Yeraze's Domain 3.0

Well, tomorrow I leave for the DOE Computer Graphics Forum 06 in Monterey, CA.  That means 3 days of listening to all the DOE people talk about all the money they have to spend, and then lament about how it only buys 500Teraflops instead of 750.

Seriously tho, it’s a great chance to meet people who have already implemented the type of stuff we’re asked to do.  They have alot more resources to devote to problems, so we DOD types like to let them iron out the kinks before we get involved   They can afford to scrub a $1million viz cluster as “insufficient” while we’re forced to make do. 

While I’m there, I’m supposed to give a talk on ezViz in the DOD.  So wish me luck.  I’m taking my Toshiba e740 again, and hopefully they’ll have wireless access.  If they don’t, then don’t expect any updates again until Thursday.
[tag:conference][tag:graphics][tag:doe][tag:dod]

Yesterday I came across a stunning article entitled Omega and why maths has no TOEs.  “TOE” stands for “Theory of Everything“, a grand unified theory capable of explaining everything about everything.  Such a formula is the holy grail of physics and mathematics, and of the type Einstein spent the later half of his life searching for.

Anyway, there’s a few very interesting things in this article.  Perhaps one that really intrigued me is “How do you define Random?”.  Any piece of data has a pattern, but the pattern may be just as large as the data itself.  In the example they use they essentially revert to the old math standby of fitting a line through a cloud of points.  You can make a perfect fit by using a formula with as many polynomials as you have points, but what does that really prove?  Therefore, a truly “random” piece of data is one that cannot be compressed, or expressed through simpler means.  Up to a point,  Randomness = Complexity.  He then uses this nugget of information and some studies of Turing’s Halting Problem to prove that math is incapable of a Theory of Everything, because it cannot precisely define his probabilistic number “Omega”. 

On the other hand, I look at it another way.  If Randomness = Complexity, then Randomness is a approachable point.  As we get smarter & computers grow in power, the complexity of problems drops.  Essentially, as we have more time & power to look at data, we start to realize that some of it isn’t as random as we thought.  You hear about it every day on the news as new scientific studies bring things like Quarks & Quantum Theory closer to reality.  Whether or not we’ll ever be able to comprehend “infinite complexity” is tough to say, but is anything actually infinitely complex?   Could stuff that seems infinite today, just be seen as really large tomorrow?
[tag:math][tag:omega][tag:random]

The DOD User’s Group Conference 2006 is coming up in June, this year in Denver, Colorado. At my boss’s advice, I submitted two papers this year:

1. ezViz – a Cross Platform, Open Source Visualization Tool . This is an update to the paper, by the same name, that I presented last year at UGC05, updated with the new features of ezViz and with some real case studies of real user data. This is a major thrust here at ERDC now, so it was the “more important” of the 2 papers.
2. Visualization of Time-Dependant, Quasi-Streamwise Vortex Tubes in a Bubble-Laden Turbulent Boundary Layer over a Flat Plate . Yeah, I didn’t come up with that name. This is a rehashing of some older data (that the lab won an award for), using new visualization methods presented by some folks at Viz05 (their paper: Opening the Can of Worms: An Exploration Tool for Vortical Flows ).  In their paper they were restricted to uniform rectilinear grids, so we expanded it to non-uniform grids and time-varying data.  It’s pretty neat stuff (very math intensive), but of lesser importance than the ezViz paper.

Well, the UGC06 website has finally been updated with an agenda, and now I’m a bit confused.  The “important” ezViz paper was relegated down to a Poster, while the “less important” vortex-tube paper was accepted as a presentation.  However, it was not lumped in with the rest of the Visualization presentations, it was placed as one of the last talks on the last day.  For those of you that don’t know, that’s basically a death knell for any conference presentation, everyone will leave early & be on their way home by then.

