One of the unintended results of uploading all my photos into Flickr is that I have had a blitz of 2006 photos flash before my eyes. I'm finally approaching 2005 with my uploads, but I've been overwhelmed with 2006. I thought I sat on my butt all year watching TiVo, but it looks like I actually got out and saw (and photographed) stuff. I know its more traditional to get all sentimental about the previous year around New Years, but I would like to say that 2006 was a fun year and thanks to all of you who shared in the many things below.

Trips: * Japan: Hakodate, Aomori and Nikko, Tokyo * Humboldt County, CA * Getty Villa * Rose Parade * DC * San Diego/Comic-Con '06 * Iowa/Puffer and Kelly wedding * Tahoe * Chicago

Book talks: * Neil Gaiman at Keplers * Neil Gaiman at SJSU * Douglas Hofstadter * Lemony Snicket/The End

College Football: * Rose Bowl (USC vs. Michigan) * USC vs. Arizona * USC vs. Stanford * Stanford vs. Navy

Cycling: * Tour of California Stage 3 * Tour of California Stage 2 * Tour of California Prologue * Levi at Lombardi Sports * Sea Otter Classic * Giro di San Francisco * Pescadero Road Race * Burlingame Criterium * Menlo Park Grand Prix

MythBusters: * Awning Fall * Encinal High Benefit * @Maker Faire

Other: * bp and joy wedding * Exploratorium: Reconsidered Materials and Magnitude X * Maker Faire * Great White at Monterey Bay Aquarium

Paul launched with a new toy I like: Cordurl. It's like tinyurl for geographical locations. For example, http://cordurl.com/M9G-6E 'links' to a NASA Shuttle Landing Facility. Paul even integrated it with geonames so that links to related Wikipedia articles show up.

It's nice when you see performance claims hold up in your own use. I just installed Java 1.6 (a bit late to the game) and, sure enough, the load time of our application improved by 25%. We've been working on performance with this release, but we're thinking of just saving ourselves time by saying, "our new release takes advantages of new Java 1.6 features to improve performance by over 20%."

LATS in Los Altos/Loyola Corners is hosting fund raiser for the Lance Armstrong foundation tomorrow and Sunday. There are classes (pilates, cycling, core, etc...) from Saturday noon all the way through Sunday noon ("24 hours of fitness") that you can participate in ($20/class, 4th class is free).

Flyer with full details

1) Why didn't I know that Rashomon is public domain? I love that movie.

2) After finding out (1), I did a Google search and found out that Sanshiro Sugata is also public domain and on Google Video. There's a whole bunch of 1940s Kurosawa films I've never seen, including this one. All Japanese movies pre-1953 are public domain, so now its just a matter of finding them.

3) Regardless, I love my Criterion Collection restorations (even if I end up buying the Seven Samurai from them twice).

4) parakkum sent me the Seven Samurai Drinking Game, which is good if you subtract out references to exact scenes (e.g. Kambei "gets shorn bald" is a silly drinking game rule, but "Has to remind himself he's bald by rubbing his head" is a good rule).

5) Speaking of which, I finally scanned in the painting I had Scott Morse do at APE 2006. Morse noted that he's a bit sadder in this painting than he was in the movie:

6) It goes well with my Yojimbo Comic-Con '05 commission

7) Tacked onto the seven like he was in the movie, Kikuchiyo, from Comic-Con '03:

With Apple under threat of litigation in Europe for its closed DRM for iTunes/iPod, Steve Jobs counters with a call for the record companies to end all DRM:

Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries. Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard. The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company. EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.

Perhaps a bit disingenuous, but it's hard not to rally behind the right call.

The Bridge School Collection Vol. 2 is out on iTunes now with 54 new tracks (still no Trent Reznor). The new tracks are mostly from shows I haven't seen so they are a little less interesting, but I went back to the Vol. 1 collection and noticed that they redid the ridiculous pricing they setup there. Previously they had marked the Neil Young songs "album only" -- the 'album' is $60! But the tracks are now available individually, which has finally allowed me to start purchasing some tracks from the collection -- I had been deadlocked by the fact that I couldn't buy any of the other tracks individually because those don't count if you later decide to buy the 'album'.

