Ross Randomly Rants

2009-07-07

How not to measure temperature

Former TV Weatherman Anthony Watts asked an interesting question one day. He wondered if the kind of paint used to protect the shelters that hold the thermometers used for over a hundred years to measure local temperatures mattered. So he did a little research, found some recipes for classic whitewash and some samples of modern paints and set up an experiment.

Along the way, he got a look at a couple of official weather stations. They were not a pretty sight. He looked at a couple more. They weren't a lot better. Then he had a bright idea. Why not go and personally inspect all 1221 stations that make up the US Historical Climate Network (USHCN). This is a "high quality, moderate-sized data set of daily and monthly records of basic meteorological variables from over 1000 observing stations across the 48 contiguous United States" according to its maintainers.

This is a huge undertaking, but odder things have come to pass with the help of volunteers and the Internet to organize them. Thus came about the Surface Stations site and the army of volunteers that have surveyed, photographed and rated over 70% of the USHCN stations to date. Site ratings are based on NOAA's own guidelines and criteria.

Along the way, stations are found that have issues so clear that they have been singled out to become the subject of blog posts. Admittedly, these are generally the worst of the worst of the stations, so this list clearly shows a kind of selection bias...

To date, 89 examples of How Not to Measure Temperature have been posted at Watts Up With That. I've listed them all here, because there isn't an easy way to get this list directly from the site and they make interesting reading. Naturally, this list will be out of date shortly...

To balance the hugely unfair selection of stations shown above, here are some posts about stations that are exceptionally well sited and maintained:

I wouldn't want to sound too judgmental, but the survey results show that the USHCN is anything but a high quality network, because about 89% of stations surveyed fail to meet reasonable standards for siting. Standards published by the same people who created the USHCN in the first place.

A report was published at the 70% coverage point, and more analysis is in the works.

Worse, it is hard to imagine that the situation in much of the rest of the world is a whole lot better.

2009-05-11

House of Leaves

I just finished reading House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.

Tempting as it is to indulge in the kinds of odd typography layout used in the book in a review, it just doesn't seem worth the effort. The one indulgence I'll allow myself is the color blue applied to all occurrences of the word "house". The rest is just too much work to do here.

The book as a substantial work, at something like 700 pages. Some of those pages are crammed with text to the point of almost not fitting inside the trimmed size of the page, and some are nearly empty.

The story is told on three layers, two of which are physically present in the book. The first layer is a documentary film about the house on Ash Tree Lane, made by its owners during their occupancy of the property. Intended as documentary, it also functions as horror, and at some strange level as a love story. The film is presented as real, and as the subject of a substantial amount of critical review and analysis.

The second layer is a critical work about the film, written by an old, blind man, left unfinished when he died in somewhat mysterious circumstances. This is the main text of the published book, and takes an erudite approach to the subject of the film, and incidentally recounts the content of the film as it progresses. It is heavily footnoted both as citations to the source material quoted, and to provide translations of some of the many quotations presented in their original languages.

This text is set in unconventional ways in several of the chapters. It often gives the impression that just writing about the events of the film forces the text layout to reflect some of those events. This is most obvious as changes to the shape of the house are reflected in the page layouts, with claustrophobic sections trapped in a tiny section of an otherwise blank page, a maze represented by text and footnotes tangled and running all ways on the page, and so forth.

The third layer is provided in footnotes by the younger man who acquired the manuscript after its author's death, and has become obsessed with pulling it into form suitable for publication. He too is subject to the subject, and given that he has his own personal demons joining the party, it isn't entirely clear that he'll survive the work.

At times, the reader gets the distinct impression that the three layers are at war with each other, and the reader is playing the role of battlefield, or perhaps civilian collateral damage.

I picked up the book due to an XKCD cartoon titled House of Pancakes. I've since spotted it in several bookstores, but oddly shelved. It is usually in the horror section, but I've spotted with the graphic novels and manga as well.

Would I recommend it? Certainly not to everyone.

Would I seek out other books by the same author? I'm not sure.

What about music by the author's sister that was inspired by the book? I don't know, but it seemed to move the principle character in the third layer story when he happened on to a band playing music inspired by an internet bootleg copy of the book he hadn't published yet...

Having finished it, I have to wonder if it was worth the effort. I'm still not sure. From one point of view, the book is a self-indulgent waste of time and the paper it was printed on. However, it is probably the best researched and most complete hoax of its kind I've ever seen. It is reminiscent in some ways of the seminal volumes Why Paint Cats and Why Cats Paint which both produced some of the same reactions.

2009-02-14

I told you RFID didn't belong in passports!

<rant>

A recent RISKS issue contains this item contributed by the editor, Peter G. Neumann:

Using inexpensive off-the-shelf components (a Motorola RFID reader and antenna, and a PC) ... Chris Paget ... built a mobile platform in his spare time that can clone large numbers of the unique RFID tag electronic identifiers used in U.S. passport cards and next generation drivers licenses. While driving around San Francisco for 20 minutes, he was able to harvest two passport tags without knowledge of their owners from up to 30 feet away.

Read the rest of the RISKS item over at the archive, or a complete article over at SecurityFocus.

Given the huge security risks that ought to be self-evident here, what justifies the use of a technology like RFID that can be read at a distance without the awareness of the document holder?

The only sensible approach in the first place was to use an optical technology such as a 2-D barcode symbology if it really was necessary to put more information into the electronic record than just the passport number itself. Printed inside the cover (or on the back of a card) it would be immensely more difficult to read at a distance, and since the cover would normally not be left open, it would rarely be possible to get the content without the holder knowing. Even better, because the symbol is visible the owner would be more likely to know that the threat exists, and avoid leaving it laying out open to the symbol in plain view.

