A co-worker gave this to me today:

What's the next number in this sequence?

0, 1, 2, 720!

A friend of mine ran into these two Java code samples in code she has to work with. The first example is one I've encountered before in intern code. The second example is so bad that it's nearly optimally bad -- it's hard to make any line worse than it already is.

Example 1:

Runtime.getRuntime().exec("java Foo");

Example 2:

while (true) {
  int i = 50;
  if (i == 0) {
    break;
  }
  i++;
}

It has recently come to my attention that my blog comments were hosed. A plugin that I had installed decided to start acting up. Many, many apologies to those who may have commented. Sadly, I have no way of recovering your comments.

I hopefully have fixed the problem and will test again later tonight.

update: fyi, it was the banascii plugin that started acting up and not playing nice with the commenting system. If you have SpamLookup and/or Blacklist installed, you may want to disable it.

So, it appears that I may have lost ~15 comments in my little snafu. It's rather silly, as the thing that broke it had never really been working anyways -- it just started not working in a very different way.

Anyway, I'm curious as to what those 15 comments were, so, if you're willing, comment away. Some examples:

• "Everyone would have seen my answer to the number puzzle if you weren't such crappy admin."
• "I was using one of the comment fields on your Web site to solve Fermat's Last Theorem, and now all my work is lost thanks to you."
• "I was going to propose to my fiance on your blog, but instead we flew to London."

Important: if you post a comment on this entry and get a message saying that it's been moderated, send me an e-mail if you can as I might still be having problems.

Yesterday I went over to Allison BMW for their 3-series launch party. My main reason for going there was that I figured they would have lots of good free food -- gotta justify the high cost of my car somehow.

The most striking impression I had about the new 3-series had nothing to do with the exterior -- BMW really Americanized and IKEA'd the interior of this car. The defining moment in this realization was when I noticed that for only $60 you can get an umbrella holder for the front passenger seat (comes with umbrella). Also, if five cup-holders aren't enough, the ski-bag add-on has been modularized; you can snap-in a storage module or two extra drink holders (in case your backseat passengers need 4 cupholders).

In the trunk they offer four optional mat accessories (anti-slip, fitted luggage, tray, and all-weather) as well as seven storage add-ons (grocery holder, drawer, tensioning straps, collapsible box, brackets, floor net, and organizer). Other interesting/odd options include: * coat hanger that mounts to the back of the head rest ($30) * remote control for your house lights ($79) * bicycle lift for your roof rack ($330) * two different attachable map lights ($25/$38) and a 'portable pocket lamp' that recharges in the cigarette adapter.

The only additional that really mattered to me was that they added a line-in and cigarette adapter under the console arm-rest. Lift up the cover and you can't help but picture your iPod nesting comfortably there feeding you good tunes.

[caveat: they've probably had a lot of these options for some time now -- I couldn't afford the accessories market when I bought my car in 2001 -- but seven cupholders???]

I just got back from a 3-day, 20 mile hike in Big Sur. Quite a lot of fun, quite a lot of photos. I have big plans for the photos, as I took along a GPS device to record the location of most of them. That, however, will take quite awhile to put the tools together for.

In the meantime, before I collapse from exhaustion, is a simple but fun fire study I did the first night down there:

The Dragon

Rest of the Photoset

I wanted to do a quick post as to why this makes a whole lotta sense on Apple's part.

A couple years ago, Apple was pretty close to shifting over to Intel. Instead, it decided to place it's bets with the G5, hoping that IBM would deliver. IBM hasn't, and Apple is probably getting tired of having to liquid cool or otherwise come up with clever cooling solutions for its product. Apple's shift to Intel is also probably a clear signal that IBM isn't anywhere close to delivering the oft-desired G5 PowerBook, which brings up (perhaps) the most important statistic:

53% of computer sales last month were laptops

The Apple laptop line, in terms of performance, has stagnated due to a lack of a top-of-the-line processor -- iLife applications like iPhoto and Garageband seriously suffer.