FYI: I'm a bit puzzled that the Neil Young tracks are now listed at "9:59" in length -- "Cortez the Killer" is actually 15:52, so maybe there is some magical 'album only' flag that iTunes kicks in if a song is over 10 minutes.

Time to clear some similar tabs building up:

Mii Office by n1c2c8 is disturbingly spot-on. d and I haven't been able to do half as well on our own.

But perhaps we should just drop $5 and have the 'pros' at Miistation make us one.

Finally, it's not a Mii, but it is doppelgangish: Metamerist's McCain/Tigh comparison means someone can kill two birds with one Mii stone.

D-Wave promises to "make computer history" when they unveil their quantum computer at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View on February 13th (register to attend). They claim that they will be able to do 64,000 calculations in parallel using their 16 qubit prototype. Heck if I know what that really means or if it really works, but I'm interested enough to check it out.

via gizmodo

Gamespot has an interview and demo video with Ed Boon of Mortal Kombat: Armageddon. Watching Boon swing around the controller forward and back to throw Scorpion's spear has me pretty excited to see the fighting game genre adapted to Wii controls, even if I was more of a Street Fighter II player than Mortal Kombat back in the day. Quarter-circles, semi-circles, and forward-back motions look far more graceful when executed with a Wiimote.

Mortal Kombat is the first game that I've seen to take a different control perspective for the Wiimote. Wii Sports, Warioware, SSX: Blur and Madden: 07 are all first-person control systems that requires you to think of the characters on the screen as your avatar. Mortal Kombat appears to have chosen a god-perspective control system that makes the character on the screen your puppet. Instead of flinging the Wii controller forward as you would if you were Scorpion in the game, you flick it from left-to-right or right-to-left depending on whether Scorpion is facing right or left. The Mii Creator shares this same god perspective and I'm sure that there are others, but this video was a fresh take for me.

kwc.org/architecture is starting to take shape. After my architectural splurge in Japan, I finally feel like there is enough original content there to stand on its own. The amount of traffic my architecture category page gets seems to justify this as well, though most of that is due to Google Image search. One other reason is that its nice to play with a pure MovableType 3.3 blog with tags and widgets, instead of trying to migrate an older, heavily-customized template.

With kwc.org/cycling and kwc.org/mythbusters, you might think that I actually like creating sub-blogs, but the real answer is 'kinda'. It's a pain to maintain a single blog between MovableType upgrades (kwc.org/blog still runs with MT 2.x-style templates), and having multiple blogs is multiple pains.

I used to believe in the idea of a universal data manager. The notion is attractive: throw everything into one big bin and have a good tool for pulling all that data out. But the fact is that you want to treat different types of data/media differently, even if they are all "blog entries." You can try and customize the wazoo out of categories and tags and whatnot, but that becomes ugly. Keeping them in separate sandboxes means that you can see just MythBusters-related tags when searching the MythBusters guides and see just architecture-related tags when searching the architecture entries. It also means that I don't have to type the 'architecture' tag when creating an architecture entry nor assign it to the 'architecture' category.

So anyway, step 1 of the separation is complete. I haven't really bothered with the default MT template just yet and I need to fix up some macros I was using with older entries. I'm also rethinking past decisions and I think I'm going to try and figure out how to merge all the various blogs and feeds into one display, instead of having the infrequent "Elsewhere" posts.

The 5,195-piece Millenium Falcon ($499) is 2,091 pieces more grand than my previous set of Lego envy, the Lego Ultimate Collector's Imperial Star Destroyer. In fact, as the Lego site notes, "this is the biggest LEGO set ever made!" The previous 985-piece Lego Millenium Falcon always looked cheesy to me, but maybe it just means that it needed 4000+ more pieces.