In contrast, the RFID tag is invisible to the owner and can be read without opening the document (or without even removing it from a pocket or wallet).

Until the world comes to its senses, wrapping your passport in copper foil may well be the only sensible action. Of course, you will then have to explain yourself to the nice TSA agent at the security checkpoint...

</rant>

2009-02-13

Coraline, now in theaters in 3D

We saw Coraline^[IMDB][wiki] the other day. It was shown in one of the new digitally projected 3D systems at our local multiplex.

Wow.

I was very taken with the book by Neil Gaiman, who is one of my favorite authors. It is a simple story about a young girl who feels neglected by her workaholic parents. They move to an old house that has been divided into flats, taking the large flat for their own. While exploring the house, Coraline (not Caroline!) finds a locked door in the parlor that appears at first to open onto a brick wall. Later, she finds it opens into another world where her "other" mother and father dote on her. They seem a little creepy, an effect enhanced by having large black buttons sewn in place of their eyes. She can stay, but only if she consents to have the buttons herself.... Read the book and you'll never look at buttons the same way again.

The movie actually extends the story beyond the book in several ways, and it does it without breaking it. In fact, the film's version of the story is better at least as handled on screen. The writers added an entire new character and improved the depth of the back story of the villainess. They even managed to fit a musical number in that was written (but not performed) by They Might be Giants.

Given that it was directed by Henry Selick (who directed Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach, and Monkey Bone) the stop-motion animation is as striking as could be expected. More striking is the delicate use of 3D projection. The 3D was used to give extra depth to the scenery without abusing the audience. It was not used as a gimmick. There is a hint of the effort expended on the animation in a short segment after the credit roll that shows a sequence shot from a wider angle and without any of the clamps or wires removed. There was some CGI used, but mostly for cleanups and wire removal.

In short, see this movie.

2009-01-07

Valuable, Open Content Creation Tools

As a software developer, I am certainly no enemy of commercial software. However, the quality of some of the free and open source alternatives has been giving their commercial competitors quite a run for their money. This is especially true for the casual or occasional user. It would be extremely difficult to justify a complete set of professional-level commercial tools just to support a hobby, but when the price is $0, the question is more one of learning curve and disk space.

Adobe has always had a large market share of the paint and drawing markets with Photoshop and Illustrator. They invented the PostScript page description language and the closely related PDF file format. They are the current owners of the high-end publishing system FrameMaker, and recently became the owners of the widely used Shockwave and Flash tools. For each of these niche products, a slew of "almost as good" commercial competitors have also been around for a while, but the open source community has been a lot slower to catch up.

Here are a few free alternatives that should be on the radar:

The GIMP is a paint tool that has overcome its anti-Windows roots to become a widely used and extremely powerful competitor to Photoshop. I haven't personally used it (when I had the chance to adopt it instead of Photoshop, its developers were still exceedingly hostile to the idea that it would ever run on Windows, so I bought Photoshop instead) but reviews and testimonials make it pretty clear that it must be taken seriously. If I were new to the market today, I would strongly consider buying Lightroom from Adobe for its RAW file handling and lightweight DAM capabilities and installing the GIMP for use on larger editing tasks such as stubborn corrections and montage.

Inkscape is a vector graphic drawing tool that set out to be the both the best possible drawing environment it could and the best example of a full-featured editor for the SVG file format. It is well on its way to succeeding on both fronts. I had tried using Corel Draw in the dark ages (under Windows 3.0, IIRC) and never got hooked. Inkscape lacks the easy templates and shapes of Visio, but then it isn't primarily a diagramming tool, and Visio was never intended to be an art and illustration tool.

Scribus is clearly aiming to become the best available professional publishing tool. This is not for casual users. But if you had a budget and would be considering FrameMaker, taking a good hard look at Scribus might pay for a fair amount of pizza and coffee. I have used FM (it was standard at a customer's site in 1988) but I haven't personally used Scribus (yet) so I'm basing this impression on reviews and testimonials. FM in 1988 was complicated, huge, heavy, expensive, and exceedingly reliable when producing huge technical manuals. FM today is more complicated and no less expensive. Of course, if having a GUI is not critical, then the clear winner over both is probably LaTeX. A good distribution that runs well under Windows is free from MiKTeX.

Blender is one other tool that deserves a mention, although I have not had the chance to even give it a test run yet. It describes itself as a "free open source 3D content creation suite." It seems to have an extremely complete set of modeling, rendering and animation features.

2008-10-01

XKCD on Anathem

Today's XKCD is a review, of sorts, of Neal Stephenson's new novel Anathem. Randal seems concerned about the amount of invented vocabulary required for basic comprehension of the story.

While sympathetic to Randal's point, I suspect he hasn't devoted quite enough attention span to get what Stephenson is actually up to in this one. It is the sort of book where putting it down too soon will make it impossible to pick up. Being set in an entirely distinct culture it requires a fair amount of context and vocabulary to keep the alien flavor. Although, if you are well-read in the right topics, a lot of what is said will sound isomorphic to things you already know.

Read in the right frame of mind, it might even teach some hard to explain ideas about the nature of consciousness. There is an interesting riff relating the solving of an abstract problem to the collapsing of a wave function, and a different spin on the many-worlds explanation of quantum mechanics that almost made sense.

As I write this, I've read about 3/4 of Anathem, and it clearly is worth the attention I've paid it.

As proof that XKCD does get it in general, I present the previous comic, which demonstrates the power of a log scale to collapse the entire universe to a comprehensible size...