Apparently the number of submissions was an all-time record high this year, so they’ve got 5 rooms fully booked simultaneously with presentations, and a huge number of posters.  Word around the water cooler is that I’m not the only one a bit upset, as alot of major papers were turned into Posters.  Posters are 1) expensive, and 2) alot of hard work.  These guys don’t know much about making posters and would really rather just write the papers and presentations Powerpoint & LaTex (Yes, these guys really do use LaTex, how awesome is that?).  So maybe things will change before the conference comes around.  We’re already talking about switching out my 2 talks (Turn the vortex tubes into a poster, and the ezViz one into a presentation) since it’s the more important of the two, then maybe we can convince the committee to let us present in the “viz block”.
[tag:dod][tag:ugc][tag:conference][tag:paper][tag:visualization]

This afternoon I got a puzzling email from the folks at the Google Adsense department. Apparently it’s been detected that I have “invalid clicks” on my website.

Alrighty then.. That’s remarkably vague and unhelpful. I replied back asking for what information may make them think they are invalid? What site are then on? What ads were they? Where were they coming from (ip address)? I got another form letter telling me to read their Terms and Policies.

Right now I’m at a loss as to what I should do next. I’m guessing that either this is an error, or it’s from Laura clicking on the various pregnancy-related ads that have appeared since I announced our new bundle of joy. Either way, I don’t think I’ve broken 5 clicks in a day yet, usually averaging about 1. How can this possibly be “fraud” ?

Well, it seems I’m not the only one asking this question. Just a little bit of digging around and you’ll find lots of storires. The most popular seems to be Benjamin Cohen’s story on Times Online where his account was revoked with little to no information as to why, but there are hundreds others. “rcd01″ on Sitepoint Forums and BrianHehe at Geek Village are both in the same situation as I, warned but not yet banned, but how can we prevent bans with no information on what we’re doing wrong? Google is no help, as any correspondence (whether reporting invalid clicks or asking for clarification) seems to result in the same form-letter responsed.

Although it does violate Adsense’s TOS, I’ve found instructions on how to modify the javascript to exclude certain IP’s (namely myself). I might try that in a bit to see if it helps. But that will do little to stop the click-bombs of angry visitors madly clicking on ads? Seems I’m just at google’s mercy at this point, hoping they won’t pull my account.

There’s an interview with Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety, where he discusses a bit of click-fraud in the light of their recent settlement. Could it be that this is a paranoid knee-jerk response to the problem of click-fraud?

[tag:adsense][tag:google][tag:clickfraud]

Found this on Slashdot earlier today and simply had to comment on it.

Jonathan Coulton runs a “thing-a-week” series and this week he has a song entitled “Code Monkey”, an anthem for underappreciated software developers everywhere. Some of the lyrics:

Not only is it funny (and surprisingly accurate), it’s just a plain catchy song. So catchy, in fact, that the sheer force of geeks worldwide trying to hear it has seemingly crashed the server for now. The music’s good, the lyrics are good, and it’s even under a Creative Commons license! So not only can I talk about it, but I even tell you to go download it here (Torrent) and it’s legal! I’m definately gonna have to check out his CD Smoking Monkey.
[tag:music][tag:coulton][tag:codemonkey]

This morning we all got up and decided to cash in on that “Friends of the Zoo” membership we bought a few weeks ago. We got dressed, ate breakfast, and made it there around 9:30. I had forgotten until we arrived that the new “Wilderness Mississippi” exhibit opened about two weekends ago.

Seems we’re starting a tradition of “one odd event per zoo visit”. The one “odd” thing that happened this morning was in the Zebra enclosure. Right as we got there, one zebra “mounted” another. We hastily distracted Rhi and took off for other areas (Don’t need to explain that fact of life yet). Although, the booming roar that one of those zebras let loose a few seconds later could be heard echoing across the entire zoo. A sound so eery that everyone I could see stopped and clutched their children closely, while looking for a rampaging elephant or bull running through the streets. I don’t know if it was a scream of joy (the mount-er) or shock (the mount-ee), but it was surprising to hear something so deep & booming coming from what I always considered basically a horse.