Apple does have to suffer the inevitable price comparisons, but the net effect should be that Apple nullifies hardware as a major purchase decision point (one they were losing on), which will leave a purely software comparison -- given the Longhorn screenshots I've seen, Apple is likely to do quite well if that's how they can get buyers to choose.

My commencement speaker was Daniel Goldin, the outgoing head of NASA. I guess they wanted to connect with the whole "2001" theme and have a spacey speaker, but Goldin is an administrator, not an innovator, and I was bored to tears. It could have been worse: MIT and Stanford graduating classes have both had Carly Fiorina as a speaker, and someone from the MIT class of '05 just sent me the text of the commencement speak by Irwin Jacobs, CEO of Qualcomm, which is the epitome of boring CEO commencement addresses. Read on, if you like being bored.

To clarify some questions that people had:

After Jobs' presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. "That doesn't preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will," he said. "We won't do anything to preclude that."

However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said.

The product that I (as a PC user) will be paying attention to is the Mac mini. It has the price point most seductive to traditional PC users, and it's about to get the horsepower that we are accustomed to. Take the Mac mini, a little bit of wireless USB, and you get a pretty hot little apartment-friendly computer.

I'm going to be mostly Internet free until Monday. Laters!

...to bring you a message of pro-Internet goodness.

I just tried to book a room at a hotel and they wanted $130/night. I went onto hotwire, selected a hotel that was $70/night (hotwire doesn't tell you the name of the hotel), and ended up booking the exact same hotel.

update: credit for saving me $60 goes to susanne, who suggested hotwire in the first place

(still incommunicado, but also innundated with digital imagery that I need to offload)

There are a lot of techniques for converting digital photos to black and white. I've generally been lazy and just done standard desaturation, but I'm starting to discover the wonder of 'Lab mode' in Photoshop. This technique involves converting your image into Lab mode, then switching to the lightness channel, which will be a black and white version of your image. If you know what you are doing, you can then do things in this channel to get the black and white image that you want. So far, I haven't figured out what those things are, but I did stumble across the 'a' channel in Lab mode, which is even cooler, and I did figure play around a bit with curves in the lightness channel to get a B&W image that I like better than standard desaturation (but am too bleery-eyed to improve anymore).

left to right: original (unaltered) photo, 'a' channel

left to right: desaturated, lightness channel with some curves adjustments, lightness channel plus this fill layer technique

update: added in one more photo using a this lab mode technique. I also did some sharpening with the unsharp mask. I think this one has the best dynamics.

I've been a bit busy the past two weeks. It would be nice to write about all of it, but then I wouldn't get the rest I very much need right now. There's a lot of photos I've got to go through and ship out to people, so that will probably be one of my main tasks this week.

Here's most of what happened the last 13 days (in approximate order of occurrence):

• Went to a wedding in Asilomar/Monterey
• Spent a weekend backpacking in Big Sur
• Entertained my parents in NoCal for three days (mom's first visit to Peninsula)
• Spent the night in Monterey
• Went hiking in Pinnacles National Monument
• Drove the Route 1/Big Sur-Carmel Highlands coastland (twice)
• Introduced my parents to In-n-Out burgers
• Went wine tasting in Sonoma
• Ate at the Girl and the Fig (thanks paul)
• Met my friend's baby daughter
• Went to a wedding in NJ
• Ate at Popeye's in NJ, but failed in my attempt to eat at Popeye's in Texas
• Read half of Baudolino. It's more focused and coherent than Foucault's Pendulum, but it lacks some of the brilliant dialogue.
• Took over 1,000 photos

I was in Bergen County, NJ, for a wedding and learned this fun fact:

On Sundays, you can buy alcohol, but you cannot buy books*

* To be fair, you cannot buy anything 'retail' (books, clothes, music), only 'essentials.'

It used to be that when a raffle said "Win a free iPod" you knew you were getting a good $250+ prize. In the past two weeks, I've participated in two raffles that were:

Win a free iPod* * shuffle

The iPod shuffle has completely wrecked my experience of not winning raffle prizes.

