Yeraze's Domain 3.0

Summer Movie Season is upon us. The DaVinci Code and X3 have already been released, and there’s plenty more on the way.

• Today while viewing X3, I saw a preview for the new Superman Returns (Official Site) movie. I have been waiting for some “reasonable” trailers to appear, showing some of what was going to happen in the movie, and today I finally saw one. Evidently this time Lex Luthor has discovered the Fortress of Solitude and the crystals that “grow” it, and uses them to reshape the earth in his image. Not really sure how well Kevin Spacey will do as a Bad Guy, but he did ok in A Bug’s Life, so I guess we’ll just wait and see.
• Pixar’s Cars opens
  soon. It’s a kid’s movie, sure, but with George Carlin & Larry “The
  Cable Guy” voicing parts, one has to believe there’s plenty of adult
  humor as well.
• “The Lady In The Water” (Official Site) is M. Night Shyagmalan’s latest bigscreen feature. I loved his previous work, although The Village was pretty much a flop. This one looks like it could go either way.
• The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (Official Site) Now, didn’t the last one of these flop? 
• Click (Official Site) – The return of Adam Sandler, although the “Universal Remote” gag is a bit old.   I have a feeling the “Hulk ANGRY” gag from the preview is the best part of the movie.
• Pirates of the Carribbean II – Did we really need a sequel?  Granted, the first one was much better than I had expected, but getting one movie from the ride was impressive enough.  Is there really enough material to warrant a second, or even a third?
• Clerks II (Official Site) – Now here’s one to look forward to.  Kevin Smith brings Dante & Randall back for another adventure… I doubt I can get Laura to see this, but I hope to catch it one way or another.
• Snakes on a Plane – And who can possibly forget this hot topic of Hollywood?  A movie so ridiculous, it has it’s own Wikipedia Entry.  More proof that Hollywood doesn’t  understand that the falling box office isn’t due to piracy, but too many drugs in the writing department.
• Along the same lines, there’s “My Super Ex-Girlfriend“, where Luke Wilson dumps a superhero Uma Thurman, and she goes on a psycho-girlfriend revenge streak to win him back.  Just what we need, Wonder Woman meets American Psycho.
• Also saw a preview for “Ghost Rider” (Official Site)
  starring Nicholas Cage as the Ghost Rider himself. While not
  technically part of the “Summer Movie Season” (Release date is Feb 07),
  looks like we’re gonna be deluged with previews all summer long. The
  way previews are nowadays, we’ll pretty much know the entire movie by
  August.

I’ll probably only get to see 2 or 3 of these in the theatre, the rest will be Rentals or HBO.  Snakes on a Plane, that’s definately a rental.  While there are a few gems, it seems that Hollywood is still cranking out alot of the same ole crap over and over again.

For alot more movies, you can check out the Yahoo Summer Movie Guide .
[tag:movie][tag:summer]

Today Laura & I took off to see X-Men 3: The Last Stand.

The movie starts shortly after the 2nd one, with Scott (Cyclops) still mourning the death of Jean Grey, and “Mutant Registration” has been forgotten in favor of the new “Mutant Antibody”. All the favorites are back: Wolverine, Professors X, Storm, Magneto, Rogue. Even some of the lesser players from previous movies have come back. And, of course, there are plenty of new mutants with strange and incredible powers.

If you enjoy the Mutant On Mutant action of the fighting, or the Mutant on Military action in some of the previous ones, then you definately won’t be disappointed. They’ve now discovered creative ways to combine their powers, so that now Magneto hurls cars that are ignited in air by another mutant, raining flaming debris. If you were more into the character building and internal turmoil of the mutants, then you may be a little disappointed in this “final” installment of the series.

You may have noticed that I put “final” in quotes. Well, that’s because while this is the final X-Men movie, it’s definately not the last time you’ll some of these characters. Hugh Jackman already has a new movie entitled “Wolverine” exclusively about his character’s background in development, for release in 2007. Ian McKellen has a movie entitled “Magneto” for release about the same time, detailing his & Charles first meetings while he was in the Nazi Concentration Camps. So while we may not see the X-Men united again anytime soon, we definately won’t have to wait very long to see them again individually.

Also, I was surprised by the gusto of the directors & writers to *Spoiler Alert* kill or neuter so many important characters. I won’t give names, but even if the X-Men return in force for another movie, it just won’t be the same.

