens that would be nice to have for the wedding work, and some flash enhancements that would be good for both:

Stage Two
EF 16-35mm f/2.8L lens	$1,449
Botero #035 Black Muslin	$129
Impact Support System	$99
Pony Spring Clamps	$8
OC-E3 Flash Cable	$75
Gary Fong Clear LightSphere II	$49
TOTAL:	$1,809

The 16-35 lens gives me serious wide angle capability for large family shots (not unusual for weddings) and I can use it for landscape work when I am shooting for pleasure. The muslin backdrop, support system, and clamps would be necessary for decent portrait shots, and ultimately I would probably want a few varieties of muslin backdrop, but for starting out, basic black would be fine. The OC-E3 would allow me to separate the flash from the camera and hold it overhead or mount it nearby, and the LightSphere would let me diffuse the flash for softer lighting. Stage two brings the total pricetag to $7,720. This would be a solid wedding/portrait kit.

The only thing lacking is an even longer lens for very special sorts of situations, and a quality backup lens for the XTi body if I am ever shooting with an assistant and we both need to be in the most common shooting range (20's-70's) at the same time. That's where stage three comes in:

Stage Three
EF 100-400mm f/4-5.6L IS lens	$1,410
Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 lens	$379
TOTAL:	$1,789

The 400mm L glass with image stabilization should provide the last conceivable bit of reach necessary for weddings and I suspect for most weddings it wouldn't be necessary. However it would be a solid lens for wildlife when I am not shooting weddings. The 28-75mm Tamron gets a lot of respect despite the brand and the price, and as a backup lens on the XTi body, that would be fine. This brings the total pricetag to $9,509 and gives me enough glass to do almost anything I want. Yes, there's no extreme length lenses (> 400 mm) but I can't conceive of a use for such lenses that could justify the expense.

The glass listed would cover me for macro, wildlife, weddings, landscape, low light, sports, and portraits (especially when you include the 28mm, 50mm, and 90mm primes I already own). Looking toward specialty landscape and architectural photography, the only other thing I can think of that would be "nice to have" would be a fisheye lens and a perspective-correcting lens. That would be the "bonus stage":

Bonus Stage
EF 15mm f/2.8 Fisheye lens	$580
TS-E 24mm f/3.5L Tilt-shift lens	$1,099
TOTAL:	$1,679

The fisheye lens lets you squeeze a lot of lanscape into a single shot by giving the shot a spherized look... here's an example taken with the EF 15mm fisheye. A tilt-shift lens is a strictly manual focus lens that allows you shift the focal plane in order to correct the perspective and distortion that often results from shooting tall structures from relatively nearby with short focal length lenses. Here's a sample shot with the TS-E 24mm. Anyway this would put the pricetag at $11,188, but what a killer kit this would be!! Ah well... if I win the lottery someday... fun to think about I suppose.

If I sell off my MTG collection and save up my pennies for awhile, the basic wedding kit becomes a distinct possibility. I'll be devoting some serious thought to that over the coming days.

Do I, Really?

Abacquer — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 12:35:04 -0400

You know... there's a group for everything on flickr...

ID Please - The Power of the Internet (and flickr)

Abacquer — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 09:30:39 -0400

Here's a little something neat I found on flickr. Like most big internet repositories, flickr has had a virtual community of photographers that have sprung up around it. One way it facilitates this is through "groups", also called "pools". A group is simply a collection of photos that you can submit your photo to. Typically groups have some sort of theme (like landscapes, cities, cats, clouds, water, or highly specific stuff like "Fitchburg, Massachusetts"). Some groups are intended to help you become a better photographer, in that if you submit a photo, you must critique the N photos that were submitted before yours. This guarantees input from other people which can be very useful if you are trying something new.

But one of the most interesting groups I've found is called ID Please. This is a group for submitting photos you took of things you can't identify. The group members have specialized knowledge, and if they recognize the thing you posted, they'll tell you what it is. The primary submissions seem to be pictures of flowers, insects, and birds. But I have seen pictures of all sorts of things go by and get identified, airplanes and vehicles, antiques and apparati, cityscapes and locations, even one person who had taken a picture of something on the ground from the window of an airplane at high altitude and wanted to know what it was.

Since I discovered this group I am rapidly becoming familiar with the local plants and animals in my area. In exchange for their help, I try to offer information on pictures of birds that are submitted to the group.

All in all, it's pretty neat! If you've got a picture of something you can't identify, perhaps you should upload it to flickr and submit it to the ID Please group.

Mind What You Post on Flickr

Abacquer — Wed, 30 May 2007 10:02:59 -0400

(Or anywhere on the internet really.) People will find your images, copy them, and use them for their own purposes.

I mention this because I have just heard about Flickr user "Lara Jade" who recently discovered that a self portrait she photographed when she was 14 years old was used as the cover for a pornographic DVD without her knowledge. The responses she has received from the DVD company border on the bizarre and betray an extremely warped sense of morality and personal responsibility.

Sadly for Lara Jade, she cannot afford the legal fees necessary to pursue the matter, especially since she lives in the UK and the photo was misappropriated by a company operating in the USA.

Read her story here.

Those of you who post personal or family photos are advised to publish them as "private" photos -- viewable only by people you name as family or friends. This is not something I've ever worried about on my blog, but I am now wrestling with the idea of marking some of my photo albums as private. If that happens, anybody who wants to view those albums will need to create a reader account so I can add you as an approved reader. I haven't decided what I am going to do. This could be a good opportunity to just switch to Flickr. I'll have to think on it.

I've Been Stumbled Upon

Abacquer — Sun, 20 May 2007 13:49:29 -0400

Well apparently somebody really liked my "Why I am an Atheist" post yesterday because they linked me up over on StumbleUpon.com. The end result? Last night my blog had over 3,700 hits on that article, and 860 hits on another article I linked to from within that article. Total bandwidth consumed 319,389,696 bytes. That's about 304.5 Mb, or a tenth of my monthly bandwidth.

Not that I mind! I'm excited that my hits have temporarily tripled... always nice to have readers. (Hopefully we'll get some new regulars here at ULev.) But I was a little worried about my bandwidth, so I ordered up another 5 Gb from BlogHarbor just for this month, just in case. In all likelihood I probably won't need it, but better safe than sorry.

The last time something like this happened was when I entered a submission to one of FARK's photoshop contests. That time the graphic I had linked to got so many hits I had to delete it... like 9,000 in the first hour. Crazy!

ULev Joins Planet Atheism

Abacquer — Sun, 20 May 2007 12:52:22 -0400

As of a couple days ago, Unbecoming Levity has joined Planet Atheism as a contributing feed. You might have spotted the new link in my sidebar under "Badges and Doodads". Planet Atheism is a feed aggregator for a large number (75 at present, and counting) of atheist-themed blogs. This makes it a very nice source for catching up on atheist bloggers and seeing what's going down in the non-believer blog-o-sphere.

ULev regulars will no doubt be thinking that people reading Planet Atheism will not want to hear about my new teeth or the funny thing my cats did the other day. I agree. That's why there's a new topic in my topics sidebar called "PlanetAtheism". The Planet Atheism aggregator only subscribes to that topic, so not every article on ULev will be dumped onto Planet Atheism's feed (much to their relief I'm sure!) This is possible because Blog Harbor offers category-driven blogs, where each category can have its own RSS feed.

Belonging to Planet Atheism has already caused an uptick in my hits, and brought new commenters to Unbecoming Levity, for which I am very grateful. I encourage anyone who has an atheist themed blog (or a category-driven blog with occasional articles of interest to atheists) to contact the proprietor of Planet Atheism and see about inclusion. (If you're curious, here's their FAQ.)

Even if you don't, at least drop the Planet Atheism feed into your aggregator (Google Reader, Bloglines, whatever...) and you will never run short of articles of interest to atheists.

Various

Abacquer — Fri, 11 May 2007 15:34:24 -0400

Okay, here's a bunch of little things I want to talk about. None of them really deserves its own article but I want to share it anyway. I suppose I should caution you that I am on percoset right now, so I am a little loopy... I apologize if this is a scatterbrained.

Eating

I still can't chew, and won't be able to for another week at least. So I am exploring different things that I can eat without chewing. Stuff that has worked out well has been jello, applesauce, soup broth, rice in thick gravy, spagettios, small bits of bread soaked in broth, yogurt, pureed fruit mixed with yogurt and juice, and so forth. Pureed baked beans is really grainy, and I don't like it. Gonna try baked beans again sometime soon where I just try to swallow the beans whole, unchewed. I've found I can eat Italian Ices, but all the acid in fruit juice is making this bothersome.

All this nigh-liquid food combined with drugs that mess up my sleep schedule, and amoxicillin (to avoid infection) is making my stomach pretty upset. But I'll get through. (It's not like I have a choice!)

NPR Podcasts

When I go to bed I like to listen to music or speech on my MP3 player. I find that listening to the same stuff every night helps me sleep. But eventually I get tired of the same stuff. The NPR website has always been a great place to go to stream shows you've missed, but at some point they began offering these shows as podcasts. (The difference, from my perspective, is that you can download old shows as MP3 files, drop them on your MP3 player or your computer, and listen to them anytime.) You guys were probably aware of that, but to me it's big news... streaming is great, but it is much nicer to grab the last few episodes of my favorite NPR program and listen to it whenever (in my case, when I go to bed.) NPR has a huge podcast directory with shows from all their member stations. Here's a link to the directory... you can subscribe to these shows as feeds in Google Reader or just hit the URL directly and save the MP3 files.