GeoCarta has a post on a new collection of Holy Land Maps available online. What was striking for me, in addition to the beautiful maps, was this Geocarta observation:

Most of the early maps are oriented to the east, reflecting the view point of European mapmakers looking in the direction of the Holy Land. It wasn't until the Renaissance that cartographers began drawing maps oriented to the north.

i.e. a simple 90-degree rotation in maps summarizes a key distinction between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

I also liked the subsequent tidbit: "Reviewing the collection, one can see a change toward the end of the 18th century as maps began replacing pictorial elements with symbols and legends."

I beat Twilight Princess a couple of days ago but I can't say that it was the pinnacle of Zelda gameplay that I had hoped it would be. Instead of propelling the franchise forward, I felt more that it stepped backwards to Ocarina of Time with spruced up graphics. If I had played Twilight Princess before Ocarina, then I'd probably be inclined to call Twilight Princess the best game ever, and plenty of reviews have referred to it as the best Zelda ever. For me, the lack of novelty occasionally left me bored. The visual design was also a step backwards. Wind Waker was the most expressive Link to date and it truly helped the storytelling. The Twilight Link is a plastic doll barely able to raise a single eyebrow of emotion. For someone like me who buys the next Nintendo platform to play Zelda, I perhaps have unsurmountable expectations that, until the Wii, have been met. Strange, considering that the Wii has been the most impressive platform release for me, ever.

My reaction is best understood when touring of some of the past Zeldas. (bolded titles were the next-generation releases):

• Legend of Zelda: this game was amazing for its time, but without friends and Nintendo Power to tell you where to bomb, I probably never would have finished this game.
• Zelda II: never played more than a dungeon or two as the side-scroller never caught my attention
• A Link to the Past: this game greatly expanded the Zelda story and universe. It established the story elements and puzzle mechanics that are general basis of later Zelda games (Hyrule Castle, hookshot, parallel universe, master sword as story element).
• Ocarina of Time: took Zelda into 3D and ranks as one of my favorite games off all time. I'm still amazed as to how well the designers were able to translate Zelda-ness into 3D.
• Majora's Mask: I enjoyed this game, even if it did reuse of the Ocarina engine. It was not a next-generation Zelda, nor was it meant to be, but it had an entertaining 3-day story construct that made it different from previous Zelda. It also had a complete lack of a Hyrule/Ganon storyline, which kept it a fresh experience. I am impressed that they managed to deliver a game that was so similar to its predecessor in technology and feel, but different enough to remain entertaining.
• Wind Waker: The Gamecube-based toon shading helped deliver the best visual design of any Zelda (still) with Link actually able to emote and use facial expressions as clues. It also introduced a continuous world, but had to hide load times in large expanses of sea. I appreciated the fact that they took a risk and did away with the Hyrule-Castle-spoke-and-wheel map model and I loved the game overall, but like many, I eventually tired of the sailing -- you know its bad when you can point your boat, go to the bathroom, and still not have arrived where you need to. With an outboard motor and a more densely populated world, it could have been a perfect game.

Then you come to Twilight Princess. Twilight is weird because it is a Gamecube game ported to the Nintendo Wii, so its not truly a next-generation effort. But it is also entirely different from its Gamecube-brother Wind Waker. Regardless, it is not a game designed for the Wii. This isn't necessary a bad thing, but for Zelda games its uncommon. I've often joked that Nintendo designs each next-generation controller for Zelda -- the Nintendo 64 and Gamecube controllers both seem a bit odd until you play the Zelda game for that system. Along this line of thinking, for Twilight to truly be a next-generation Zelda experience, the Wiimote would have to be more than a tacked-on experience. Unfortunately, it's clear that you could play the game with a Gamecube controller as everything (except for fishing, which I hate) has the same mechanics as Ocarina/Wind Waker.