2008-08-29

There's always time for the comics!

Here's another couple of web comics mentioned today at Questionable Content:

Schlock Mercenary

Sci-Fi silliness. Over 3000 strips so far, one a day, with no missed days. The artist says he wants to hit 10000 at a minimum, so it won't be disappearing any time soon. I've just started reading at the beginning, and it looks promising. Nothing even PG so far, and probably safe to open in an office.

Main page: http://www.schlockmercenary.com/

1st strip: http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20000612.html

Gunnerkrigg Court

Manga in high style, from the glimpses I got between server crashes. I have no clue what the story is about due to the server crashes, but the art I saw was impressive.

Main page: http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/

1st strip: http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/archive_page.php?comicID=1

Others I've mentioned before

Consider this a reminder that QC (http://questionablecontent.net/) is worth watching... do start near the beginning or the most recent strips won't make sense at all. Be sure to watch out for the daily specials.

And, having now read about half the story so far, I can say that Girly (http://go-girly.com/) is not actually as NC-17 as its advertisers are on average, but it certainly rates a strong R and does feature a complete lack of ambiguity about the hero and her sidekick's sexual preferences. And kittens. And a twisted genius veterinarian.

Also, today's XKCD is a riot. http://xkcd.com/469/

A recent XKCD strip (http://www.xkcd.com/463/) was featured as a summary of problems with Diebold (now operating under some other name) voting machines in Ohio on the infamous RISKS-L list (http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/25.29.html#subj3.1). Apparently there was anti-virus software on the voting machines!?

2008-07-23

What Is Science?

In a presentation to the National Science Teacher's Association in 1966, Richard Feynman said

Another of the qualities of science is that it teaches the value of rational thought as well as the importance of freedom of thought; the positive results that come from doubting that the lessons are all true. You must here distinguish--especially in teaching--the science from the forms or procedures that are sometimes used in developing science. It is easy to say, "We write, experiment, and observe, and do this or that." You can copy that form exactly. But great religions are dissipated by following form without remembering the direct content of the teaching of the great leaders. In the same way, it is possible to follow form and call it science, but that is pseudo-science.

and

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

and also

It is necessary to teach both to accept and to reject the past with a kind of balance that takes considerable skill. Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation.

I had the good fortune to get to know Dr. Feynmen a little bit as he was still teaching at Caltech when I was an undergraduate student there almost 20 years after that speech. I even took a class from him my senior year, although he spent most of the term away from campus educating NASA and the public about the importance of listening to the engineers who understand how a thing works at least as much as the goals of management.

As I read the speech I quote from above, I was vividly reminded of attending Feynman's lectures to his informal class for freshman, affectionately known as "Phys-X" because it was not listed in any catalog. The class met for an hour or two a week most years. Anyone could attend (and there were often a few other faculty lingering in back to listen) but only freshmen could ask questions. Each lecture was strongly driven by the questions, although it is likely that he had a goal in mind and guided the discussion more than I noticed at the time. I tried to attend as often as I could because he had a rare knack for clear explanation, and for those precious few moments I got to share in his sense of wonder.

Why am I reminiscing about one of the world's finest teachers, safecrackers, bongo players, artists and physicists?

Because I am searching for a way to explain my core frustration with the current global attempt to misuse science in the name of environmentalism. I thought I would start to organize my thoughts beginning with a sound definition of science itself, and lucked into that Feynman speech on my Google-guided wander around the subject.

Websters defines "scientific method" as

principles and procedures for the systematic pursuit of knowledge involving the recognition and formulation of a problem, the collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses

Feynman would probably have called that an acceptable definition, and then discussed all the ways in which actually doing science is nothing like the orderly process described. And in my own experience (although I claim to be more engineer than scientist), he would be right. That is not to say that the idea behind the definition is wrong. I would argue that the definition is just simplified to provide a clear image of a process that is certainly an example of a "scientific method".

Websters defines "science" in part as

3 a: knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method b: such knowledge or such a system of knowledge concerned with the physical world and its phenomena

Feynman clearly would have disagreed with Webster here. He always emphasized the importance of thinking things through oneself, at least enough to understand the boundaries of the accepted knowledge. He was also passionate about teaching. I came away with the strong sense that one couldn't claim to really understand something unless one could teach it to another. Even experimental verification was to some degree subordinate to teaching.

I would say that we don't know a general principle unless it can be used to make useful projections that can be tested.

I think of that as a kind of teaching of the principle. If a principle holds, and I understand (at least partly) the principle, then I can make a prediction based on that understanding. That prediction can be tested, and the results speak to the domain over which the principle can be held to be true. I see the prediction itself as a form of teaching about the principle in question.

Failure of a principle to explain an outcome does not necessarily mean that it is wrong on the face. Often failure means only that a region has been found where the principle (no longer?) operates. Of course, after using a principle to make a number of predictions that all fail, it might be worth chalking the principle up as wrong and a misunderstanding. Occasionally, a principle is so powerful in the sense that most predictions it makes can be demonstrated to hold that it gains general acceptance, perhaps as a natural law.

For example, Newton came to an understanding of (some of) the laws of motion. From that understanding he could explain the positions of the planets in the night sky, and even predict future astronomical events. He could also explain motions of simple machines in ideal conditions, and make predictions about their effects. For a long time, Newton's laws predicted everything important about motion.