(yet another Pinnacles photo set)

I'm not sure how exciting you'll find my second Pinnacles set, but if you looked at the first one, you can see that the sky was a bit more ominous this time about (it ended up being a perfect Cali blue by the end).

More about these photos in the extended entry, as well as comparisons between my hay photos and horizon line's hay photos (to demonstrate that we are in fact different people, despite posting photos of the same places).

I broke the magical $10 barrier with my Google adwords today. It took about a month to reach that mark, though it took about a week of fidgeting with the ad layout to figure out what was the best placement.

I monitored mybloglog to figure out which entries to place ads on, eventually choosing about 15% of my entries to mark with ads -- this results in about a third of my incoming traffic is being served ads right now. I would get a higher percentage if I placed ads on my category archives, but I'm not willing to do that right now.

Of course, given that In-n-Out pays $10/hr starting, I would make more money flipping burgers, but experiments are experiments. If only I could start getting some of the home loan ads or trial lawyer ads, I would really be rolling in the dough.

I've placed ads on this entry if you're curious to see them (if you don't see them, click on the entry title to go to the individual entry page).

update: * Big Sur/Sykes Photo Map (Google Maps * Big Sur + GPS: Phase 1 * Big Sur + GPS: Phase 2 * Big Sur + GPS: Phase 3

I took a lot of photos in Big Sur, but it was in a documentary, not artistic, mode that I took most of these photos. I carried along a GPS unit to mark where each photo was taken, and my hope is to combine these two sets of data together to make a nice map. So, my main focus was taking photos of the exact same landmarks, but from different angles, over the course of our ten mile hike.

It's going to take quite awhile to put together to grand map, but in the meantime I've thrown together a photoset. I didn't do a great job on processing/filtering this photoset -- I've noticed that some of my selections are blurry or could use some color-correction -- but I am currently overwhelmed by my photo backlog (two sets of wedding photos still to process).

On a photography note, I almost exclusively used my 70-200 f/4 lens for these, which was both good and bad -- it was easy to take the documentary photos of the Big Sur landscape, but along the trail it was pretty difficult to get non-blurry handheld shots because of the copious shade. It's too tough to switch lenses while you're trailing behind the hiking group, so I'm curious to play with a monopod to see if it is hike-friendly, quickly-deployable gear, or possibly I just need two camera bodies :).

Some sample photos:

And the rest: Big Sur Hike Photoset

• Art you can see online: Zoom quilt and Virgil Widrich' amazing photocopy origami animation (Fast Film)
• Art I wish I had seen offline: The Weather Project at the Tate Modern (flickr photos)
• Architecture: Ando does steel and Gehry does brick
• SF: Joshua Norton, Emperor of SF and bridge namesake
• US: gCensus = Google Maps + Census data
• Ireland: Confusing road signs in Ireland (still probably less confusing than driving in North NJ)
• World: 2005 Risks in Global Filmmaking
• WWW programming: Slick Ajax tools: Rico (open source Javascript library), Ajax on Rails (using Rails as your server platform)
• WWW dating: Pickup lines used by Mario (McSweeney's)

We may have to start getting used to CNN's "Missing white girl of the day" and the FoxNews propaganda apparatus:

A House subcommittee voted yesterday to sharply reduce the federal government's financial support for public broadcasting, including eliminating taxpayer funds that help underwrite such popular children's educational programs as "Sesame Street," "Reading Rainbow," "Arthur" and "Postcards From Buster."

In addition, the subcommittee acted to eliminate within two years all federal money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting -- which passes federal funds to public broadcasters -- starting with a 25 percent reduction in CPB's budget for next year, from $400 million to $300 million.

Article: Public Broadcasting Targeted By House

On a sidenote, here are CNN's current headlines: * Real-life brothers in arms [top headline (interest story)] * Was race a factor in Aruba arrests? [Was race a factor in this being front page news?] * Autopsy: No sign Schiavo was abused * Bomb kills 23 Iraqi soldiers at restaurant [look, real news!] * Patriot Act rules on library records blocked [look, another real news item!] * Ex-hostage in Atlanta shootings strikes book deal * 'Operation Babylift' orphans return to Vietnam * Pac-Man chomps up milestone

Some reviews for Adobe CS2 have complained about how unintuitive the latest incarnations of the suite's icons are:

They're cute -- but what the hell is the seashell?