In conclusion, it’s a great action-movie. While it fails a bit in character development (Who is Kitty, and why doesn’t she have any family? What’s Beast’s story? etc) it definately makes up for in action.
[tag:xmen3][tag:movie][tag:review]

Last night was UMC’s “Long Coat Ceremony”, where Karen she received her long white doctor’s coat & recited the Hippocratic oath.  It was a nice ceremony, good food and good music.  They had a cute DVD of an hour long (yes, hour long) slideshow of all ~100 students, showing baby pictures, school pictures, and lots of candid photos.  Somebody obviously enjoys Final Cut Pro.

Governor Haley Barbour addressed the students, talking about how they should return to MIssissippi after they finish their residencies.  He had a good speech discussing the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the area and the opportunities it presents.  He even brought up the old proverb about the Chinese Symbol for crisis being danger + opportunity.  Of course, it’s not true but he at least acknowledged that he didn’t know if it was true or not.  He seems like a pretty good guy, and a great public speaker.  Guess I’ll get to see him again next week when he comes to christen the XT3.

So Karen is now a Doctor, a MD.  She starts her 5-year Orthopaedic residency (intership?) in Little Rock, AR in a few weeks.  Seems funny to think of her, tiny little Karen, hanging out with all those buff football quarterback looking Ortho’s I used to see when I was at Z-Kat.  I have a feelin she could take em tho, if she had to.  So congratulations Karen, and good luck.
[tag:family][tag:medical][tag:whitecoat][tag:graduation]

Today I found an interesing quirk in Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003, specifically Visual C++.

I was attempting to compile a linux app on my machine that used CMake & VTK. It all went pretty well until I got an error “Unresolved symbol atanh”. I quickly noticed that I wasn’t including math.h and tried again, only to be met with the same error. Figuring that maybe I wasn’t doing it the “Microsoft Way”, I highlighted it and clicked F1 only to find nothing.

After some digging around, I found that atanh, asinh, and acosh are all missing from Visual C++. Instead, they provide a table of derived formulae to compute them. I was amazed. Why would they leave these functions out? If they went through all the trouble to provide a table in their documentation, why not just add the functions, or #define’s? After some research, I finally came across GSL – Gnu Scientific Library, that comes with high precision replacements for alot of math functions, including the missing atanh I needed. A little more digging came up with GnuWIn32, a collection of several libraries compiled for Visual C++, including GSL For Windows.

Now if I can just get “Debugging” priveledges so I can figure out why it still crashes. Seems that pass-by-pointer doesn’t function the same in GCC vs Visual C++.

Update: 5/24/2006 10:30am
As an experiment, I downloaded CodeBlocks with the MinGW compilers. Cmake supports MinGW Makefiles as an output, so I recompiled VTK and my App. I wasn’t able to use the IDE, just ran make from the command line, but now it seems everything is working. It’s faster than Visual Studio, although I’ll freely admit that I am not a VS guru so I may have missed a few optimization flags. But where the VS code returned 0 everywhere and required the GSL library, the MinGW build returns valid values using the built-in atanh function.

Update 9/12/06:
I thought I added this long ago, but Microsoft acknowledges the shortcoming and publishes a workaround here.
[tag:math][tag:gsl][tag:visualc++][tag:microsoft][tag:mingw][tag:codeblocks]

Gotta thank Karen for putting this great little montage together. Using the services of One True Media, she put together a bunch of photo’s over the last year into a great little musical montage.

And in case you’re wondering, the party was a huge success Nobody got seriously hurt and Rhianna loved every minute of it.
[tag:family][tag:video]

Tonight Laura and I went to see The DaVinci Code.  She was a big fan of the book, and try as I might I’ve been pretty unsuccessfull in “avoiding” all the media about it.  Seems every time I watch TV there’s either a News Story about it, or a special on the Discovery Channel debunking it.  Even without reading the book, I felt like I knew the entire story.

All in all, it’s a pretty good movie.  The story is interesting, albeit pretty flimsy.  Using the “San Greal” vs “Sang Real” trick made popular by Holy Blood, Holy Grail, it starts with an odd museum curator’s murder and turns into a search for the Holy Grail.  Of course, the grail is not a cup but rather the last surviving descendant of Christ.  With the religious aspects aside, the puzzles and connections alone are interesting to any hacker-type.  From the “Cryptex“, to the Rose Line vs the Rosslyn Chapel, to the “Missing Orb” at the tomb of Sir Issac Newton, the story is ripe with riddles and puzzles to keep you guessing.