Except, of course they didn't hold perfectly even at everyday scales because the real world is messier and refuses to provide simple systems of point masses on a frictionless plain in a vacuum. In modern terms, you can't fully explain the motion of a curve ball from just Newton's laws. The ball just persists in acting as if there are more forces present than Newton's laws can explain, and that shows one boundary to their domain. (I'm pretty sure that you need to add some aerodynamics and fluid dynamics to get there, not to mention a whole lot of mathematics that Newton and Leibniz hadn't quite needed to invent yet to explain it. I'm sure that there are gyroscopic effects from the ball's spin that matter as well, but I can't remember how much about that was known to Newton either... but I'm neither a science historian nor a physicist, remember...)

When Einstein came along later and corrected Newton's laws with the General and Special theories of Relativity (yes I am way over simplifying here, but I'm trying to make a larger point without getting bogged down in all the details of the Physics) he wasn't really saying that Newton was wrong. Rather, he was saying that under certain conditions of extreme mass, extreme velocity, extremely small scale, etc., Newton's laws were outside their domain and lost their explanatory power.

Again, I'm not really trying to get all the details right, I'm trying to make a point about the nature of science. Einstein once said "to defeat relativity one did not need the word of 100 scientists, just one fact" and Feynman said "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."

I believe that all knowledge is true, for a certain value of "true". Or meaning of "is". Or until shown to be false.

Why do I claim this has something to do with the misuse of science in the name of Environmentalism?

The answer to that will have to wait for a while as I sneak up on it.

2008-06-25

This Summer's Guilty Pleasure

We spent a couple of hours watching game shows tonight. Yes, game shows. Silly game shows. Silly but entertaining train-wrecks in slow motion kind of game shows.

First up was Wipeout. Imagine running an obstacle course for best time in a field of 24, with a cash prize of US$50K for the winner. Now imagine that the course designers were nuts. Think rodeo clown nuts. And that some network suit accidentally signed off on the building plans without asking too many questions about the number of giant rubber balls, large barrels, spinning turntables, or mud pits called for. Or perhaps the suits just said "oh just get three of everything and stop bothering us with details". One of the producers (co-executive producer Scott Larsen) has been quoted as saying "I come up with most of my challenges after a few beers laying in bed, sort of half awake, half falling asleep. So I kind of dream them up."

It is hard to describe unless typical Japanese game shows are an available frame of reference...

And speaking of the high art of the wacky Japanese game show, I Survived a Japanese Game Show was next up. Here the producers recruited a bunch of gullible people from all over the US and flew them to LA to be on a reality show. When the arrived at LAX, they were swept off to the international terminal and sent straight to Japan where they discovered during a studio tour that the reality show was really a chance to appear on a Japanese game show (apparently called something translated as “You’ve Got to Be Crazy”) where TOHO studios will do their best to humiliate them all each week, sending the looser home, until the last contestant standing is handed a cool $250K. And TOHO studios are perfectly capable of humiliating the pants off a bunch of naive contestants....

Personally, I can hardly imagine deciding to go on a reality show at all, let alone let a producer talk me into leaving the country on only a few minutes warning. Since all of the contestants did just that, it is pretty clear that they start out an ant or two shy of the whole picnic...

But they are both fun to watch for the sheer spectacle of it all.

2008-06-04

My phones don't ring

We noticed over the weekend that our phones aren't ringing as much as they used to. Then I happened to hear the dumbest phone in the house chirp. Out of curiosity I picked up the receiver to find someone waiting for me to answer.

Some investigation showed that the problem lies outside of the house. It was easy enough to unplug the house from the Network Interface (NID in phone jargon) and plug that same dumb telephone (an AT&T 210 Princess if anyone is keeping score) directly into the jack in the NID. Since that removes all my house wiring from the question and connects the phone directly to the line, a failure would exonerate my house wiring and plethora of other telephonic devices.

I called my number from a cell phone.

Chirp.

I repeated the experiment with a LED line tester, that shows a green LED for a live line, a red LED for reversed polarity, and flashes when the A/C ring signal is present. At the start of each normal ring in the usual ring pattern, the red LED just flickered.

Again, this is at the NID, with the whole house disconnected.

Oddly, we have dial tone, and the DSL is still as alive as it ever is.

Since I hate to wait for call centers and deal with the first tier of triage agents whose basic job is to find a reason that I don't have a problem that should be their problem, I sought out Verizon's web interface.

There seems to be a nice line problem reporting site inside the mess that is the Verizon web site, and it even walks you through a reasonable triage diagnosis. (All of which I had already done.) When that failed to turn up a novel experiment or repair the issue, it offered to collect my info and file a trouble report. I dutifully filled out the multi-page form, only to have it return an internal server error instead of moving from page 3 to page 4 of the entry.

I started over, and got to page 4 where I waited for it to run an automated line test which could take 2 minutes during which the phone must not be in use. Two minutes is a long time to watch a progress animation, but at least it did finish. With inconclusive results. So I confirmed that I wanted to report a problem, and discovered that the earliest time they would commit to having a truck rolled was 10 days later.

I filed the first trouble report the afternoon of Jun-1. At that time, their flaky web interface confirmed I had filed the trouble report, and that I was "waiting for dispatch".

More than 48 hours later (spanning two full business days) I check the status report, and it is still marked "waiting for dispatch". I have not even received a courtesy e-mail confirming that I filed a report using that e-mail address as the suggested contact (what, I should expect them to call me with no inbound ringing?).