The podcasts (shows) that I am most interested in are:

Stem Cells

So I was listening to one of those podcasts of NPR Science Friday where the topic matter was stem cell research. A guy called in who equated a 14-day-old blastocyst with a person. He was in the crowd that considers a fertilized human egg to be a human being, what he framed as "life begins at conception". Obviously holding that view, there was no way he could get behind stem cell research since it involved killing embryos.

Then one of the guest experts offered the caller a challenge which I committed to memory because I never wanted to forget it:

Imagine you are a fireman dealing fighting a fire in a fertility clinic. You enter a room and find in it a six year old girl, and a tray with 20 frozen embryos. You can either save the girl or the tray of embryos. Which one do you choose?

In my opinion, the caller chickened out. He said something like "that would be a call I would have to make as a fireman... it would depend on who was closest to the door and who was most likely to survive." I felt his answer betrayed that he couldn't really equate 20 embryos with 20 people... if he could, the decision should have been both straightforward, and patently ridiculous... as if anyone could ignore a 6 year old girl screaming for rescue from a fire and instead choose a rack of test tubes.

Although it isn't clear exactly when an embryo becomes a person, it seems downright obvious that a 14-day-old blastocyst is far less a person than a six year old girl. I'm going to remember this challenge. It really made me think.

Birdies

I've been feeding the birds in my yard again lately. I stopped many years ago, but started up again after my Dad passed away. It's funny, I sort of got him interested in birds and birdfeeding years ago, and now he has sort of gotten me back into it. Things haven't changed much. Regular wild bird food doesn't have enough millet in it, and has some other seeds that most of the birds don't eat. So I went back to one of my old recipes and it worked like a charm, but it involves buying parakeet food and mixing that into the seed, which is expensive. I have to find a place where I can get millet cheap. Anybody know a place?

Dawkins Discussions... on Amazon?

I've been following some discussions on Dawkins which are popping up on Amazon. Apparently any product for sale on Amazon gets its own discussion forum. So at the bottom of the amazon page for The God Delusion are the hot forum topics related to that book. It's amazing what lengths some people will go to in order to discredit Dawkins. Check it out, if you dare. This is where I found out about the "Dawkins Pause" video... this particular discussion links to the video (it's something of a relief to see that the theists seem to be in the minority on this forum.)

If you need more Dawkins, here's a feed for RichardDawkins.net which you can drop in your news aggregator.

I'm about halfway through The God Delusion myself. Having trouble reading it right now... mostly because of the percosets.

Topix.Net

Don't know if I've recommended this before, but topix.net is a nice source for regional newsfeeds for small towns. They incorporate feeds for local newspapers and blogs, and all you do is enter the zip code of the town you are interested in, and topix.net will generate a feed for that town that you can plonk into a feed reader like bloglines, Google reader, and so forth. (It's my understanding that IE7 has a feed aggregator built right in.)

My Shared Shite

I've been regularly flagging articles in the feeds I read as shared so that other people can enjoy them. You can access the GoogleReader page devoted to my shared articles here.

3Hive Decency

Some fairly decent stuff has cropped up on 3Hive since my last article about indie music. I recommend The Autumn Defense and Lymbyc Systym.

Oral Update

Abacquer — Wed, 09 May 2007 13:35:46 -0400

Breakfast today was baked beans and scrambled eggs pureed into a gloppy soup that I spooned into my mouth a little at a time. It tasted fine but the eggs made it grainy so I had trouble eating it. I'm still picking at it now. I took two percosets at 10 AM because my mouth was really getting sore and I am still feeling pretty loopy right now.

But I am missing chewing. I tried to bite a grape a few minutes ago, I was able to dent the skin of the grape slightly but it was too painful for me to actually bite into. So I think I'm gonna have pureed grapes sometime today.

My dentures were biting into my front upper gums something fierce yesterday so I made an unscheduled trip to the dentist for a minor adjustment. I will be briefly visiting him again today for more adjustments. After looking at my gums yesterday, he said there was no point in doing a full adjustment because everything was going to change overnight, so he just touched up the part that was really hurting.

Oh and if you are curious as to what the surgery was like, here's an excerpt from a letter I sent my Mom about it:

...I was very scared about this visit... and yours and Donna's phone calls on Sunday were very reassuring to me. I was still scared though. When I finally ended up in the surgeon's chair he asked me how I was and I said "terrified to the point of zero defecation". He paused a moment and then said "you mean 'scared shitless'?" I love joking with doctors, because they are so learned you can come up with complex jokes and they get them right away.

They used a peculiar device on my arm that prevented me from feeling the needle at all. I was amazed at that. Then one of the nurses switched on the heart monitor and I could hear it going beep-beep-beep-beep rapidly because I was so nervous. She said to me, "Don't worry Charles, we're going to give you a series of medications now, and the first will make you relax, and then we'll switch to another one which will sedate you." I nodded and listened to the beeping. After only few seconds the beeping began to slow down. Then it weirdly began dropping in pitch (from beep-beep-beep to borp ... borp ... borp). I suddenly noticed that I felt like I had just spent six hours working in the yard--all my limbs felt very heavy, but I didn't feel sleepy yet. I looked at the nurse who was standing at my side and said "I feel very heavy." She said "That's normal, Charles" and stepped away from my side for a second.

Then she came back and looked into my eyes and said, "Mr. Seggelin, are you awake?" I nodded, drunkenly. She said "Can you walk? It's time to go to the recovery room."

That was a real "what the?" moment for me. In the "second" when she stepped away from my side, I had fallen asleep for 2 hours and they had removed all teeth, sewed up the injuries, put in the dentures and stuffed my mouth with gauze. I couldn't remember falling asleep. It was literally over before I knew it, exactly as you and Donna had assured me. I was *SO* relieved. And that was that.

Now if I can just get the dentures adjusted tomorrow so that they aren't falling out of my head, things should be great. Then it is just dealing with the soreness which, in all honesty, isn't as bad as I thought it would be, so far. I am very sore, but getting 19 teeth pulled isn't 19 times as painful as getting one pulled. More like getting 3-4 pulled, because you have that same "tooth pulled" pain in four locations (upper left, upper right, lower left, lower right). The other thing is I feel exhausted (sort of like when I had pneumonia, but not as bad) because my body is trying to repair 19 separate injuries to my gums and that takes a lot of energy. Going on car rides is no fun because I am very weary and whenever the car goes over a bump, the dentures clack together and I get a pain there. But these things will pass. I suspect by Monday next I'll be much better...

Digital Camera Binoculars

Abacquer — Mon, 07 May 2007 23:11:19 -0400

This weekend, while gazing on the gorgeous colors of the Yellow Warbler, a veritable "wild canary" in appearance, an odd thought occurred to me. Why doesn't someone make binoculars with a built-in digital camera?

It's exceedingly difficult to photograph birds with conventional digital cameras... you really need expensive equipment and prohibitively expensive lenses. And yet the image in my Bushnells is crisp, bright, clear, and wonderful in every respect except that I cannot record it in any easy way.

Why hasn't someone done this? Then I wondered, maybe someone already has. So early today I went poking around on the net for binocular cameras. Sure enough, there are some, but not quite what you think. All digital camera binoculars are simply two components fashioned together, binoculars and a camera. The camera has its own objective lens, and uses a digital zoom to take the picture (which results in as grainy a picture as you might expect.) Furthermore, what I've heard from people reviewing these things is that sandwiching the camera into the unit ends up meaning quality lost in the optics... so they end up not being very good binoculars either.

The primary problem with all such units is that the camera uses its own objective lens instead of using the high-quality lenses of the binoculars themselves, so buying such a unit is simply using binoculars to point a camera. Furthermore the camera has no idea what to focus on in whatever you are looking at. If you are looking at birds through brush, you may be focused on the birds, but the camera is focusing on the brush.

But if you think about how binoculars work, I think it's easy to see why digital camera binoculars are built the way they are. The light reflected by whatever you are looking at passes through the objective lens on each side of the binocular, passes through a pair of prisms which correct it (otherwise it would appear upside down and backwards) and reflect it back toward the eyepiece. When you adjust the focus you are moving the eyepiece lenses in and out, changing the distance between them and the prisms. This diagram should make it a little clearer:

Each eyepiece has two lenses, I've drawn four to represent the eyepiece changing position based on your focus. But this is problem number one. Focusing happens at the eyepiece, not at the objective lens. In order to capture the image as you have focused it, the camera would need to capture the image exiting the eyepiece.

Second problem: there is a third lens involved in this process, the lens of your eye. When you adjust the binoculars to focus an image, you are focusing the image on your retina using the lens of your eye. Even if the camera could capture the image as it exits the eyepiece, it might still be blurry because the camera isn't capturing the image that landed on your retina, using the lens of your eye.

You could attempt to solve the second problem by allowing the camera to auto-focus, but this introduces the final problem, the camera doesn't know what to focus on. I look through my binoculars at three fence posts nearly lined up in the distance. The the optics I see post 1 in the foreground, post 2 peeking out from behind post 1, and post 3 peeking out from behind post 2. Whichever post I want to focus on is totally up to me, but I can only focus on one at a time. Needless to say I'll pick the one with the bird on top, but the camera can only guess. Depending on how complicated the image is (looking through brush, etc) the camera will probably guess wrong.