About the only time I found the Wiimote really engaging was during certain boss fights that required Link to plunge his sword into the big boss. I found myself gripping the Wiimote like a dagger and violent plunging it into the air. These were the moments I was hoping to have more of. I'm hoping that Miyamoto has a true Nintendo Wii Zelda cooking in the oven, one that takes previous Zelda mechanics like the ocarina, wind waker, and howling and gives them the fun, stand-up experience of the Wii.

• Over the weekend I had fun shooting the SportVelo training camp. Novelties included shooting in the rain and shooting from a car.
• Floyd Landis will be in SF following the prologue of the Tour of California on Sunday. Tickets are $35.

The Spitzer Space Telescope caught this awesome image of comets colliding in the Helix Nebula (the red is the comet dust). It would fit well with BSG mythology.

via SpaceWriter Ramblings

I went to the D-Wave demo of the "first commercially viable quantum computer." That's a heavily qualified statement, but it basically means that they were able to take a 16-qubit quantum computer and hook it up to a molecular structure search, a seating chart constraint optimizer, and a sudoku puzzle solver. The cool aspect of what they done is that their software is designed to optimize SQL, so you don't really need to know anything about the adiabatic quantum computation. Their software will take the SQL program, convert it to a graph, and load it into their quantum computer. The best solution is lowest energy state of the quantum computer. Due to the physical nature of the computation, the second-best solution is the second-lowest energy state, etc... Their goal with this sort of model is to either:

• Get a more accurate solution in the same amount of time as a digital computer
• Get a solution of the same accuracy but faster than a digital computer

Of course, their current prototype is about 100x slower than a current digital computer, so it will take awhile for them to transition from proof of concept into realizing those goals.

D-Wave's near-term vision for their technology seems to be an Internet service by which data can be sent to a quantum computer and a solution returned. This would in effect be a "quantum computer co-processor" for digital computers. They were very clear that quantum computing is not a replacement for digital computing; rather, it enables new efficiencies with respect to certain types of computation in finance, biology, chemistry, security, etc...

I went to the presentation to see the demo, but I was a bit let down by it. In retrospect, I should have expected to be: what they currently have is un-demoable. Their prototype is 100x slower than a digital computer, so it can't perform any type of new computation that would really knock our socks off (e.g. cracking a 1024-bit RSA key). Regardless, it is very difficult to demo computation. The only thing left to show would be the actual quantum computer, which in publicity photos looks absolutely beautiful. But there was no way they were going to transport a massive, liquid-helium-cooled quantum computer to the Computer History Museum. Given all this -- the no-show quantum computer, no demonstrable new application -- it pretty much leaves the rest of the demo to a question of belief. It would have been nice if they could have brought parts from previous prototypes, a mis-fabbed qubit, anything that could have taken their Internet-based demonstration and made it more physically grounded, but I complain because I like toys.

I've posted some videos in the extended of the molecular search demo. As I've already said, there's not much to see, just much to believe.

Not really, but I do wish there was some content flag you could set that says, "if you are going to traffic-bomb my site, you have permission to mirror the content elsewhere."

I've been constantly restarting my server this morning trying to get some life out of it, but the fact is, I shouldn't be running Apache on Windows. The Windows Apache response to extra traffic is generally to lockup for a small period of time. If that extra traffic keeps coming in, the server gets knocked to the mat again repeatedly. I probably shouldn't be running over a DSL connection either, but I've actually been nowhere close to saturating the link: Windows Apache is the weakest link.

I know this is a bad setup, but its a whole lot cheaper than setting up an extra Linux box or paying a hosting company. Regardless, I am now looking into hosting providers. Dreamhost used to be a good one, but recent reviews seem uniform in saying that "Dreamhost used to be great until last summer." I shall investigate more, but the goal is to spend no more than $15/month.

Yesterday's Slashdotting only brought in about 4-5x the normal daily traffic. As it turns out, I was actually getting hit by a one-two punch: two days ago was a big traffic spike due to a Obi-Wan Kenobi Valentine's image I posted from Something Awful (people were loading a 150K category archive page).