So at 1:00 am on Jun-4 I attempted to use their web interface to make a direct complaint to their customer service. Omitting the contact info and standard form, my complaint boils down to:

I filed a line repair request and problem report on Jun-1 due to persistent problems with inbound calls that can be observed at the NID.
I am shocked that the earliest appointment offered was Jun-11, eleven days in the future. Furthermore, your web site claims the status of my report is "waiting for dispatch".
Waiting out 11 more days of intermittent inbound calling is not acceptable. Furthermore, not seeing any change in the status of the report after a full business day does not inspire confidence. Neither does the lack of even an automatic notification to the email address I provided as a contact that a report was filed.
The problem is on your side of the NID, and I am not receiving the service for which I am paying. That is not quality customer service.
I would appreciate some attention to the problem with my line, as well as some feedback about your progress with this issue.

Next to the Submit button on the form is the note "Please click submit only one time". I did. half an hour ago, and there has been no visible feedback from their web application to indicate if anything happened.

I am not holding my breath for a speedy repair.

In the meantime, if you happen to be trying to call us at home, you might need to avail yourselves of some other means than the phone number we've been answering for more than the last decade...

Update... Sometime during the evening of Jun-5 we had a phone message from their automated call center informing us that they had found and fixed an issue in the central office and that they believed our problem was fixed as a result.

Of course, as I write this, the status page at Verizon says that the "number you are reporting is part of an outage." I haven't observed a problem with the line today, and the phones do seem to ring again...

2008-01-04

Twin Musicals to End the Year

We ended the year on a Hollywood Musical note, but perhaps not the traditional sort...

First, over the weekend we made it up to our local Krikorian branch to see the Tim Burton treatment of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

Then on New Year's Eve, we watched John Travolta carry off Divine's role on the "Shake and Shimmy" DVD edition of this years film version of the stage musical made from John Waters' classic cult film Hairspray.

The short version of what follows is simply that both are quite entertaining and well worth pursuit on either disc or screen.

Sweeney Todd

First, I should say that I have never actually had the chance to see a production of the original musical, but I have known of it and the story for some time. Also, one of my favorite misuses of musical theatre in film occurs in the Kevin Smith film Jersey Girl, where the little girl Gertie (Raquel Castro) coerces her father (Ben Affleck), grandfather (George Carlin), and his blue-collar work buddies into performing some of it as a grade school project. (Incidentally, the film is worth seeing for those scenes alone, even if it could have benefited from reducing the Jennifer Lopez role all the way down to a brief cameo and a photo on the mantelpiece.)

And, of course, I have been a fan of Tim Burton since tripping over his short animated film Vincent many years ago. Since then, his films have always proved to be nicely odd and edgy, and generally among my favorites.

This film is no exception. It is the highest class and highest budget slasher film I have seen, bar none. The supporting cast is as strong as the lead roles, but never draws attention completely away from the strong horror film plot. And there is enough blood around to satisfy just about any fan of the genre. At the same time it is also a Shakespearean tragedy, as well as a light romantic comedy.

Without seeing the original staging, it is hard to be too critical of the musical choices that were made. However, all of the main characters hold up the musical ends of their roles quite satisfactorily.

All in all, we were thoroughly entertained by this one, and look forward to adding a DVD to the collection.

Hairspray

The original film is probably the most mainstream of all of the John Waters cult films, and certainly of those films that Divine was involved in, but it still has the Waters touch in spades. I wouldn't call it his best work ever (I'd favor Polyester or Pink Flamingoes of the ones I've seen ahead of it) but it is worth watching even if only for the ensemble cast.

Then they made a Broadway Musical out of it, which just seemed like a nutty idea at the time... but it apparently worked. I haven't had the chance to see the a production of it, but it did well and won awards.

Since other musicals have been doing well when moved (back) to film, it then made sense to try doing that to Hairspray.

One key feature that makes the 2007 adaptation work is the choice of John Travolta to replace Divine. I don't know who else could have brought as strong a voice to that role without being overshadowed by Divine himself or the makeup job required for the part.

With the cast anchored by Travolta as Edna, the rest of the ensemble is suprisingly strong, including new discovery Nikki Blonsky as Traci, and Christopher Walken as her father Wilbur. Travolta and Walken really do play well off each other although there are a couple of moments where one wishes the scene had cut a moment or two sooner... The rest of the cast is just as strong, the song and dance sequences are well structured, all the cast can sing, and there are even some nice cameos by original cast members to watch for.

I doubt I'll benefit personally from the song lyric subtitle track or the detailed dance instruction sequences that were included as extras on the DVD, but some of the alternate versions and dropped musical numbers were also nice to see.

This is one DVD that would really benefit from a quality sound system...

2007-12-23

Things learned when searching Google

While looking for something else entirely, I tripped over some general computer knowledge pages at http://vlaurie.com/ which included the surprising bit of trivia that there is a kind of font editor shipping in XP, but not well known.

It is the Private Character Editor, and is intended to allow an end user to design characters in the Unicode range dedicated for private use. This is the recommended place to put a company logo character, for example. Apparently, there is a mechanism in place in Windows to allow characters built in this tool to be logically attached to individual fonts.

The private character editor is not found in the start menu. To launch it, click Start, Run, type eudcedit in the box and click Ok. If you want to create a shortcut to it, it seems to live in %SYSTEMROOT%\System32\eudcedit.exe

The private characters can be retrieved for use in a document with the aid of Character Map. Of course, once you use a private character in a document you are faced with a different dilemma, namely how to let anyone else use the character too... I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

2007-12-15

An impressive single-tasker

We've all had the experience of taking a string of Christmas lights out of the box, testing them to prove they work, stringing them up, and finding that now they don't work. Until now, I haven't known of a better solution than to inspect each bulb individually, which is a painful process.

This year, I found the right tool for the job: the Lightkeeper Pro.