Digital cameras solve this problem by giving you an LCD screen to work with. When you look at the LCD screen, any focusing you do happens between the camera's image receptors and the lenses, not between the lenses and your eye. In other words you are focusing for the camera's "retina", instead of your own.

Trying to do that with binoculars results in a pretty different sort of binoculars. Ones that place all of the focusing inside the equipment, and then render a digital image in the eyepieces... somehow--sounds tricky, and really expensive. Easier to forgo the binoculars altogether and use a monocular which has a big fat LCD display instead of an eyepiece. Such a device has already been invented... it's called a digital camera. All you have to do is get one that can take lens attachments and buy a ridiculously expensive lens...

It sure would be nice someday to have a camera built into binoculars that somehow captures the image from the eyepiece, and renders it on a top-mounted LCD so you can focus there, but still have a natural view through the eyepieces. Not sure how such a thing would be done. Heck for all I know it may already exist and I just haven't heard of it. Does anybody else know?

I thought that perhaps image-stabilized binoculars did digital manipulations of the image, but actually they use gyros to detect the motion of your hands and make micro-adjustments to the prisms to stabilize the image--the image itself is still analog.

Ah well. For now I'll have to enjoy the birds as I see them, and rely on words to convey the images.

Sony Needs a Dope Slap

Abacquer — Tue, 01 May 2007 09:08:45 -0400

I really need to add a "WTF" category to this blog. I had heard about this peripherally and figured it was just an urban legend, but it's not. In the last few days Sony released its new adult-oriented video game God of War II for the PlayStation console. Recently they had a big "European launch party" in Greece for members of the press who write about video game news. They tried to theme the party to match the nature of the game, so the party featured an actor dressed up as the hero from the game (okay, you might expect this), games involving throwing knives and pulling live snakes from pits (?), topless women who hand fed grapes to the guests (WTF?), and as a centerpiece, the decapitated carcass of a freshly slaughtered goat (WTF!!?).

Now it's not the first time Sony has done something amazingly stupid to promote their wares, but, as you can imagine not everyone was cool with a slaughtered animal being used as a "prop" at a party. Guests were invited to reach into the goat's lacerated body, pull out entrails, and eat them. The entrails had in fact been replaced with some sort of Greek dish that resembled intestines. Yum.

If a goat had been killed and served as a dish which guests could eat, that probably would have been fine... I mean anyone who eats meat is eating a killed animal. But to morbidly lay out a dead animal at your dinner party with its head hanging off as a lurid decoration? That's just disgusting, cruel, morbid, and a waste of an animal. According to Sony the goat carcass was purchased from a loal butcher and then returned to the butcher after the party.

Apparently it has finally occurred to Sony that this whole party really wasn't such a great idea. Mostly because of the backlash from animal rights groups, Sony has issued an apology.

From Sony Apologizes For Decapitated Goat In 'God Of War' Launch (InformationWeek via Yahoo! News):
..."On this occasion we recognize that we fell short of our normal high standards of conduct and apologize for any offense caused," Sony said in a statement. "We are conducting an internal inquiry into the circumstances of the event in order to learn from the occurrence and put in place measures to ensure that this does not happen again."...

The article goes on and quotes animal rights activists decrying the use of the goat's carcass, and a professor of marketing who calls the party centerpiece "stupid".

Which is all expected of course, but what I find intriguing is that nobody quoted seems to have any complaints about topless women feeding grapes to the partygoers. Okay, of course they are performers, and they were paid to perform this service, but it hardly seems appropriate for a video game launch party. The use of "pretty girls" at product launches or other types of retail expositions is not a new thing, and includes some sort of compensation, typically money, but not always. But this goes beyond anything I've heard of before. I would expect something like this at say a strip joint* or something like that, but a video game launch party for the press? WTF were they thinking?

Here's an article from 1Up.com recapping the event and including a picture which is probably NSFW.

That's effed up, yo.

*: Which is not to say I've ever been to a strip joint. For the curious, no I haven't. I have no interest in watching ecdysiasts perform live. That would be way too embarrassing for me.

New Interesting Articles Sidebar

Abacquer — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 09:58:08 -0400

So as long as I am stealing ideas from James, I might as well go for broke. Aces Full of Links has a great sidebar where James can list links to articles he's recently read, would like to share, but might not have time to write about. This is a feature of Google Reader and it is very slick. While reading articles in the reader, there's a button one can click to share the article, and this causes it to immediately show up in a "clip" you can install on your blog.

I really like this idea, so I'm stealing it from James. Unbecoming Levity now includes a new sidebar called "Interesting Articles I've Read". It appears at the bottom of the sidebar on the left, right beneath the blogroll.

I often come across something I want to share but just don't have the time to write an article. I used to use some third party sites for this in the past, but got tired of my blog failing to load because the third party server was down. I have a feeling Google would be a lot more reliable, so I'll give it another shot.

Breathalyzer Evidence

Abacquer — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 19:29:43 -0400

I served on a jury for a drunk driving case many years ago, what they now call an OUI case (Operating Under the Influence). Out of the juror pool we lost one potential juror early. Apparently this juror had been arrested for prostitution at one point in the past and had been acquitted, but both the prosecutor and one of the offficers had been involved in her case, which she felt would taint her opinion. So the judge dismissed her. One of the other questions that the pool was asked before the trial began was "If you feel you would be less incined, or more inclined to believe the word of a police officer, simply because he or she is a police officer, you should speak up now." Point being that would prevent you from dispassionately deliberating on the merits of the evidence alone, instead of who was giving the evidence.

During the case, I became convinced by the defense attorney that the defendant was not actually drunk when she was arrested for DUI. The officer that had arrested her seemed very young and had only been on the force for a short time, and I became convinced that he was inexperienced. The other officer, the one who did bookings, seemed a little less than honest. I found it questionable that he could remember the exact demeanor of a person he had booked months earlier, when his job is booking person after person, day in and day out. When asked if he felt the defendant was drunk at the time she was booked, he said "yes". When asked why he said "she had bloodshot eyes, and seemed unsteady on her feet." When asked if he had testified in a different drunk driving case earlier that same day, he responded "yes". When asked if his testimony in that case had been, verbatim, "he had bloodshot eyes, and seemed unsteady on his feet" he also responded "yes". This gave me, and others on the jury, the impression that this guy said the same thing on every case, and basically he was just there to back up the arresting officer.

Finally when it came to the field sobriety test evidence, the defendant had passed most of the tests, and had failed on "stand on one foot and count aloud until I tell you to stop". According to the testimony, the defendant at first didn't count aloud, was then asked to, and counted "5 6 7 8 9 10" and put her foot down. The arresting officer asked "Why did you stop?" She said "I'm done." And that was the end of the sobriety test evidence. No breathalyzer evidence was admitted. The defense attorney even offered in his closing argument that it is hard for a sober person to stand on one foot and count for a long period of time. I wasn't sure I bought that argument.

Once we got into the deliberation room it took about 30 minutes to reach a consensus. Some of us had been convinced that the arresting officer was inexperienced, and although the defendant had drunk a few beers during the day, she probably wasn't over the limit for blood alcohol at the time she was arrested. The testimony of the officer that she was driving slowly and hunched forward over the wheel (what he described as "windshield face") didn't seem all that compelling... there was no mention of erratic steering, falling down, etc. And where was the breathalyzer evidence? If she had failed the breath test, it would surely have been brought up in court.

There were a few jurors who weren't really sure either way. I was in the not-drunk camp, and it wasn't long before I was the spokesman for the not-drunk camp. Before long the drunk camp contained only one woman who (late in the deliberations) said "Listen, my dad is a retired police officer, and those guys are fully trained to recognize a drunk person." I asked her if that shouldn't have been grounds to excuse herself from the jury, given that anyone less inclined or more inclined to believe a police officer's testimony was supposed to identify themselves before the trial. She said "I'm not more inclined to trust a police officer," then after a pause added, "well I guess I am."

I pressed on. "Is it completely inconceivable that a young inexperienced officer might not have a firm grasp on his DUI training, given all the other stuff he has to learn? There's good and bad in every bunch, is it impossible that this guy just made a mistake? Smelled a little beer, saw red eyes and decided the defendant was drunk? Heck I could drink a beer and pet my cat and I would meet both of those requirements and yet be completely fit to drive."

Eventually, she gave up. "Well I think she's guilty, but I'll say not guilty because you've all made up your minds." And so the defendant was able to walk out of the courtroom, avoiding a conviction for driving while intoxicated.

Outside the courtroom, the defense attorney asked to talk to me once the trial was over. He wanted to know the details of our deliberation, perhaps to determine what arguments were effective and what arguments were not. The defendant was standing right next to him. So I went over with him what we had discussed. When I mentioned that we felt there would have been breathalyzer evidence had she failed the test, the defendant suddenly laughed and said "Of course there was no breathalyzer evidence, I refused to take the test." This fact, combined with what I read on her face during this admission, a sort of ha-ha-I-fooled-you look, immediately changed my mind. My heart sank in my chest and I realized I had been instrumental in allowing a person who had been endangering herself and others while driving drunk to get off scott free.