So, about the new “Wilderness Mississippi” exhibit:

The Good:

• It’s remarkably clean, the cleanest part of the zoo by far.
• There’s a wide selection of animals, although since it is “Wilderness MIssissippi” most of it I’ve seen before.
• All the outdoor pens have large shaded areas in front, complete with Benches & fans
• There’s a large indoor aquarium area with Turtles and otters

About 2 months ago, my trusty Seimens Speedstream router died and I was forced to replace it. The result: A Belkin F5D7230-4 from Wal-Mart for $40. It setup quick, and after a few days I was pretty happy with it. This story is to update, and correct, those original statements.

About two weeks ago I started having intermittent disconnects on my cablemodem. As I have Vonage, it was screwing up not only my internet access but my phone line. It was an odd 30-seconds of operation, 30-seconds of disconnect, back and forth. I called up Time-Warner and after being bounced all around their tech support departments, they agreed to send someone out. Of course, when he arrived everything was fine again and he left without doing anything. Unfortunately, the problem keeps cropping up day after day with no explanation.

About two days ago I noticed that while my Cablemodem was properly maintaining the connection, the lights on the router were imitating exactly what happens during configuration changes, when it has to restart. For some unknown reason, the router is rebooting itself. After two days of digging around on the internet, I’ve come to realize that Belkin routers are crap.

1. I am currently running firmware V6.00.10 on the router. If you use it’s built-in tools to upgrade the firmware, it tells you the “newly available” firmware is version 6.00.03, from about 18 months ago. If you go to Belkin’s website to download firmware, they list 4.03.03 as the newest.
2. Apparently due to some marketing and advertising confusion, Belkin is offering refunds on selected models (mine included), but you have to have the original sales receipt showing price & sale date..
3. Just visit the BroadBandReports.com Belkin Forum and see tons of complaints.
1. Evidently there are multiple hardware revisions on this model, mine being V4002. Older models were compatible with the OpenWRT project, but the V4000 models use a different chipset and are not.
2. Multicast crashes the router
3. Certain MTU Sizes can crash the router
4. Establishing over about 200 connections kills the router, sometimes rebooting it (I think this is my problem). BitTorrent is a major router-killer because of all the parallel connections, and I think my Vonage unit just compounds the problem.

From reading around the net, it seems that Belkin Support is pretty clueless on the whole thing. They’ve apparently released a new V5000 of the hardware with V7.00 firmware, but I can’t find it for download anywhere (Not that it would probably even work). So essentially, it seems as though this unit is already “antique”.

So my advice to everyone reading: Avoid this router. I’m stuck with it at least in the short term, but I’m probably going to have to replace it.

Update: 7/6/2006
This article gets alot of traffic it seems, and I just got the following email that I thought would be useful to anyone else with similar problems.

So.. If you’re having trouble, give Belkin a call and maybe you can get a Freebie replacement. I can’t honestly tell you if it’s a good deal or not, since the F5D7235 doesn’t seem to be for sale on either NewEgg or ZipZoomFly.
[tag:hardware][tag:belkin][tag:f5d7230][tag:review][tag:router]

I got bored last night and spent some time digging around Google Video, and found that now they have a Top 100 list that they maintain showing some of the most popular stuff. So here’s some of the neater stuff I found last night:

1. Animusic’s Pipe Dream – an incredible piece of synchronized music & 3d Rendering.  I first saw this back at SigGraph 2000, and it’s as impressive now as it ever was.
2. Incredible Machines – Seems to be commercial stubs for some Japanese television show, showing some amazing Rube Goldberg-esque contraptions.  Very reminescent of Honda’s Cog.
3. Free Photo Booth – evidently a Candid Camera-style prank at Universal Studios
4. And while not on Google Video, the Darth Vader vs Japanese Police Vol1 and Vol2 are good for a laugh

So if you have a few minutes go check those out..  Also, for another interesting dig, it seems that Google has a new feature entitled “Google Base” that is advertised as a mass-storage service.  But in practice, it seems to be a kind of eBay-clone.  Check it out, let me know if you find anything neat.
[tag:google][tag:video][tag:funny][tag:humor]

I’ve been searching for ways to make a few bucks on the side lately. Working with Tom is one way, but that’s alot of work. I always figured that there had to be an easier way and last week I think I finally found it.