Its advertising, packaging, and even its documentation reads like a Super Bass-o-Matic '76 commercial. But actually does work as described. Honest!

Within its vaguely gun-shaped package is a bulb remover, a 60 Hz hum tracer, a bulb tester, a fuse tester, storage for spare bulbs, and a flashlight.

But wait! There's more!

The real magical feature is the piezoelectric light string repair device. Just remove any bulb from a dark segment, plug the gun in where the bulb was, and pull the trigger. After a couple of pulls, the string is likely to just turn back on. All except the bad bulb, which you can then replace.

Now how much would you pay?

Remember, all this can is done with the string installed and power on. And with only one short trip up the ladder to the top of the eaves.

MSRP is $25, but it can be had for $20 or so in stores like Amazon, Target and Lowes. Even if you don't need one this year, grab one in the post-season sales and add it to your toolbox. You'll thank me next year when you pull the lights back out of storage.

2007-11-12

Comics that remind me of a certain someone

One art form that seems specifically designed for the world wide web is the comic strip. A daily three-panel strip at a legible resolution fits neatly on a page, and even a Sunday special rarely requires a scroll bar.

More importantly, the web permits an artist a degree of editorial freedom that can never be had from formal syndication. It also has a potentially world-wide audience, and with a loyal, multi-lingual fan base can even end up translated into multiple languages. This might be the earliest media product to demonstrate that self-publication is practical and that the old distribution channels may not keep their monopolies forever.

Independent music is following a similar path, podcasting has already had a visible effect on radio (although in that medium it seems like the old distributors are embracing the new channel from the outset), blogging has visibly impacted the traditional print media, and there have lately been several attempts at film and video production targeted specifically at online delivery.

Here are a few comic strips I've noticed, some of which have characters and settings that strongly remind me of people I know.

Specifically who these remind me of is left as an exercise for the reader...

Girl Genius

Adventure, Romance, Mad Science!

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/

A steampunk manga written Phil and Kaja Foglio and drawn by Phil Foglio. You might recognize Phil as the artist behind the covers for the first editions of all of the Myth Adventures books. Many of the pages are full of background details and inside jokes that probably are best appreciated in the print editions. Six volumes are available as graphic novels, and volume seven is currently in progress.

Narbonic

The dreams that we have had
Are gonna prove that we're all mad
And that's okay

http://www.narbonic.com/

The story of Narbonic Labs by Shaenon K. Garrity ran from mid 2000 through the end of 2006. It is formatted as a three to five panel daily strip, and Sunday specials.

It is presently being rerun as a Director's Cut with commentary from the artist about each strip, and a weekly podcast. The entire run is also available without the commentary, and four print volumes were issued.

User Friendly

Impairing productivity since 1997.

"Tech support, ghost in the machine speaking."

http://www.userfriendly.org/

An inside view into the workings of a (fictional) small ISP called Columbia Internet. It is written and drawn by J.D. "Illiad" Frazer, and much beloved by working geeks. It is notable for its long run, with new strips appearing seven days a week (at midnight, Pacific time since Columbia Internet is located in Vancouver, B.C.).

xkcd

A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

http://www.xkcd.com/

Stick figures and geek humor written and drawn by Randall Munroe. It starts with scans of art drawn when he was supposed to be taking notes in classes, much of that early art is reminiscent of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Le Petit Prince. Most of the later art is in a minimalist stick-figure form which allows the absurdity to shine without distraction.

From the site: "Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors)."

2007-09-10

Rory, Cat, Requiescat in Pace

Rorschach (Rory)

b. ca. January, 1991
d. August 27, 2007

A Faithful Feline Forever.

On the twenty-seventh day of August, 2007, at four hours past noon, our cat Rory died of heart failure. He was nearly 17 years old. Rory is survived by his companions in feline mischief Emily and Apostrophe, and by Michelle and I, his faithful staff.

Rory (short for Rorschach) was born to an unknown mother cat sometime during the winter of 1990-1991. When he wandered into Shal and Annette's yard that spring, he was estimated to be only about three months old. Rory came to live with Michelle and I within a few days. He came to us with a clean bill of health and his first round of kitten vaccinations thanks to Rory, asleep in a bookmark crop. Annette and Dr. Sylvia Domotor. Dr. Domotor has been his first choice of veterinarian for his entire life, and she was with him when he died. We named him Rorschach because the tabby patch on his body was shaped like a perfect ink blot. He quickly became Rory for day-to-day usage, at least partly out of an urge not to have to spell Rorschach all the time.

Rory explaining why he has a bone to pick with us on our return from a ten day vacation. As a young cat in our condo, he amused us by following us everywhere, sitting on my shoulder, and sleeping curled up tightly in my armpit. That first spring he was too small to climb the stairs easily, but stubbornly managed them one step at a time anyway.

Ross and Rory tucked under the covers. When we moved the following winter to our current house, naturally he came along. We weren't too worried about the relocation because he had never been allowed to be outside unsupervised. The move itself was uneventful, and with one minor exception he immediately took over the new, larger, space.

His first experience with ceiling fans unfortunately coincided with his first experience with large expanses of linoleum flooring. The new house came with a ceiling fan in the dining room, and linoleum over the entire dining and kitchen spaces. On his first exploration of the house, he was uncertain about the cold flooring. About the second time he wandered into the dining room someone had turned the fan on. He got out into the center of the floor, then realized something was wrong. Hunkered down, he scanned the room for the threat, saw the large, moving fan blades, and panicked. At that point, he learned that it is not easy to accelerate from a standstill on clean linoleum....