The lawyer explained that under Massachusetts state law it is considered the equivalent of invoking the fifth amendment, you can refuse breathalyzer and sobriety tests on the grounds that it would incriminate you. Further, the prosecutor in an OUI case is not allowed to reveal if a defendant refused the breathalyzer or sobriety test in Massachusetts. So this is why we had not gotten any breathalyzer evidence, because the defendant herself believed she was drunk at the time, and had refused the test. My expression probably betrayed my feelings because the defendant laughed again and said to her lawyer "He's starting to think he made the wrong decision."

I was not amused. I looked her in the eye and said "If I were you, I'd be thanking my lucky stars I got away with it because you very nearly didn't, so you damn well better not do it again." I turned and stalked away. Minutes earlier I was feeling pretty good about doing my civic duty. Now I was furious, mostly with myself for being such a tool. The two most convincing and outspoken jurors in that deliberation room had been the lady who's father was a police officer and myself. Had I not been there, the defendant might have gotten the conviction she deserved.

I fumed about it for days afterward, but like all things, eventually it faded from my consciousness, except for one detail--if there is no breathalyzer evidence, the defendant refused the test. This one piece of information would likely cause me to immediately feel a defendant was guilty if no breathalyzer evidence was offered, so in order to obey the law, from this point forward I would need to excuse myself from juries for OUI cases. I'm not sure I buy the "fifth amendment" comparison. Unless I'm mistaken (always a possibility), if a witness asserts their fifth amendment privilege, they do so on the stand in front of the jury. The jury doesn't get shielded from the fact that the witness refused to answer. So I fail to see why the jury should be shielded from the fact that the defendant refused to take a sobriety test or a breathalyzer test.

I was reminded of this story by an article in the Sentinel & Enterprise (the local conservative rag) about the defendant's right to refuse the breathalyzer.

...When state police arrested a Fitchburg police detective last month for operating under the influence, he refused to perform field sobriety tests or take a breathalyzer, according to a state police report.

And when state police arrested a Fitchburg school district guidance counselor earlier this month for OUI, she also refused to take the breath test, a police report shows.

Both of their trials are scheduled to take place in the next two weeks.

An easy win?

OUI cases are a cakewalk if there is no breathalyzer results and no field sobriety tests, according to attorney Christopher M. Uhl, who defends drunk driving cases...

I will not debate the accuracy of the breathalyzer test--there is evidence both ways. But this event in my life bothered me for a long time and that is what I wanted to relate.

What do you think? Should a jury be allowed to know that a defendant refused a field sobriety test or a breathalyzer test?

So Long Bloglines

Abacquer — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 15:26:05 -0400

I am giving up on Bloglines. It's still a halfway decent feed aggregator, but the outages are annoying, and as of a few weeks ago, they performed an update that essentially broke the Bloglines Notifier. The notifier was a small application that put an icon in the taskbar on your PC (or someplace similar on a Mac) that highlighted red whenever one of the feeds you were interested in had new articles posted.

But some feeds are busier than others, and while I want to know every time a new post appears on, say, Pandora's Tea Room, I do not want to know every time a new post appears on, say, The Boston Globe's news feed. It's not that I wouldn't read the more active feeds, it's just that they aren't the feeds I would want to stop what I am doing to check on... especially since something new is going to appear every few minutes. Fortunately Bloglines allows you to specify which feeds will be monitored by the notifier.

Sadly, with their last update, this setting was suddenly ignored by the notifier, and it was constantly blinking at me and popping up a notification bubble saying I had three thousand articles I needed to read. Essentially it became useless at telling me exactly what I wanted to know. I notified them immediately of the problem, and here we are weeks later and notifier is still broken. I realize that Bloglines is free and therefore complaining about it may be unseemly, but if it doesn't do what I want, then I don't want it, free or not.

So the heck with it. There are other feed aggregators out there. James mentioned Google Reader to me the other day so I have been trying that and it seems to work nicely. It unfortunately has no notifier-equivalent that I am aware of, but then again, neither does Bloglines anymore.

Anyway going with Google should lead to less outages, I hope!

A Vista Rant and a Ray of Hope

Abacquer — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 17:13:51 -0400

It bugs me that in the last few weeks of his life my father spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get his new "Vista" computer from Gateway to run his existing software, and to play nicely with the two other computers on his network (one XP and the other Windows-98). My mom described him as regularly infuriated by the new "improvements" to Vista, such as drastically and mystifyingly reworking the interfaces of the major office applications so that you no longer know where any of the functionality is anymore, and doing away with meaningful text menus so that everything is an icon. (Which of course requires you to hover over every freaking picture and wait for a tool tip to come up and let you know if you found what you were looking for.)

This is not something a 67 year old man with high-blood-pressure and heart problems should have to deal with from a computer which is supposed to make his life easier. It is still utterly mind-boggling to me that some genius over at Microsoft thought people were going to go so loopy with joy over the new interface that nobody would ever want the option of say, switching to a "classic mode" so that they could continue to be productive. Go eff yourself, Microsoft.

Now that Dad has passed away and my Mom's old Windows-98 machine is becoming (more) unreliable, we decided to help her move her business on to Dad's new computer. The very first thing we did was back off Dad's files, and then pack his computer into a box with all of its peripherals and Dad's old disks, and take it to a computer store near my house. Dad had Win-98 install disks, an XP home edition upgrade disk, and Office-2000 from the older computers which were going to be disconnected and shut down once the new box was functional. I told the guy at the store: "Wipe it, and install Win98, then upgrade to XP, install office 2000, download and install all the service packs for XP and Office, get AOL installed and functional, then locate, download, and install all the drivers so that these peripherals (monitor, scanner, printer) will work with the XP OS."

It took the store 2 days to get the computer back to me. Total cost, $90. When we brought the computer back to Mom's house it took all of a couple hours to have it up and running with all of her software and fully networked with the other machines so that she could transfer her records to it. Poor Dad had spent weeks wrestling with the stupid thing. He was upset when it arrived because he didn't realize that it would be coming with Vista and that practically everything he did on a daily basis had been turned upside down and obfuscated by the new interface. The new computer didn't even end up in his office--he had to unpack and put his old computer back together again because the new one wouldn't work the way he wanted it to--so he ended up putting the new one on a tiny desk adjacent to his bedroom.

Stories like my Dad's are sadly not uncommon (minus the tragic ending, of course). But home users everywhere, excited about buying new hardware and updating to the latest and greatest new OS, are discovering that latest is not necessarily greatest. In fact it might just suck royally. The end result, tens of thousands of angry customers phoning up computer retailers and saying "WTF? Why can't I buy a box with XP on it? I don't want this screw-head OS on my new box, I want something I can actually use!"

Well, computer retailers are finally getting the message. Dell has just announced that customers buying home systems can opt to have the system shipped with XP and not Vista. From a Computer World article:

Dell Inc. yesterday bowed to pressure from customers and dumped its Vista-only policy for consumer PCs by adding Windows XP as an operating option on half a dozen machines...

..."We heard you loud and clear on bringing the Windows XP option back to our Dell consumer PC offerings," Dell said on its Ideas in Action page, a companion to its IdeaStorm site...

...Earlier this month, Dell decided to add Windows XP on systems sold to its small business customers. At the time, Tom West, Dell's director of small business marketing, said the older operating systems wouldn't be offered to consumers. "Dell does not have plans to launch Windows XP for home users as the preference and demand is for the 'latest and greatest' technology, which includes Windows Vista," he said on the Direct2Dell blog.

Yesterday, Lionel Menchaca, Dell's manager of digital media, noted the reversal in another blog entry. "After Tom West's post that said Dell would offer Windows XP on systems for small business customers, many Direct2Dell readers have commented or sent e-mails asking us to bring back Windows XP for home users as well. Today, we're doing that."...

...Rival Hewlett-Packard Co. was not available for comment on whether it would answer Dell with a Windows XP option for its consumer customers. HP's small business systems can currently be ordered with either Windows XP Home or XP Professional, as well as Vista Business or Home Basic; the company's consumer PCs, however, are available only with Vista...

How long do you think HP is going to go on having home users refuse to buy computers from them unless they get XP knowing that Dell is making that option available? Interestingly the XP-equipped computers from Dell are cheaper. If Vista was so easy to set up and use, wouldn't the XP machines be more expensive? According to Microsoft they should be, but then Microsoft isn't in the same reality as its customers.

Rule #1 when upgrading a user interface: do not make using the application HARDER for your installed base. Rule #2: if you are making a fundamental change to the interface which will require a learning curve from users either make the new interface optional, or introduce it in slow steps.

There's already a company out there offering some sort of patch that attempts to put menus back on your office applications if you were unfortunate enough to step in Vista without realizing what you were getting into. And of course, they want you to pay for this. Yeahhhh, I'm tired of being part of Microsoft's world-wide division of beta testers known as "customers", and I don't think I should have to shell out more money to get back to productivity, so I think I'll stick with XP for now. When Microsoft finally pulls its head out of its butt and releases a service pack so that users can shut off the silly ribbon and get their hierarchical menus back, then I'll be looking at Vista--till then, no way, and Microsoft can lips my donkey.

Recently, MS slyly slipped Internet Explorer 7 into the "critical updates list" for XP. Which means if you have your XP set up to update itself automatically, you may soon sit down to your machine and find your browser has been quietly replaced by a different version which has a different interface... most notably, the browser tool bar is now at the top, but some of the icons have been moved down to a second line on either side of the tabs, and the menu bar is conspicuously missing (screen shot). Why? Because IE7 is basically the "Vista" version of IE... so if you were thinking of upgrading to IE7 that's something to keep in mind.