Anyway, I post about this because I learned this fun fact from meta about the disappearance of the familiar 'eye' icon for Photoshop: they had to get rid of it because it freaked out the Japanese customers.

In trying to understand this revulsion to eyes on your desktop -- as a former user of XEyes -- I am reminded of another story that meta shared about her mother and Clippy. Most people are just annoyed by the Office paperclip, but her mom was fully freaked out because, "there's this thing on my computer, amd it keeps rolling its eyes at me!"

The bird is watching you:

addendum:

discussing the now-discontinued Adobe Atmosphere product:

meta: did i tell you what it looked like when adobe had just bought it and before we re-worked the ui?
me: nope
meta: it was dark grey... very gloomy looking. and LOTS of windows.
meta: but the worst part was... in the upper corner, where you'd usually have the close button in OS 9....
meta: they had eyes. on EVERY window.
me: hahaaha
meta: no, it gets worse.
meta: i was looking at it over this guy's shoulder.... and i kept sensing movement in my peripheral vision. but when i looked to where it was.... it was always the same as before.
meta: then, i finally caught it.
meta: THE EYES WERE BLINKING!

A contributor to wikipedia was silly enough to get into an argument over the definition of 'weblog'... with the person who coined the term (Jorn Barger/robotwisdom) -- not that the person who created the term should own it, but if you do find yourself in such a debate, you're probably better off retreating rather than losing the respect of your peers. This is certainly a candidate for Lamest edit wars ever.

• 17:49, 12 Jun 2005 Robotwisdom (rv stevie's ego-delusions)
• 17:34, 12 Jun 2005 Stevietheman (rv back to factual version)
• 17:15, 12 Jun 2005 Robotwisdom (rv because stevie is wrong)
• 16:59, 12 Jun 2005 Stevietheman (rv to last edit by Stevietheman; with minor edits)

• 12:31, 12 Jun 2005 Tverbeek (stopped opening paragraph from going down the rabbit hole)

• Talk:Weblog - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Haven't made up my mind yet whether or not I like cutouts yet. The effect is pretty, but I often feel that the effect is to distract the viewer from looking at the picture as a whole, and instead shout, "over here! over here!"

I'm almost through my backlog of photos, but it gets tedious, so naturally I found even more photos to process by going through some of my old photos and seeing if they have anything more to offer.

These are just standard invert actions, but I like the affect (blue flame, black water spray).

I attended my first Indian wedding in New Jersey last week, though it was more of an Indian wedding with Mexican influences. I missed the mariachi band playing during the reception as I had to head back west, but I did get to see my friend enter in on horseback while a van blasted dance music (this should be part of every wedding).

I'm planning on submitting one (and only one) of the photos I took at the wedding to the C.A.F.E. group on Flickr for constructive criticism. If you could help out by indicating which one of the photos below you think is best, I would appreciate it. There were various alterations I was experimenting with, including B&W conversion, dodge/burning, lomo-izing, etc...

I don't know if I need to add my voice to the chorus of parakkum, ln m, and o.t.a., so I'll try at least to be short.

I saw Batman: The IMAX Experience at The Tech, which has a dome-style IMAX screen. Very early in the film, when there's this wide shot of Himalaya-ish mountains, I thought to myself, "Now THAT's IMAX!" Later on in the film, I started to get a little twigged at the fact that one eye on each actor's face was always bigger because of the fishy effect of the dome (we weren't seated dead center). There were also problems following the fight scenes. It was just too big and too close. I thought this was the fault of the IMAX projection, but from the reviews, it appears that even on a normal screen you really can't tell what's going on.

Overall, I thought this was the best of the Batman movies, though they definitely emulated the Spiderman model. Batman Returns still has the best villains, but this felt like the better story.