Rory lurks in a paper bag, waiting for his moment to spring out and be Once we were all well established in the house, Emily wandered onto our doorstep. When she and Rory touched noses through the screen door, we decided that it might be safe to capture her and add her to the family. After she got a quick visit to Dr. Domotor, we solved the often thorny problem of introducing the second cat to the house by leaving on vacation for two weeks. When we returned, neither cat was speaking to us, but they were fast friends and remained so to the end. Rory and Ross sound asleep, sharing a pillow, nose to nose. For his last weeks at home, Emily was helping to clean Rory up after syringe feedings, and generally grooming him in his last few days.

Our third cat, Apostrophe, was also a stray. We watched him grow up from a clumsy kitten barely able to walk without tumbling, into a lanky, amiable klutz. He argued persistently for months that there was room for at least one more cat inside, and we finally relented and moved him indoors full time after the second trip to a kitty ER to have punctures on his backside cleaned out. Rory, backlit in a high-key exposure. Rory took the addition of a third in stride, and in time they too became fast companions.

So, Rory, requiescat in pace. You touched many lives, and are missed by all who knew you.

2007-08-24

RFID Passports Revisited

I've written about RFID and passports before, but have let most of the recent news about its interaction with the new biometric passport standards slip. But I can't pass up the latest tidbit.

The problem with RFID in general is that you can't make reasoned arguments against it without sounding like a kook that is afraid of black helicopters and mind probes. The thing is, that there really are some serious issues raised by the widespread adoption of RFID that simply are not possible if simpler (and cheaper, and more suited to the application) technologies like 2D barcode are used instead.

In short, the advantage of RFID is that the tag's information can be retrieved without the operator needing to actually see the tag. The disadvantage of RFID is that the tag's information can be retrieved without the operator needing to actually see the tag. But that actually isn't the reason for today's bit of ranting.

The ICAO is the agency of the UN that sets standards for passports, which are generally adopted by the member nations, including the US. The ICAO established a standard requiring that passports carry biometric information about the holder in addition to the usual date of birth, full name, and issuing country which is about all the information that passports classically carry.

Apparently, a typical bit of biometric info to include is an image of a fingerprint. Rather than storing an encoded hash of a matching print that would require a border checkpoint to use an equivalent (usually patented if not trade secret) technology to match a bearer's print, someone chose to store a simple image of the print. Since it is important to use as little space as possible to store the image, JPEG2000 is used to compress a photograph of the fingerprint. If you are going to store a fingerprint in a document with a hoped-for lifetime of 10 years, that is all reasonable.

Unfortunately, the makers of the passport readers all appear to have used JPEG2000 implementations that have some (or all) source code in common. In particular, there is a known bug in the JPEG2000 implementation that makes it vulnerable to a buffer overrun attack.

A determined individual demonstrated recently that he was able to use off-the-shelf technology to clone a copy of a passport's RFID chip. That is bad enough. But his latest revelation is worse: he was able to modify his cloned copy of a passport's otherwise valid RFID tag to include a fingerprint picture that exercises a known buffer overrun attack on JPEG2000. That tag has been demonstrated to crash every passport reader it has touched.

Today's attack is just a denial of service. The passport station would be crashed, and under normal conditions it could be restarted relatively easily and wouldn't crash again until another bad passport was brought through. (Of course the fiasco at LAX the other day involving 10000 people stuck on the tarmac outside of the customs barrier for as much as seven hours could be the result of that denial, especially if the official reaction to such a crash was institutionally stupid.)

But one of the better ways to inject code of the attacker's own choosing into a device is to carefully craft a buffer overrun attack so that rather than crashing the targeted system, it actually takes it over. At that point, you have code provided by an attacker running inside a passport terminal. These terminals are networked, and it is not inconceivable that such an attack could have effects that are both subtle and far reaching.... I'll let you fill in your own risks from that point.

2007-08-22

Mooning Again

Since I last mentioned the Lua programming language in these pages, it has seen a surge in visibility. Yes, I know that is a coincidence, because I am pretty sure I don't have enough readers of my random musings to have had an effect.

But it is interesting to see that it has sustained its place in the TIOBE top 20 at the respectable position of #15 this month. Since TIOBE doesn't appear to keep an archive of each month's scoreboard, here is the list as of August, 2007:

Rank	Language	Ratings
1	Java	21.768%
2	C	15.699%
3	Visual Basic	10.646%
4	C++	10.111%
5	PHP	9.696%
6	Perl	5.320%
7	C#	3.987%
8	Python	2.749%
9	JavaScript	2.575%
10	Ruby	1.906%
11	PL/SQL	1.833%
12	SAS	1.389%
13	D	1.251%
14	Delphi	1.222%
15	Lua	0.645%
16	COBOL	0.600%
17	ABAP	0.587%
18	Lisp/Scheme	0.585%
19	Transact-SQL	0.549%
20	Ada	0.537%

A couple of things struck me about this list of languages. One is the absence of FORTRAN despite the continued presence of COBOL and SQL, both more venerable. This month, FORTRAN is found down at #21, or just pushed out of the top 20. The presence of D in the ranking at 13 (D is the 13th letter for the numerologists in the audience) is amusing at least partly because Walter Bright, D's creator, is a friend of a friend. I am sad to see that Java continues to dominate, but heartened to notice that the C/C++ family if counted as one language would both push Java down a notch, and allow FORTRAN to return to the top 20.

The real surprise is Lua. A year ago, TIOBE had hardly heard of the language. Last December, Lua just slipped on to the top 50 list, at a position quite near to Objective-C (near and dear to Mac OSX developers--interestingly, Objective-C hasn't budged much at all since December, since it is sitting at #50 exactly today). Lua crossed into the top 20 list by landing at 18 in July, and clearly it is on track to improve its current standing again for September.