In IE7, you can at least turn the menu bar back on, but you can't put it at the top--no it must sit below the toolbar now because MS thinks that is more important. So instead it gets sandwiched between the two rows of icons, which is a bizarre place to put your menus.

Personally I barely use the toolbar at all in IE, the only buttons I use there are the forward and back buttons. I use the menu bar all the time on the other hand, mostly to access favorites, save copies of pages, print, and view the source of pages. Here's a thought, get rid of all these unnecessary icons, and put the next and back buttons ON THE MENU BAR. There's even enough room to fit the URL box there too!

It's becoming a recurring theme that MS comes up with some dippy interface idea and is flabbergasted when the community at large says "WTF were you thinking? How do I shut this shit off? Why is it turned on by default?"

Anyone remember "Clippy"? That dip shit paper-clip cartoon that suddenly started getting in the way of accessing application help in the manner that you were used to? People HATED Clippy with a passion. I don't know anyone who hasn't turned the stupid "office assistant" off, ANYONE. Except perhaps for people who couldn't figure out how to turn the annoying thing off. I already know how to work with application help files, I don't need to be forced to start entering "English questions" into the numbtastic assistant so that it can screw up and take me to the wrong page.

"The Ribbon" is the new office assistant, once again Microsoft runs off the god-damned end of the Earth with the fool notion that we want their help. Please, Microsoft, please stop trying to help me and just give me an application that I only have to learn ONCE.

My Apologies

Abacquer — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 11:56:47 -0400

Because of my daily influx of more than 100 or so spam e-mails, I have had to install a spam filter (PopFile). Because I have a spam filter installed, it occasionally misclassifies e-mail from friends and family as spam. Because of the sheer bulk of the e-mails, I occasionally don't notice when legitimate e-mails are lost in the sea of spam, and in the end they go unread.

And sometimes these e-mails ar every important to me. So I would like to offer my apologies to:

Bob Kitchen, who sent me a get well message when I was sick that I never got until today, and for one other e-mail.
Patti Macguire, who sent me three e-mails over the last year that I missed out on.
Kris Silvia, my sister in law, who sent me some e-mails during a time frame when I was mystified that I hadn't heard from her about some photo work she wanted done.
Jay McGaffigan, whose e-mails from his Verizon account got misclassified.
Mark Whitney, who sent me a lead to help me finish a collection I was working on early last year.
And most importantly, my good friend Tom King, whose message about a recent hospitalization went unread. Sorry Tom, I hope you are feeling better.
Anybody else whose e-mails I didn't recover from the spam folder and I am still unaware of.

Obviously I need to figure out a new way to deal with spam. PopFile is good, but it isn't that good. I can whitelist certain e-mail addresses in PopFile so that it always lets them through, and this is something I am going to need to do for all my friends and family.

Can you guys help me out? Some of you have multiple e-mail addresses, or the addresses change. Can you take a spare moment sometime over the next few days and drop me a message with the words "whitelist me" in the subject? It would really help, if you typically use more than one e-mail for correspondence with friends, if you could send the message from each account you use.

In this way I can make sure that my addressbook is completely up to date, and make sure that PopFile is trained to let any messages from those addresses through. Thanks for your cooperation in this matter, and once again, I'm sorry if I missed your e-mails and didn't reply to you.

It pains me to think, now that my father is gone, that I might have missed some correspondence from him over the years. But this is the way it is, thanks mostly to spammers.

What's Goin' On, What's Goin On

Abacquer — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 09:26:11 -0400

Life has been a little hectic for me, and while I've had time to take part in interesting discussions on articles I posted over a year ago (weird) I haven't had much time to post any new articles. So here's what's goin' on, reduced to a bullet list, just so I can get the shite out there:

Went to see the oral surgeon on Tuesday, no real surprises there, it was just a consult, they wanted me to know what to expect and to talk to me. Had to read some scary consent forms where they tell you everything that could possibly go wrong during your procedure... we might break your jaw, we might puncture your sinuses, we might damage teeth you were planning on keeping, you might have a heart attack from the anaesthesia, you might die, the world might end. Great stuff to read if you are a person with an anxiety disorder triggered by medical situations. Thanks guys.
I go in for my impressions at the dentist this afternoon. Probably have to have the surgery in about 3 weeks.
Celebrated Easter with Patty's family on Saturday, and with my family on Sunday. Plus we had a little egg hunt for Lynnea at our house Sunday morning. Total of 3 egg hunts, and I hid somewhere between 85 and 145 eggs over the weekend (I had help on the last hunt.)
Atheist's don't believe in jinxes, but lately it's hard to shake the idea of misfortune following me around. During Saturday's get together, I noticed that the dog of one of my sisters-in-law, who had been brought to the gathering, was acting funny--labored breathing, strange movements. I told my sister-in-law about it, and she took the dog to a vet during the celebration and was informed that the animal needed to be put to sleep. Happy Easter kids, the dog is dying. They had the dog put down that same day and a lot of the kids were crying about it.
Continuing the jinx thread, I was on the phone with a friend yesterday afternoon and we were discussing all the things that had been going on in my life when suddenly I heard a loud bang on my cellphone. My friend had been rear ended by another driver and terminated the conversation with "my back is hurting, I can't talk now". Later in the evening I heard back that after a trip to the hospital my friend was okay, but he didn't yet know how bad the damage to his car is. We joked that I should try to capitalize on this Hurleyesque bad luck of mine, have people pay me to stay away from them, or pay me to hang around with folks they don't like until the meteorite hits them.
I've been seeing my Mom each weekend and helping her to get things taken care of now that Dad is gone. Mom runs a small business out of her house and depends entirely on an ancient Windows-98 box to do her work, and the box is acting pretty spotty lately. A few weeks before Dad passed away he had purchased a new computer, and so now I am trying to repurpose that box so that when my Mom is ready, she can switch to the new box and run her business on that. Unfortunately the new box comes with Vista which my Dad hated, and after spending a couple of hours trying to use the box I can see why. Microsoft completely changed the standard windows interface, all the control keys are different, and no functions are where they used to be. They also decided (apparently) that menus are overrated, so the standard office suite doesn't have menus anymore... yeah you heard that right. Everything is now reorganized on a new fat toolbar with tabs on it so that you can switch between toolbars. Microsoft calls it "the ribbon", I call it "thumbing your nose at everybody who already learned how to use your shitty applications". Vista does not come with a "classic mode" option like XP did... they really expect you to relearn where everything is. I refuse to subject my 68-year-old mother to this nonsense. So I backed up Dad's files, packed up his computer and all his peripherals and disks, brought it to a computer shop and told them to wipe it, and then install XP home edition and Office 2000, and get all the drivers to make sure the peripherals work. In the end, my Mom will be happier for it. And having a chance to check out Vista I am now quite certain that I won't be upgrading to it.
Had a little birthday party for Pat at home last week, a little cake and song, and a couple gifts (taking our economic situation into consideration of course). Pat got the movie "Eragon" which was -eh-. It's basically Star Wars... AGAIN, and progresses far too quickly. I kept saying "these guys forgot the montages" while watching it. But the dragon was pretty, and it was still fun to watch.
Oh, and I am saddened to report that Kurt Vonnegut passed away. Thanks for the stories Kurt, we'll miss you.

Guess that's about it. Gotta get to work! See ya later.

Julie Amero -- Sentencing Delayed Again

Abacquer — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 12:16:17 -0400

According to the Hartford Courant, sentencing in the Julie Amero case I wrote about last month has been pushed out a second time to April 26. States Attorney Michael Regan has become involved. No reason for the delay has been officially given, but it's clear that it probably has something to do with a pantload of people who actually have a clue when it comes to computers saying, in effect, "WTF are you idiots doing over there?!!?"

Stay tuned...

Swimming in Raw Sueage

Abacquer — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 09:05:46 -0400

Viacom Sues Google

You probably know that the media giant Viacom recently sued the internet giant Google over Viacom content which appears on YouTube. People who watch big companies like these have been saying that as soon as YouTube got purchased, the lawsuits would come. Mostly because YouTube didn't have a lot of money, so suing them for damages wouldn't net much.

Now that YouTube is owned by Google, there's money to be had, and so now a company isn't limited to seeking injunctions so their content can't be shown on YouTube, now they can seek damages--quite a bit of damages actually. Viacom claims Google owes it 1 billion dollars, which is pretty hefty.

Google for its part has been trying to negotiate with Viacom, to work out some sort of deal where Viacom content can be shown on YouTube. The lawsuit may just be another way that Viacom is choosing to negotiate, so it may never actually go to court.

Viacom seems less interested in allowing YouTube to show Viacom content, and more interested in having all of its content taken off YouTube. The sticking point, from what I've heard, has been the filtering of any future Viacom content from YouTube. In order to prevent any more Colbert or South Park or whatever from appearing on YouTube, people would need to actively view every posted video and delete content owned by Viacom (which is a pretty wide variety of stuff).

Google has basically said "when you want something taken down, just send us a list and we'll take it down." But that isn't good enough for Viacom, and they want Google to actively filter the material. To which Google has indicated for that kind of service they would need some sort of compensation. Of course Viacom is not going to pay Google to take down content which belongs to Viacom in the first place!