Of course, it’s hard to talk about the story without getting into the Religious implications and aspects of it all.  Frankly, I’m not gonna bother.  There’s plenty of other stuff out there about it, go read that.  In my mind, it’s a great fictional story. 

But, if you are going to go see the movie, maybe you want to read some of these first (or afterwards, if you don’t like spoilers):

• HowStuffWorks.com “How the DaVinci Code Doesn’t Work” – A great resource listing all of the technical errors in the movie.. Containing such classic gaffes as paintings in the wrong museums, and the completely wrong statement about Alexander Pope at Newton’s funeral.
• Wikipedia’s Entry on “The DaVinci Code” – A good collection of various information about the story and the book’s history since release
• And of course, the Official Website

In conclusion, it’s a fun movie.  I didn’t get the whole “changing the world” angle that some people are trying so hard to put into it, but I did enjoy the ride.  Some people seem to be treating this as a factual Research Paper, but it seemed pretty obvious that it’s fiction to me. Tom Hanks did a pretty good job with it, and any movie with a Mini chase scene gets a plus by me.  I loved all the references to DaVinci, although sadly the major one (the Cryptex) was apparently made up for the book.  It’s fun, tho, and I recommend it for that reason alone.  Laura, who’s read the book, said it was surprisingly close to the book, but left a few “treats” for those who had read it (Such as the identity of the stranger watching over the Rosslyn Chapel).
[tag:thedavincicode][tag:movie][tag:davinci]

At work we use Autodesk’s 3dsMax as an integral part of our visualization process.  We use paraview and VTK to create geometry, typically as PLY files, and then import them into 3dsMax for high resolution renderings.  We have some nice scripts that will let us create a context scene, and then load each dataset in turn and submit a job to the render farm.  The results look amazing and it’s really taken our results to the next level.

Unfortunately, 3dsMax wasn’t really designed to do this and it’s really starting to show.  To manage a renderfarm (a large collection of nodes dedicated to nothing but rendering), they provide a piece of software called BackBurner.  Unfortunately, it’s pretty well tuned for controlling 2 or 3 jobs that each contain a few hundred frames.   Frankly, the performance really stinks when you have 2000-3000 jobs, each of 1 frame each.  Once a few jobs queue up we’ve seen submission times drop from 4-5 jobs per second, to 30-45seconds per job.  It’s pretty ridiculous, and once the number gets over 1000 the whole system just seems unstable and unreliable.  The manager seems to just “take a smoke break” as we’ve started calling it:  It simply stops responding and stops handing out new jobs for about 5 minutes, then suddenly catches up with everything that happened while it was out, never reporting an error.

What I’ld really like to do is submit a single job that could use MAXScript to dynamically load and unload data between frames.  This would greatly reduce both the amount of time to submit jobs (submit a single job instead of a job per frame or job per dataset), and reduce the load on BackBurner (Only has to manage 1 job instead of thousands).  Unfortunately, it seems there is no way to do this.  MAXScript has a preRender/postRender callback but they are only triggered at the beginning of the first frame and the end of the last frame, not between frames.   They do offer a preFrameRender/postFrameRender callback that offers that, but you’re not allowed to change the geometry.

The only other way I know to do this is using the existing preRender callback, but somehow getting backburner to restart 3dsMax between frames, instead of automatically advancing to the next one.  This I know will work, but I don’t know if it can be done.  Muster from Virtual Vertex can do this through control of the “Packet Size” option, so I may switch to that.  Honestly tho, I’ld really rather keep it in BackBurner, since it’s already installed & operational (mostly).

So I ask you, o great IntarWeb… Any ideas?
[tag:3dsmax][tag:autodesk][tag:maxscript][tag:backburner]

So, this weekend is Rhianna’s Third Birthday Party.  We’ve invited alot of other kids that she knows, and some that she doesn’t, to all meet up at my parents house in Meridian for a big party.

As a three year old girl, you can probably guess that the theme is “Dora the Explorer.”  We went to a party a few weeks ago that was also Dora, and we’ve been invited to a party in another few weeks that is again Dora.  She’s all the rage right now, and Rhianna loves every minute of it.  So we’ve got all the usual party gear: Hats, streamers, balloons, plates, napkins, etc.  We even have a big Helium tank for the balloons.