The full story on what the TIOBE index is calculated from is found here. In short, they run hand tuned queries against all the major search engines for each language, count the significant hits, and do a lot of statistics to arrive at the score for each language. The final ranking is then simply the list of languages sorted by their scores.

In case my biases aren't clear, Lua is my new favorite language especially when combined with just enough C to get the job done. The majority of my productive work is done in C, Lua, and Perl, with the occasional diversion to C++ and on rare occasions, Java. Although I have not personally used any of the .NET family, I firmly believe that .NET is to be preferred to Java any day.

2007-08-20

And Now, in Cat News

I haven't written much in this space before about the cats that actually own my house and run my life. That is mostly because I have been more interested in technical topics or entertainment. The existence of cats and that they are in charge was generally not germane to either of those topics.

Lately, our oldest cat Rory (short for Rorschach for the perfect ink blot mark folded along his spine) has himself become the source of technical musing. He went lame, and the lameness developed into mild paralysis of his hindquarters. Concern for his health resulted in a trip to the vet, where attempts to cure the immediate problem revealed deeper problems and resulted in a lengthily stay. He returned home for a week, but has had further difficulties and had to return to professional care.

Because of these difficulties, we have had the opportunity to see more of the inside of a well-run veterinary hospital than we ever had before.

Some background might help here. All of our cats have been seeing the same vet since they were found and adopted. All three were originally strays that volunteered for the strenuous post of indoor cat with a small household staff to keep in order. Their vet is Dr. Sylvia Domotor who now operates Dr. Domotor's Animal House in Monrovia employing several other vets and a sizable staff. She has been their vet since well before she founded her own practice. The cats remained her patients because we have always approved of her handling of them. For that matter, we have had nothing but good experiences with all of her other vets and with the rest of her staff.

And as we go through these difficult times with Rory's health, we are touched again and again by their kindness and professionalism.

2007-06-03

Rosemary's, Mac King, and Spamalot

We just returned from a short jaunt to that great blinding spot in the desert, Los Vegas. The trip was designed to let us stuff ourselves silly, and see some silly shows. It was a complete success.

We had a phenomenal dinner at a small restaurant well off the strip called Rosemary's. The whole experience was wonderful, with just the right combination of good service, great food, and good beer. We both had the night's five-course tasting menu, including matching beers in my case. Every detail of the service, presentation, plating, food, (and matching beer selection) was perfectly executed. My only note for a return visit would be to go easier on the early beers... four 150ml servings and a smaller dessert beer do add up, especially when cleverly served in half-full 300ml mugs. The dessert course for two was a sampler of half-servings of pretty much the entire dessert menu which itself is a menu item they call their Dessert Storm. It is highly recommended if you manage to have room for dessert and can't make up your minds.

We had a very fine lunch at a hard to locate Thai restaurant called Lotus of Siam (known to foodies as LOS). It too is well off the strip, although in this case you could easily drive right past it due to the mini-mall it sits in having its face turned away from the street. Those in the know order lunch off the menu, although their buffet certainly looked and smelled good.

For entertainment in between sessions of overindulgence in food, we managed to see the classic cars at the Imperial Palace, Shrek 3, Mac King's afternoon show at Harrah's, and Spamalot at the Wynn.

Each of those probably deserve separate reviews, but...

Mac King is a friendly down-to-earth guy who's performs as a bit of a hick in an ill-fitting plaid suit. The show is fun, and in between bouts of silliness he does some seriously good magic and gets really strong reactions even from the relatively jaded (and quite often slightly tipsy) Vegas audience. Be warned, however, that his style is not the classic gentleman magician...

Spamalot is the Vegas version of the Broadway Musical (somewhat loosely) derived from the classic Python film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. For Vegas it seems to get an extra dose of showgirls, is cut a little shorter, and runs without intermission. Fans of the film are pretty certain to find most of their favorite bits and lines preserved, although some of the longer sequences from the film have been simplified. The result was a very effective translation of the experience of the film into the completely different medium of live theatre.

Back at home, we find ourselves in need of a vacation from our vacation...

2007-05-07

New look for my ranting

To confirm the obvious, Ross Randomly Rants has a new look. Blogger revised its systems a while back, and recently pushed all of us into their new format. Since they allowed us to preserve our existing templates and page designs, this change probably had little or no visible effect aside from requiring some people to have Google accounts.

Here at ranting central, I finally got around to finding out what new features were available if I flipped my blogs to the new layout system from the old template system. The key feature that pushed me over the edge is that new Blogger has post labels. Labels are a lot like what we call tags over at Flickr: an ad hoc mechanism for categorizing blog posts.

Once I went back and re-read all the old posts and dropped a few labels on them, I realized that the blog itself needed a way to tell visitors what labels I had used and as a result a way to find posts with particular labels attached. Although there might be tricks available to show the labels in an old Blogger template, it was much easier to bite the bullet and flip to the new layout system where a list of the labels in use in my blog is a stock widget.

Then I got greedy. At Flickr, we are used to tag clouds as the best way to display a collection of tags. A cloud lists all the tags, but uses font size and color variation to signal which are used more than others. This produces a more interesting display than a flat list with counts of posts. A little searching around produced a page at phydeaux3 that did exactly what I wanted. I don't know who phydeaux3 is, but their fine script deserves credit.

I hope the change to a cleaner overall look is for the better, and now all that remains is to remember to actually label my posts in the future.