The complexity of such filtering, while perhaps not immediately appreciated by Viacom, is certainly appreciated now. MoveOn.org and a number of other groups have sued Viacom for asking Google to remove videos which were not Viacom content, but parodies of Viacom content and therefore protected under fair use. You see, it's not as simple as searching for "Colbert" and printing a list. Duh.

All that aside, I think Viacom has a good case against Google. The content really does belong to Viacom, and it is copyrighted. The "we can't control what our users do" argument didn't work for Napster and I wouldn't expect it to work here, even though the content here is partial clips instead of entire songs. The hope therefore is that Viacom will instead work out a deal with Google so that the case doesn't go to court.

In many ways it is good for a company to have clips of it's content appear on YouTube. For example, I was never a big Family Guy watcher. But after laughing my ass off to some clips on YouTube, I went out and bought the first season of Family Guy on DVD, and now I own seasons 1-4 on DVD. The YouTube clips made the owners of Family Guy some money in my case. It's really a form of free advertising, and some companies have embraced that.

Ultimately if the case goes to court, I expect Viacom will win, and YouTube will have to change dramatically. I hope that doesn't happen.

Carol Burnett Sues "Family Guy" Creators

In one of the recent seasons of family guy there is an 18-second clip featuring Carol Burnett's famous cleaning-lady character mopping up the floor of a pornography shop. Ms. Burnett has responded to this parody of her character by suing the creators of Family Guy for copyright infringement, and is seeking 2 million dollars in damages.

When I was a kid, I loved the Carol Burnett show. I watched it all the time (even in reruns) with my family and laughed myself silly. What I find odd is that many times the show included parodies of movies, TV shows, or novels. So clearly, Ms. Burnett understands the use of parody, particularly in comedy. One would think that to see her trademark character remembered after all these years would be flattering.

Guess not.

There's no way she is going to win. It's obviously parody and is protected. I can't see how she would not know this and so I'm assuming she just needs the money and is hoping for some sort of settlement. It's depressing really, because I've always liked Carol Burnett.

Julie Amero's Bad Day

Abacquer — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 19:33:12 -0400

In all likelihood, if you are reading this you are a computer user who has a basic familiarity with the Internet and using computers, and that knowledge may serve you well as you read this. This is a story about a 40-year old substitute teacher from Norwich, Connecticut, who apparently through ignorance of computers, is facing 40 years in jail, because of porn pop-ups on a classroom computer.

Having visited porn sites, I know full well that once you have one open, it's often quite difficult to get rid of it. What happens is when you click the close box, either a bit of JavaScript or a piece of malware traps the "OnClose" event and opens a new porn page for you. Close that one and it happens again. And usually you have to close many such windows before they stop coming back. This is standard operating procedure for most porn sites. Usually porn sites are part of a "family" of sites all owned by the same distributor. Thus when you click the close box on one site the next site in the family will pop up, unbidden. And it is quite possible for this to happen even with standard IE-pop-up blocking turned on.

You can make this not-happen if you have a very good pop-up blocker, but such blockers are not reliable in my experience... they catch some pop-ups but not all. There are other tricks (I'm told) that you can use if you are a real computer expert. But the victims in this case were not computer experts. They were a substitute teacher covering a computer class, and her 11 to 13 year old students.

According to Ms. Amero, in October of 2004, she entered the classroom to find some students at the teacher's computer, accessing a site about hair care. One of them didn't belong in that classroom and the other did. Being a substitute, Ms. Amero was not familiar with any of the students. Shortly thereafter porn pop-ups began appearing on the machine. Ms. Amero sought to get rid of them in a fashion typical of an average user. She clicked the close box.

"The pop-ups never went away. It was one after another," she testified. "They were continuous. Every time I clicked the box in the corner, the red box, the red X, more were generated."

The school for its part, did what most schools do when parents overreact to something that could have happened to anyone. They fired Ms. Amero. Shortly thereafter, Ms. Amero was arrested--charged with four felony charges of risk of injury to a minor, a sub-clause of that violation specifically with respect to the morals of a minor.

Ms. Amero lost her court battle. The prosecutor maintained that there is no way to get porn sites to pop up without deliberately clicking a link to open them--which is twaddle, and anyone with a passing knowledge of web surfing knows it. Further he claimed that since Ms. Amero didn't simply pull the plug or throw a jacket over the monitor until the problem could be dealt with, then she must have intended to view those sites in the presence of children.

Ms. Amero claimed that substitutes are not supposed to disturb or touch anything in a teacher's classroom, and therefore believed that she could not shut the computer off.

I've seen inexperienced computer users when faced with an unexpected behavior--in college I worked for the school's computing services department, and one of my jobs was assisting people using computers. Many of those people were computer illiterate, and let me tell you, the obvious solution isn't the first thing they try. Many computer illiterate people are afraid they are going to "break the computer" and are therefore unwilling to try anything unusual. It doesn't surprise me in the least that this substitute teacher would simply try closing the pop-ups ad nauseum.

I have read the entire record of testimony from the case, and see a number of problems here. In my opinion this is a mistrial, and the case would need to be heard again.

With respect to the evidence, a number of the expert witnesses made claims that I know for a fact are false. Whether or not they know they are false, I can't say, but I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that there are gaps in their expert knowledge. The information services manager for Norwich Public Schools testified under oath that is was not possible to get into an "endless loop of pornography". That's flat out wrong. He was also asked under oath if spyware or ad-ware could generate pornography, and testified that they could not. This man does not know what he is talking about.

The detective on the case is clearly very knowledgeable about computer crime. And yet, at one point in the case he testified that if you click a link to a page, when you next view the link on a web page the link has changed color, but this does not happen if the page in question opened as a pop-up. That's completely incorrect. Your browser tracks URLs that were visited, not how they were visited. Links to pop-up pages will turn purple just like links you clicked manually. The reason it is important is it has direct bearing on whether Ms. Amero deliberately chose to view a porn page, or if that page appeared as a pop-up through the action of ad-ware or hokey JavaScript or whatnot.

The other, immensely huge problem with the case is the defense attorney. The defense attorney is a self-professed computer illiterate, and should have had a computer consultant with him at all times so that when other witnesses are offering incorrect testimony as expert opinion, he could consult with his own expert and get him up there on the stand. But the defense attorney appeared to be completely unprepared most of the time. When the state rested the defense attorney wasn't ready to present his case, to the consternation and bewilderment of the judge. "I wasn't expecting the state to rest right now."

The defense's first witness was a computer expert who intended to give a presentation in court regarding ad-ware and spyware he found on the machine, a presentation that would have explained the difference between clicking a link and being redirected, and which would have demonstrated how Ms. Amero could have gotten stuck in a loop of porn pop-ups without necessarily clicking on anything suspect. He was not allowed to give his presentation (which I got the impression included slides, and ad-ware/spyware reports from the hard drive in question) because the defense attorney hadn't seen fit to give the reports and slides to the prosecution ahead of time. If you don't disclose evidence to the other side, it can't be presented in court. The only thing I could conclude is it was taking the defense expert time right up to the day before to get the presentation ready.

The defense expert was also dreadful. Having only prepared to give a presentation, his responses to question-and-answer type testimony were confusing and ultimately probably seemed evasive to the jury. I understood what he was trying to get at, having built web applications myself, but even I found myself saying "why in the hell would he choose to phrase it that way?" He was also a little combative at times because he couldn't understand why he was not allowed to discuss his findings with respect to ad-ware and spyware on the box in question--mainly because the defense attorney wasn't doing his job.

Of course one of the big questions is, was the teacher deliberately viewing porn on the computer at her desk while class was in session? Prosecution says yes, defense says no. People who have been following the story have checked the haircare site in question and have discovered that it can indeed lead to a cycle of porn pop-ups (Associated Content 2/26/2007).

The other big question is, did the teacher do enough to prevent the students from seeing the porn? From the testimony given, it seems that when students came up to the desk, the teacher tried to block the screen or otherwise shoo the students away. But it is clear from the testimony of the students, a couple of them managed to catch a glimpse of pornographic material. And from her own testimony, the teacher attempted to close the offending windows which kept popping up, and also at two points during the day told other teachers and the vice-principal she was having trouble with pop-ups. She said she felt she was not allowed to shut the computer off, and upon being questioned about turning off the monitor only, said she wouldn't know how.

Contrary to the detective's claims, links recolor themselves when a URL is loaded in any fashion, and apart from redirects, it's not really possible to tell from looking at temporary Internet files whether someone visited links deliberately or though the action of spyware or some other agent. The detective continues to say that he stands by the evidence and that people can't claim spyware or ad-ware was responsible without producing the spyware or ad-ware in question. Which is rather convenient since the defense expert wasn't allowed to present such evidence in court due to the apparent ineptitude of the defense attorney.

The substitute teacher was in charge of the class, and it was definitely her responsibility to get rid of the porn, and if she didn't know how she should have called up to the office and explained immediately that there was a problem. So it seems a little incongruous that she would wait until lunch to tell someone she was having a problem (while not bothering to mention that the pop-ups were pornographic in nature.) I assume she simply made an unwise decision to try and solve the problem herself based on her own limited knowledge. Therefore at present I can't say that this was a "willful" act (i.e. she was deliberately trying to endanger these children). Then again, I doubt a 12 or 13 year old catching a glimpse of a nude woman is going to be impaired for life, but that's a topic for another day.