Looking at the number of visits:

08 Feb 2007 3832
13 Feb 2007 4782
14 Feb 2007 7946

15 Feb 2007 18078

18,000+ isn't that terrible in comparison to the normal 3,000-4,000 daily visits. It certainly would have been much higher had my server not been burning toast.

Yesterday was actually a good day from a bandwidth perspective (300-450MB is normal).

08 Feb 2007 412.45 MB
13 Feb 2007 658.47 MB
14 Feb 2007 946.67 MB
15 Feb 2007 457.37 MB

NOTE: The heavy bandwidth on the 13th and 14th was due to the Valentine's traffic.

# of pages and # of hits was only about 2x normal.

So, from a traffic perspective, it wasn't really the DSL line that was at issue. My Apache server (for whatever reason) wasn't able to handle the # of requests coming in. I blame Windows/Microsoft, as always (not my lack of skills in configuring an Apache conf file ;) ). Looking at my network utilization graph, the Apache server would handle the incoming requests well for a couple of minutes without fully saturating the link. Then there would be a sharp spike and the graph would flatline as the Apache server became unresponsive.

Perhaps the more interesting statistic was how I did with my Google ads. I believe I'm not allowed to share those directly, but I can make the following summarizations:

• click-through ratios went down on my blog. Slashdot traffic is not ad-friendly.
• click-through ratios on everything else went up about 3-4x.
• yesterday still was not a 'banner day' with respect to ads

One nefarious conclusion one can draw from this is that slow site = better ad sales. This makes sense: people see the ad load, but the rest of the content is slow in coming and they decide to leave.

The prologue for the Tour of California was awesome -- thanks ota for coming along and also shooting video (stage summary). Also awesome? My Canon 30D.

Team Uni was in effect yesterday. After much practice with the Tour de Comic-Con, it was time to branch into the cycling realm with the Tour of California. parakkum loaned the necessary video capture equipment, offtopicartisan shot the video and reconnoitered the course, and I shot photos.

The hardest stretch was when ota initiated the sprint from Telegraph Hill down to the Embarcadero so that we could catch the podium presentation. Or perhaps the hardest stretch was when we had to walk back up Telegraph Hill to get to my car.

On a whim I decided to drive up to Santa Rosa to see stage 1 of the Tour of California. I normally ignore the sprint stages, but I figured with President's Day and all it would be worth a new experience. The Santa Rosa stage also has three laps on the finishing circuit, so there would be multiple chances to snap photos.

There were tons of people in Santa Rosa and I couldn't get a good spot near the finish line. I managed to convince someone to let me squeeze in but a half an hour later the media folk started setting up right in front of us, blocking our best views. I couldn't get good sightlines down the straightaway, which meant that the autofocus and metering on a lot of my photos were blown. It didn't really matter, either, because there were so many of the thin yellow thundersticks being waved around that half of my photos feature them instead. As it turned out, it really didn't matter what was going on towards the finish line.

After the riders passed on at the start of the penultimate lap, there was a loud popping noise. I turned around and saw bike after bike piling up. There were riders yelling at each other in anger, others were lazily getting up, and others seemed to be figuring out what damage they suffered. All the while, the forty riders who weren't involved in the crash raced away. It wasn't even until a couple of minutes later that I realized that Levi Leipheimer, who's in the overall lead, was involved in the crash. The race lost all organization after that. The announcers didn't know what was going on, the finish had to be reviewed on tape to see who won, the judges belatedly decided to neutralize the finish (award everyone the same time), and one of the riders failed to show up for the award's ceremony.

The photo above is my favorite from the day because it summarizes so much of the chaos. Off in the distance, the riders racing away. In the foreground, riders still piling up on top of one another. In the center, Levi Leipheimer. The Liquigas rider is kicking someone in the head and on the side of #118's right leg: a face (you have to view the full size to see it).

• Tour of California Stage 1 Photoset
• Stage 1 Summary @ spare cycles

Lots to report from my Spare Cycles blog. I spent most of the day on Sierra Road: stage summary, diary.