Some friends and I pitched in for an Amazon Prime upgrade a couple months back and it's completely changed my shopping habits. Instead of browsing around trying to choose $20 worth of items to buy so I can get free shipping, I treat Amazon like a just-in-time supply delivery system. If my photo printer tells me it's running low on yellow ink, I quickly log into Amazon, order the $10 cartridge with free 2-day shipping, and by the time the ink is dry and new cartridge is waiting for me at my door. For gift buying, I can ensure precision gift delivery with the 2-day shipping, or overnight for an extra $4 when I'm really doing "just-in-time" shopping.

The resupply isn't quite perfect yet. Today I had to go to Home Depot to pick up replacement bulbs and a new light switch. It would be nice to envision a future in which, via RFID or by taking a photo of the item, I could save myself the effort of combing Home Depot's aisles and instead have the replacement parts waiting for me on my doorstep, delivered by my just-in-time Amazon supplier.

Today's Supreme Court decision which enables local governments to take private property under "eminent domain" and give it to private developers has me upset for two reasons:

1. That the Supreme Court somehow believes that local governments exercise proper prudence and restraint in giving private developers a big wet kiss. It's not like there's corruption in local governments (cough San Diego cough).

2. I actually agree with Scalia and Thomas, who were among the dissenters.

Supreme Court Rules Cities May Seize Homes

The CAFE-ization of one of my photos is complete. I submitted this photo:

The relative consensus was: eliminate the street sign, crop tighter, lighten the face. One of the group members produced this, which also clones out the face in the bottom right:

Updating a previous entry, Congress undid the spending cut imposed on public broadcasting by a House subcommittee: Congress Will Not Cut Public Broadcasting Funds.

"Should abandoned military installations be preserved?" I had a conversation about this and Treasure Island with a city planning student. I was at a party full of city planning students, and not being able to hold a conversation on actual city planning, I somehow managed to find a conversation topic that would leverage my love of Treasure Island and my childhood as a military brat.

Treasure Island is a manmade island that served as naval base from World War II to the early nineties. The conversation focused on whether the redevelopment of Treasure Island should try to preserve some of the military architecture and the cultural landmarks, such as the chapel where many people had been married back in the day.

(a long, boring, rambling essay on Military Generic, ugly architecture, McDonald's, Suburbia, Le Corbusier, and the expectations of a military childhood in the extended)

del.icio.us Director: del.icio.us has been improving its features for creating and tagging bookmarks, but it hasn't done much to make it easier to find those bookmarks later. Director pretty much gives me everything that I would expect in terms of browsing and searching my bookmarks.

Scrapbook for Firefox: makes it super easy to collect and compose images and text you find on Web pages. Normally I have to keep track of dozens of tabs when I researching a topic or holding onto articles. Now I can just save what I want into an easy-to-manage pane.

My computer, the one that runs kwc.org, died earlier today in a fit of hard drive badness. Initially I was going to go my traditional incremental route, but when I weighed the amount of time it would take to get everything reinstalled versus future, planned upgrades, I decided to turn this unplanned event into an opportunity to do a major rebuild.

Starting in 1998 or so, I built Version 1.0. I budgeted about $500/year for computer parts in order to keep my computer perpetually almost-top-of-the-line, but never cream of the crop. Some years I would replace the motherboard, other years brought accessories like external hard drives and LCD monitors. The only original parts after seven years of rebuilding are the computer case and the CD drive. I called this computer Karma, because I somehow figured that it was a fitting name for the incremental approach.

I'm now saying goodbye to that lineage. Much like the Windows software that runs on it, it simply acquired too much cruft to continue onward. The original case is a sentimental possession, covered with stickers, glow-in-the-dark paint, and other detritus from years past, but it lacked proper cooling, ease-of-access, and front panel inputs. The original CD drive required that I manually extend the drive tray.

There has to be some inheritance to carry on the proud tradition; in this case it is the memory sticks, video card, and wireless card -- all late additions -- that survived into the new case.