Assuming she is guilty, it seems to me that locking up a 40 year old woman (with no prior convictions) for 40 years because some kids glanced over her shoulder and caught a momentary glimpse of porn on her computer screen is a little extreme. I think what would be more appropriate is something on the order of 4 months of community service and you can't teach anymore. There are female teachers who have had sexual relations with their students who've spent no more than a few years in jail. So something in this case is way out of whack with respect to the punishment fitting the crime.

What do you think?

Sources:

Reality Out of Focus: Julie Amero's Raging Internet Porn Addiction (Associated Content 2/26/2007)
Case against Julie Amero needs to be deleted (USA Today 3/16/2007)
Inaction sank Amero; read the full trial transcript (Norwich Bulletin 2/25/2007)
Experts rebuke Amero ruling (Norwich Bulletin 3/9/2007)
Julie Amero's Blog
Teacher Faces Prison for Pop-Up Infested PC (PC World 2/7/2007)

EDIT: spelling issues, and modified final paragraph to be less flippant.

Too Much To Talk About

Abacquer — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 19:36:39 -0400

I'm sorry I haven't been able to blog in awhile... there's just been so much going on my life. I've got a lot of things I'd like to talk about, but any one of them would be a full blog article I don't have time to write. So here's the "Cliff Notes"...

My Health
I visited the doctor about 2 weeks ago. My TB test came back negative, as expected. I woke up with the area around the injection on my arm completely flat and showing no reaction other than a slight redness. I could tell it was a negative result, but still I had to get to the doctor and have a nurse stare at my arm for two seconds and say "yep, negative." Did I mention it was snowing? A lot? The doc informed me that the plan at that point was to let the antibiotics run out, and then monitor myself very carefully, watching for fevers. I was to take it easy and not exert myself once off the antibiotics. I took my last pill the day my Dad had his aneurism. So I was getting almost no sleep, no regular intake of food, a high amount of exertion and stress, exactly at the time we were hoping my body would be able to cope with the remaining infection. By March 7th I was having fevers and my doctor extended the antibiotic. By March 8th the fevers had reached 102, and I was having painful chills in the night. On March 9th the fevers subsided and I haven't had any since. I had another visit with the doc today and she began to speak very frankly about having a surgeon go in and "break up" the scar tissue, or using a needle to drain out the infected area so it could heal. I spoke very frankly about how disturbing those prospects were to me, and if sixty days of antibiotics would solve the problem, I'd rather go that route. For now, we are on a middle ground. The doc has given me a script for 10 more days of the antibiotic, but I am to repeat the "wait and see" experiment when the current batch runs out (Sunday). If the fevers return I can start the next script. Next week I will have another CAT Scan, and then based on the results we will make a decision. The doctor said I could come in and speak with the pulmonologist at that time if I liked. At this point I'm beginning to feel resigned that a surgical solution is going to be necessary.

Mr. Deity
If you haven't seen the "Mr. Deity" videos yet, check them out, they are hilarious. A warning to my theist readers, these movies are created by humanists, and are therefore pretty irreverent. Don't check them out if that is going to bug you.

RSS & YouTube
Why doesn't YouTube support RSS in any obvious fashion that I can detect? Why do I have to go to my subscription page on YouTube to see what is new. If they are tracking what is new, then they have the information necessary to provide an RSS feed. Bloglines tries to "fake it" for you, building an RSS feed out of a YouTube search, but that doesn't work well. Partly because old videos keep popping up on it, and because jerks post movies on YouTube with the usernames of popular YouTubers in their keywords simply to bring in viewers. The only YouTubers I subscribe to are ImpyTheRap (i.e. Nobody's Watching) and SuttSteve. Yet my Bloglines is constantly telling me they have new videos when they don't, simply because the RSS feed is built from a keyword search, and some people are not capable of getting viewers on their own talent. Does anyone have a good way to get a YouTube subscription as an RSS feed? It's really bugging me. I had to discontinue my YouTube "feeds" in Bloglines because it was a waste of time.

Texas and the HPV Vaccine
The Republican Governor of Texas, Rick Perry, has mandated that all girls entering the sixth grade in Texas schools must receive the HPV vaccine Gardasil, produced by Merck. HPV, or Human papillomavirus, is a virus that can be carried by both men and women, but some strains of which are shown to cause cervical cancer in some women. It is primarily transmitted sexually, but can be contracted in other ways (skin on skin contact, or being born from an infected mother). Under Perry's plan, parents could choose to refuse the vaccine for their child, but it is not clear if the child would then be allowed to enter the public school system (any more than they would be allowed to refuse, say, Mumps and Rubella vaccines and still put their kids in school.) The Texas legislature voted 118-23 to basically overturn this order. The primary complaints were that (a) there are questionable connections between Perry and Merck, (b) parents should have the right to choose whether their daughters will be vaccinated, (c) the drug is new and needs to be further tested, and (d) Perry circumvented the legislative process. On (a) and (d) I can't really comment, on (c)... well the FDA has approved it, so it has to have undergone some testing at this point, and on (b) I'm just mystified. The mandate clearly has an opt-out clause... so what's the diff? The thing I can't shake is that the early complaints about the possibility of making this drug mandatory that came out of Fundie USA was that it would encourage young women to have sex. Which is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. But I can't help feeling that because those who said it are realizing how stupid that sounds, we are now getting other excuses like a through d above. I find myself wondering if HPV was transmitted in a nonsexual manner, would there be any outcry at all?

These are the Same People Who Said...
Tell me you haven't heard this one before: confronted with the latest news from climate scientists about global warming, a politically motivated skeptic will claim "These are the same people who said the world was headed for another ice age back in the 1970's... why should we believe them now?" Like so much politically motivated rhetoric, there's little merit in it. Between the 40's and the 70's a cooling trend was noted in the data available at that time. Scientific journals noted that although such a trend could be the precursor of the cyclic ice ages that our planet goes through, there was not enough data or understanding of the climate to accurately predict when the next ice age would come. The popular press on the other hand (i.e. those journals which are not peer reviewed) took the story and made a sensation out of it. The scientific community never said another ice age was imminent, period. Needless to say I hate hearing this stupid argument, especially when it is delivered by people who unfortunately are accorded undue credibility... like Michael Crichton for instance. But if you want details refuting this particular bit of rhetoric, check "The Global Cooling Myth" on Real Climate.

Guess that's all I have for now. Hope everyone else is well and happy...

I'm Back!

Abacquer — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 12:36:28 -0500

I'm happy to say that this time my CAT scan went quick and easy and with it behind me I am feeling a lot better. The last time I had a chest CAT scan done there was an incredibly long delay while I was laying on the platform. And the last time, they were unable to find a vein in either of my arms or my right hand (ouch!) and could not administer the special dye that they use for doing a second "contrast" scan.

This time the technician had no trouble finding a vein, and got the IV into me before the scan began with no trouble at all. I also think that they have since acquired newer equipment because this time the scan went very quickly indeed. I think the entire thing was done in about 10 to 12 minutes.

If you've never had one, basically they have you lie on a platform in front of what resembles a giant donut. For me they put pillows behind my head and a foam wedge under my knees. And for a chest scan, they like to have your arms out of the picture, so they had me put my left arm behind my head and my right arm (the one with the IV) they just had me hold up in the air and rest against the donut. Here's a picture of the scanner they used on me (a Toshiba Aquilion 16):

Inside the donut are x-ray cameras on some sort of track that allows them to (noisily) whirl around the inside of the donut at high speed and take a 3 dimensional "slice" image of your body. The platform is on a motorized track that allows it to slide back and forth through the donut while the cameras take the pictures. For a chest CT, they slide you in all the way up to your chin. This can be a little alarming if you don't like enclosed spaces. I just closed my eyes and didn't think about it.

Then, when the machine is ready to take pictures, it talks to you. Now, take a breath, and hold it. And then the platform moves a bit. Now, breathe normally. The last time I had a CT, this process took about 20 minutes for the first scan only, and the platform would inch along, and then stop a few seconds so the machine could tell me to breathe normally and then take another breath and hold it. This time the scan was literally over less than a minute after it began and the machine only asked me to hold my breath once.

Then the technician returned to inject the dye into the IV. The IV tube's contents was colorless... I couldn't see the dye, but I'm sure it showed up on the x-rays. The technician warned that people react in different ways to the dye, but the most common reaction was a feeling of heat as the dye moved through the circulatory system. He told me that whatever symptoms I felt I should just speak into the air and let him and the other technicians know.

After the platform repositioned itself, I began to feel extremely warm in my temples. Nowhere else, just my temples. They felt very hot like I had a fever or had just run around the block and winded myself. So I said "I'm starting to feel hot." A disembodied female voice came through some sort of intercom in the room and said "That's okay, that's normal. It should pass soon."

Then the second scan began. If anything it was shorter than the first, and this time the machine only spoke to me once. It said: Now, breathe normally. Which was a little baffling because it had never asked me to hold my breath in the first place. Then the technician came back in and said "You're done." He removed the IV and put a bandage over the spot, and told me to take my time getting up and getting my gear on, and offered me a cup of cold water. Which I was definitely in the mood for, since you're not allowed to eat or drink anything for 3 hours before the exam.

He told me that my doctor should have the results within 3-4 days or much sooner if anything serious is found. So that's it. I thanked the technician and complimented him on his bedside manner and the ease with which he made me feel comfortable and reassured, and then I was outta there.