I also got my very first press pass, which I haven't had the chance to break in yet:

I new that the media pass would give me better access to take my photos, but who knew there would be other fringe benefits:

• The Press Room has wireless internet to upload your photos and write your reports
• It also has food and water
• You get a welcome bag from the city (someone stole the fudge out of mine, but I got a wine glass, opener, and tourist info)

I'm in Santa Barbara now drinking coffee to stay awake. I still need to find a place to sleep tonight...

Levi Leipheimer continues to put on a show for the fans and I've been having my best cycling+photography experience ever. Today I got to be a total fanboy + a "pro" photographer. Another photographer took time to give me advise on portfolio building, lenses, and submitting photos to magazines. People pay to have experiences like these and instead I'm being fed food and offered money for my photos. Armstrong, Ekimov, Julich, Cancellara, Hincapie, Danielson, Voigt, etc... I got near total access: Graham Watson and Casey Gibson stood behind me.

I even inquired about being a staff photographer. When I told the guy that I work as a software engineer, he told me to keep my job. Which only shows that not every dream should come true.

Now I'm tired. I woke up at 4:30am to drive down here and I need to go find somewhere to sleep. Good night all.

Some of you may have noticed that kwc.org was offline today. This was inopportune seeing as I was 400 miles away and in the midst of posting lots of cycling coverage.

But kwc.org is back now and it is no longer on my home DSL. I am now serving it on AN Hosting. AN Hosting uses the atrocious cpanel UI, but it happens to be really inexpensive and they promise good uptime. We shall see. It can't be any worse than my DSL line, which was finally being maxed out by recent increases in traffic.

Things may be a little unstable until I get all the right permissions and configurations and whatnot in place.

Today I hung out taking photos and getting autographs at the stage start in Santa Barbara. I thought I'd drive up Balcom Canyon after that to get some photos from the final climb, but the CHPs had the road blocked off. After hiking about a kilometer up, I decided to turn back because I had a photographer's bib (a bright yellow bib that says "photo" on it = all access pass) waiting for me at the finish line and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to take my first real sprint finish photo.

I drove like a madman to get to the finish line -- it's hard to stay in front of professional bikers -- mostly because I kept on making wrong turns. With all time I had to prepare, you would think that I would have printed off street maps.

I did get my first real sprint finish photo. It wasn't as good as I had hoped, but it was exciting to give it a try.

Stage 6 Report: Santa Barbara - Santa Clarita

My Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L lens was a champ during the Tour of California. Once I got a decent camera body to stick it on, its true quality shined like a diamond. But I have a whole void for < 70mm that I need to fill. Milling about the start area in Santa Barbara as well as the post-race interviews, it simply wasn't possible to frame a lot of shots unless I wanted closeups of nose hair.

One of the longest discussions I had during the Tour of California was asking another photographer for recommendations as to which lens to get next. Two in my book ranked highly as contenders: the Canon 16-35 f/2.8L and the Canon 17-40 f/4L. The 16-35 is twice as expensive for the extra 1mm of wideness (1.6mm on my 30D), but the f/2.8 could come in handy if I start using it for mountain bike races. The 17-40 has an extra 5mm (8mm on 30D) of reach. Another plus for the 17-40 is that is much sharper at the edges than the 16-35, though this doesn't matter as much if you have a 1.6x crop factor camera (like the 30D). This photographer actually knew colleagues who turned in their 16-35s for 17-40s because of this sharpness issue (money wasn't an issue).

Canon may have settled the debate for me last week if I can locate the money:

The new Canon EF 16-35mm II is designed to improve the sharpness issues of its predecessor. Not much is known about this lens yet as I have not seen any hands on reviews. About the only complaint I see with the new specs is that it now requires an 82mm filter instead of 77mm filter, which will cost you a few extra bucks... but you should have a few extra bucks if you can afford this lens in the first place.

"You can take shots of black cats fighting in a coal mine... at night."

Photographer John at the Tour of California, in reference to Olympus' ISO 10000 digital camera.