Karma now sits partially gutted, travelling on its way to the River Styx. If I find a couple of coins to stick on its eyes maybe it will be able to buy some memory from the ferryman and journey back to the world of the living, but for now I'm busy trying to get this puppy into Web-serving, photo-editing condition.

There also has to be a name for the new machine. I chose the name Fenix, because he just looks so happy dancing among the blue flames:

I'm not a big fan of Alsop. As cool as a Space Invader-shaped museum might be, the overwhelming ode to consumerism in the form of Prada-inspired-skirt buildings, champagne bottles, teddy bears and Rubik's cubes, make it seem like Alsop designs his plans by surveying his hotel room after a post-FAO-Schwarz drinking binge.

Whatever his design process might have been in the past, I tip my hat to him for his latest boldness: prisoners at HMP Gartee, Leicestershire will get to participate in the design of their new prison. This sort of approach has helped with productivity in office buildings, so who knows what sort of effect it would have on a population that's incarcerated behind bars instead of cubicle walls. If they make it too nice, perhaps they won't want to leave, but I'd rather be part of the workshop designing the secret underground tunnels.

Cameron Marlow -- creator of blogdex -- is trying to finish up his Ph.D.

MIT is a hellhole, so help him escape by taking the survey.

As a reminder to myself to back things up, here's a list of data casualties (files that I failed to backup and were unrecoverable from the dying disk):

• entire iTunes library: not a huge loss, as I do own the CDs and have an old version backed up, but it will take quite some time to reburn, and I've also lost all the ratings (unless someone knows how to extract that data off my iPod)
• some Daily Show clips: also not a huge loss, possibly some missed laughs down the line, but so much of my Daily Show archive survived that I should be more than fine.
• my Desktop: this is an unknown. A lot of what's on my desktop is copies of data that I'm staging for printing, etc... but it's also where I put a lot of data that's awaiting filing. I can't remember what these files might have been, so this is an unknown loss.

The important thing is that my Web server and photos made it through unscathed. I await a future in which data loss is eliminated by massive network replication -- a future that is quite possible with today's technology.

Yet again, comments were broken (and now fixed). Apparently I neglected to reinstall some libraries, and SpamLookup is still definitely beta software. I should just have a flag like they do in shark-prone waters to indicate whether or not comment badness has recently occurred.

Google is rolling out personalized search once again, this time through the "Search History" feature that they rolled out awhile ago. The old personalized search was a bit kooky to use because you had to fill out a profile of interest categories, and if you trashed your cookies or used a different browser your profile was lost.

I can't quite tell yet what triggers a personalized search results. If I do a query for "test search," then I get personalized search results. If I do a search for "Armstrong" (to test if Lance, Neil, or Louis gets top placement) or "Java" (language, island, coffee) then I get no personalization.

I don't get the cool Kaltix-based category slider that lets me refine my search dynamically, but I'm hoping that makes a re-appearance as they refine this.

A day after I posted about Google's personalized search launch, I now find myself demo-ing Yahoo's "My Web 2.0 BETA"* (the logo for which tips its hat to the Flickr folks).

In terms of features, Yahoo's response is to see Google's personalization + search history and add in social bookmarking (del.icio.us-like) and social networks (Yahoo 360). This is an impressive array of functionality, but does an impressive feature list make for an impressive experience? Review in the extended.

France is going to be the site first nuclear fusion reactor, with Japan picked as the site of the second reactor. This is a major $10B+ undertaking by a six-nation consortium of the US, Japan, EU, China, Russia, and South Korea, and many scientific and engineering challenges will have be solved before the reactor is scheduled to come online in 2015.

This news reminds me of Carl Sagan's Contact. Beyond the similarities of Japan being picked as a second site for a major, international building effort, this paragraph from the article could have come straight out of a faux Contact news report:

Many experts also predict that construction could take much longer than currently foreseen, given the difficulty of coordinating multiple suppliers of costly and highly technical components in many countries. Today's agreement leaves open the possibility that still more countries may participate in the project. India, for example, has expressed interest in getting involved.