Long ago I heard of a website called Scriptlance, a kinda “eBay” for programmers. People would post projects ranging from homework assignments to full web-portals, and then allow programmers to bid for the work. Theoretically this helps the people get the best deal for their money, and it gets alot of work out in the open. I never really thought it would work before, because you’ld have people undercutting for ridiculously low prices (college students, foreigners, etc). But, signup was free so I created an account and got to digging around. I have to admit I’m impressed.

I’ve finished 2 contracts through the website so far. Most of the work is pretty trivial stuff (for me anyway). But so far, the project that I’m most proud of is the ItsOnSirius.net project that I just wrapped up. It started as a small project to simply retrieve a text file of the current listing on Sirius Radio and generate a nice HTML table from it. A few hours with PHP later and it was done, easy. After that was running for a few days, he came back with another request for logging all the data into a MySQL database to allow for searching and playlists. That’s alot more ambitious, but a day or two of planning and 4 hours of coding later and it’s done and running. The guy is pleased with the results, and I found it pretty neat to do. I even got a chance to play with Plesk, a nice web-based system managment tool.

So I think I’m gonna keep doing the freelance programming thing for a while. It keeps me busy at nights and breaks up the monotony of games or movies every night. Plus, if I just take the minor jobs then I can easily take a day off. So if anyone out there reading this needs any work done, drop me a line… I just may take you up on it
[tag:freelance][tag:sirius][tag:programming]

This weekend was Easter, that favorite christian holiday celebrating the death and ascension of Jesus Christ that is inextricably celebrated with bunny rabbits and colored eggs.  Has anyone ever figured out how that connection was made?

Friday, Good Friday that is, I had to work.  I believe I mentioned that earlier.  Laura had already left for Meridian Thursday night, so I had the place to myself.  The original plan was that I would head on down Friday night, but once Laura got settled in down in Meridian, it became pretty obvious that Rhianna had caught Pinkeye.  Combine that with the soaring gas prices ($2.76/gallon for the cheap stuff right now) and I was starting to come up with new plans.  I eventually hitched a ride with my sister and went on down tho, braving infection.

Saturday was great.  We decided not to take Rhianna to the church Egg hunt, figured we’ld be considerate and avoid spreading Pinkeye to all the other kids.  We did, however, set up a little photo area outside and get some amazing photos of Rhianna.  There is one in-particular that is just stunning, and I have to credit my dad for that one.  He’s been practicing real hard with his new Nikon, and it’s paying off big-time.   I’ll try to get a version of it up here for all you shutterbugs to see.

Sunday Laura & I came on home, Laura’s mom is watching Rhi right now.  Having the place to ourselves, we decided to fire up the grill and cook some steaks.  I’m still a grillmaster-in-training, but I’m learning.  We spiced things up this time with some Hickory Wood chips from Home Depot, and bought us a basting brush.  Last time we grilled Laura found some Stubbs BBQ marinade.  We soaked the steaks in that, and used some more for basting as it cooked.  I don’t know if it was the hickory, the marinade, or some combination of it all, but those were the best steaks I’ve ever eaten.  Simply amazing stuff.  Just a little more practice and a bigger grill, and I’ll be ready for a big 4th of July cookout.  I’m also going to have to join the I Love Stubbs fanclub, because that stuff is just incredible.  As Laura put it, “If they’re brave enough to put his ugly mug on it, it’s gotta be good barbeque”.

The only other thing worthy of mention is that we finally finished off last weekend’s project of the new dining room light.  Again, Home Depot for the win.  I also switched the dining room to all Compact Fluorescents.  We put these in our living room ceiling fan once, but really didn’t like them.  We used some 60W equivalents, and they had a frustratingly long (~2 minute) warmup time. This time we used the cheapo 100W equivalent spiral bulbs and they seem to come on instantly, no warmup.  So maybe we’ll be revisiting them again soon and put a few in some other rooms.  The spiral ones are not very pretty, but if I only have to change them once every few years and they really save us money, I’m game.
[tag:bbq][tag:easter][tag:family]