The main attraction for the party has got to be the Bounce House that we rented for the weekend.  At $140, Rhianna has already had a bit of fun with it today when we blew it up for a quick test.  I imagine tomorrow she, and all the other little kids, will exhaust themselves with it.  I’ve personally seen Rhianna jump on one of these for 30 minutes straight and still have to be drug out of it kicking and screaming.  Maybe tomorrow we can bribe her out with Cake and Balloons.  Now if we can just avoid all the potential disasters that accompany such a thing:

1. Hopefully, noone will get sick:  Fill little 3 year olds full of junk & sugar and watch them jump up and down, and hope they don’t fizz.
2. Hopefully No one will fall out: I don’t think my insurance would cover that.
3. Hopefully No one will break any limbs: Trap 12 kids in a confined space and shake..  Should look surprisingly like one of those nuclear Fission demo videos you saw back in your highschool physics classes.

So cross your fingers and hope it goes well.
On a side note, we’ve started Rhianna’s Driver’s Ed. training early with a Cinderella Convertible Pontiac car.  She hasn’t had a chance to power it up yet, but she’s loved just sitting in it.   Laura thought it would make a good birthday present, and it seems she was right.  Although, I don’t have any idea how we’re gonna get it from Meridian back to Clinton.  Guess we’re gonna have to think about that a bit.
[tag:birthday][tag:family][tag:dora]

I’ve been writing alot of documentation at work this week, so I haven’t felt much like writing here. But this seemed important enough to warrant it. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, it was discovered this week that the NSA Has a massive database of all US Phone Calls. Not only is this an incredible invasion of privacy, but it’s plain illegal. At least, in this implementation it is.

Ira Winkler, a former NSA analyst, has a great article on this. What alot of people don’t realize is that this is completely legal in theory. Thanks to the FISA (The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act), the NSA has full authority to get this information without a warrant. But, they must get a warrant within 72 hours if they want to act on it. This is where the current system is failing, as they’re acting on it without warrants. As Winkler points out, the warrants here do more than protect citizens, they act as a form of quality control by weeding out obviously bad information.

So how is this bad? Well, I think it’s universally agreed that terrorism is a bad thing. Stopping terrorism is a good thing. But stopping terrorism at the expense of more obvious crimes like abuse, child pornography, murder, theft, etc is a bad thing I think. Read this excerpt:

I don’t think it would be hard to prove that the crimes that investigators are being removed from touch far more lives than the potential terror attack that these people may or may not be planning. And all this BS about them not having any identifiable information, there are dozens of Reverse Phone lookups that can easily turn that phone number into a phone number and address. From there and some careful google’ing, you can get just about anything, as any good Identity Thief can attest.

And for those of you who think that this database surely has to be too massive for any useful information to be drawn from it: Just google for InfoViz. InfoViz, short for information visualization, is a small but booming field for visualizing/analyzing large amount of textual information like Documents, papers, or phone numbers. Using graphs and relational viewing algorithms, I’ve seen some pretty impressive information extracting from seemingly useless text. The DOD & DOE are especially interested in this stuff, as evidenced by PNNL’s site and Sandia’s VxInsight.. They already have the tools, it’s just a matter of time before they’re connected.. In fact, they probably already are.

I think the only good thing to come of this has to be this line from Bruce Schneier:

[tag:nsa][tag:phone][tag:news][tag:infoviz]

Don’t worry, it’s work safe

I found this on google video just now, and couldn’t help but post it. Somewhere between absurdly hilarious and strangely admirable, there is the field of “Manualism”. What is “Manualism” you ask? Well, the Wikipedia claims it is an educational philosophy that states the that the best way for deaf students to acquire language and knowledge is with the use of a language produced manually and received visually, in other words a sign language.

But lesser known is that it’s also the art of forcing air through your hands to create sounds. In case you haven’t gathered, it’s basically making music with those fart noises you used to make with your hands in grade school. If you don’t believe me, the guy has a great website here. He’s got several videos on Google Video, but my favorite has to be the Hawaii Five-O Theme song. It’s a shame they didn’t get him to play Hail to the Chief at tonight’s Presidential Address.
[tag:video][tag:humor][tag:manualism]