I'm back home now and my lung is hurting. I'm finding that it feels good when I first wake up but as the day wears on it gets more and more sore. Hopefully that will go away soon. I'll be calling my doctor on Monday to see if she has the results, and to see what she wants me to do next. It's day 19 of the antibiotics and I have 11 days left. It would be wonderful to not have to keep taking that moxifloxacin quinolone.

Weelanders Show How Evolution Leads to Extinction

Abacquer — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 22:12:45 -0500

Okay this is going to be a lengthy article with a lot of graphics, so I am going to use an excerpt today. Basically it's a summary of the first run of my Genetic Factoring sim, and how it demonstrates that evolution can lead to extinction. It also includes a summary of the most efficient (and robust) genome to be generated by random mutation and natural selection, and how it compares to the original genome. Let's begin with a graph...

Genetic Factoring -- Weelanders Run Amok

Abacquer — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 10:00:00 -0500

I'm sure you remember the Weelanders... artificial life forms which lived on a grid and helped demonstrate that evolution through random mutation causes natural selection to kick in something fierce. At the time I originally ran tests with the Weelanders, I hypothesized that the Weelander concept could be adapted to do more than just demonstrate natural selection.

And, a few months ago, I did just that. I built a new version of the Genome application called "GeneticFactoring", and stripped out a ton of Weelander support code. I wanted to make Weelanders that factored numbers and then reproduced based on how successful they were at factoring. As a result they didn't need to search for and consume food, they didn't need sexual reproduction, they didn't need the ability to move, heck they didn't need chromosomes in pairs, as a result, all of the "critter emulation" code was unnecessary, resulting in a simpler Weelander support system.

What they did need was the ability to compute square roots, find primes, and factor numbers... this was the new code that needed to be added, and it was all going to be written in the native Weelander instruction set. It took me awhile to code the genome "Facto-f", but eventually I had it working. Then I modified the container and world code to invoke the Weelander factoring code in the following manner:

Populate: at the beginning of time, populate the grid so that it is completely full of the starting Weelander genome "f".
Setup: build a list of 50 numbers to factor, then factor each number using internal container code and store the results.
Execute:
1. for each critter on the grid
2. run through the 50 numbers
3. call the Weelander's Execute method and pass it the number to factor.
4. The Weelander factors the number and returns the results.
5. If the Weelander goes into an infinite loop without returning results, terminate it.
6. Otherwise, compare the Weelander's results to the original results.
7. If they do not match, terminate the Weelander for inaccuracy.
8. If they do match, note how many execution steps the Weelander needed to compute the result, and proceed to the next number.
9. Once all the numbers have been factored, compute an efficiency value for this critter (total number of steps divided by total number of tests).
10. Proceed to the next critter and repeat.
Cull: examine all the living critters on the grid and gather the top ten percent based on efficiency, and terminate all the others.
Repopulate: for the most efficient critters, allow each one to reproduce asexually (possibly with mutation). If after processing them all, the grid is not filled, go back and run through them again. Keep doing this until the grid is filled.
Loop: Jump to step 3.

An immediate problem which cropped up was that Weelanders would mutate in ways that made them faster at factoring this specific set of test numbers. So if by random chance, none of the test numbers was a multiple of say, 7, the Weelanders might make themselves faster by throwing away the "divide by 7" test somehow. Which is great until you hand them a multiple of 7 at which point they die from inaccuracy.

I solved this problem somewhat by changing step 6 to jump to step 2 instead of 3. Thus on each "tick" of the world, a new set of test numbers would be created and then all the Weelanders would be tested against that set. Makes sense really, and automatically weeds out Weelanders that made the grade last tick by "cheating". I improved this further by making the first 10 test numbers a fixed set that didn't change and which exercised a lot of the conditions I wanted to make sure were covered. The remaining 40 were random.

But another problem appeared, one that completely flummoxed me because the system appeared to drift toward less efficient creatures over time, instead of more efficient ones. How could that be possible? Natural selection should continue to hold true, and the creatures should be *more* efficient over time, not less efficient.

But nothing prepared me for the worst problem at all... hardware. My computer, wonderful though it is, is experiencing a hardware problem. The cooling system is no longer operating, or not operating well. As a result, any operation that pins the CPU usage at 100% for a period longer than 10 minutes or so will cause an audible heat warning alarm to begin issuing. It's an alternating two-tone klaxon which doesn't come from the computer speakers, it comes from somewhere inside the computer case. And it is, needless to say, very alarming. I like my CPU. I don't want to cook it.

Needless to say factoring numbers is CPU/FPU intensive. And I've got 230 Weelanders factoring 50 numbers each, over and over, ad infinitum. After 10 minutes or so of runtime, the CPU gets too hot, and I have to shut the simulation down or risk damaging my computer. This problem cropped up immediately after building the new GeneticFactoring code and caused me to terminate the experiment permanently months ago.

Then last night I broke the code out again and tried to figure out a way to get it to execute without pan-searing my CPU. Eventually I came up with a rather simple solution. The simulation executes for 20 ticks, pinning the CPU at 100% for about 60-90 seconds. Then the simulation pauses, basically issuing a call to Thread.sleep for sixty seconds of downtime. This drops CPU consumption to 0% or close to 0% for a minute, giving the CPU a chance to cool. Resulting in a usage pattern like this:

I'm happy to say that having made this change I've been running the simulation for 3 hours with no overheat alarms. At this point I feel safe walking away from the computer and letting it process the simulation.

Regarding the other problem, the problem of the population drifting toward inefficiency, I also managed to solve that. I observed the changes to the Weelander genome over time. After awhile I began to observe what I thought was the culprit. Creatures weren't being selected based on their efficiency at factoring *all* numbers, just the 50 test numbers they had to factor.

So let's say a mutant does something weird like tests factors out of order... instead of 2, 3, 5, 7, 11 it goes 5, 3, 2, 7, 11. It's still accurate, but it tests a different factor first. If more of the numbers in the test set are multiples of 5 than 3, and more are multiples of 3 than 2, then this critter will in the end rate more efficient than the basic Facto-f genome, which is suitable for factoring any value. As a result, genomes which aren't really more efficient at factoring any value, get selected ahead of the f genome, and over time, this exterminates the f genome. After which the population becomes less efficient over time as more and more test sets are produced.

That was my hypothesis anyway. To solve the problem, I decided to artificially inject the original genome into the list of critters during the repopulate stage, thus if the population ever drifted away from efficiency, there would always be some number of the original genome to tug it back. Basically I grab my ten percent most efficient, and then tack 10 copies of the original genome to that list before I repopulate. This makes sense since natural selection is only concerned about the environment you are in (i.e. the 50 numbers you happened to test) as opposed to my overall goal (more efficient factoring of ANY number.) Now the top ten percent must always compete with the baseline. If they drift away, the baseline will win and it will get selected for repopulation instead. The only way to stay alive is to consistently beat the baseline.

Makes sense doesn't it? Yes, yes, I know, brilliant.

It was right about that time I noticed that the code that was selecting genomes for propagation was selecting the least efficient ones instead of the most efficient ones. Y'know, it takes a special kind of mind to come up with a brilliant explanation like the one above and still be completely wrong. Needless to say selecting the least efficient members of the population will uh, tend to make the population drift toward inefficiency. It's amazing what happens to the code when you say "greater than" but you meant to say "less than". > versus <, baby... classic coding error.

Nonetheless, although the effect I hypothesized was ultimately not to blame for the drift, I still think the effect could occur, so I decided to keep the "baseline infusion" code in place.

So the factoring Weelanders are back in action, and I'm interested to see what they will do to become more efficient at factoring. There are a lot of simple things I can think of that would lead to slightly more efficient code, but the Weelanders are always surprising me.

What I can tell you is that given a test sample, the Facto-f genome generally requires (on average) 1500 to 2200 execution steps per number. After running the simulation for 3 hours, the top genomes are showing efficiencies on the order of 500 to 600 execution steps per number. Ok I'm impressed. Especially when you consider that these Weelanders have to produce accurate results to survive. If they fail any single factoring test, they're gone.

I'm going to let the sim run for awhile longer and then take a peek at these efficient Weelanders. I wonder what they are doing?

The Dreaded Internal Project

Abacquer — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 08:51:45 -0500

Two words you never want to hear your boss say: "internal project". This is what happens when you are between projects for too long and when the next project starts is unclear... could happen immediately, could take weeks. Companies don't like to see their workers billing "unassigned time" for too long--developers are awfully expensive commodities in the U.S.A. and it isn't good when they become part of the P.S.O. (Profit-Sucking Overhead).

So in an effort to keep the developer from twiddling her thumbs for too long, eventually the company will assign an "internal project". This is just busy work, usually badly defined, haphazardly built, hardly ever finished (because as soon as the real project starts you get yanked off), and in the end, largely unused. I've seen a number of internal projects over the years, maybe a dozen or so. The number I've actually seen completed? One.

Well I've reached that point where I've been on the bench long enough that the company is desperate to throw anything at me to keep me busy. So today I'll be gathering requirements and writing up a loose spec for a hardware tracking system for the IT department. Tomorrow I have an all day training session, and by Friday I should probably be getting started implementing the system. I guarantee, if a project starts up before I'm finished the project will get mothballed and the IT guys will continue to use spreadsheets to track mouses, keyboards, monitors, and cpu's. So it's hard to take it seriously.

Ah well. It's an opportunity to work with .NET and SQL Server I guess. Helps me stay sharp. Or something.