Category Archives: Thoughts

General thoughts, usually on some technical or engineering development related topic. A place for me to chat about things I think might be of interest.

3D Programming, Daily Blog, Ideas

Interesting Mashable share discussing stop motion to CGI transition

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Cool rundown of some of the transition from stop motion to CGI. In particular I had never considered that motion blur would be an issue with the believability of stop motion sequences. Makes sense after hearing the description though.

Mashable page here video here.

It is pretty amazing how far and fast this technology has moved. I’m wondering what will happen now with VR/AR as they seem to have the potential to follow the same curves. Back end them through something like AWS or a direct peer to peer link and you should be able to look at building multi-person immersive environments. Add in voice recognition to replace keyboard entry. Use either multiple camera views of the participants or limb sensors and you should be able to make it amazingly real.

Daily Blog, General Technical, Thoughts

Pixel-C and Pixel-XL Filesystem Support

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I’m finally getting the filesystem support on my Android pixel devices sorted out. I’ve had Samsung tablets and phones previously (until the Note 7 debacle) and they fully support exFAT. Given this is the default for almost everything larger than about 4GB that has been very useful.

When I got my two current Pixel branded devices I thought that my SD card readers were failing. It is not clear that the issue is a lack of exFAT support. Particularly curious as I appear to be able to read NTFS formatted SD cards in read-only mode.

I’m now at s point where things are workable but still rather annoying. Cards that I’ll use with my pixels are either small, crippled and FAT32 formatted (read/write) or NTFS and read-only. Cards I’ll use with my old Samsung tablet are exFAT formatted and won’t work with any of the pixel devices.

I suspect that if I rooted the tablets I could probably find a way to add exFAT filesystem support but I’d rather not make changes at that level. Really wishing that google had paid the extra bit to license exFAT for its flagship devices.

 

General Technical, Thoughts

One major reason I’m not fond of fork/exec componentizing

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In Debian Linux recently the CryptKeeper encryption package fails to properly set passwords due to a bug fix in the command line handling of a package it runs (see this Register article for more details) .

It appears that the code was tested and worked perfectly in previous versions. The tool being used had a minor bug in its command line processing that resulted in the password being accepted even though it was placed improperly. Once the maintainers of this package fixed their big, the string sent by the CryptKeeper package resulted in the letter ‘p’ being taken as the password and the actual password being ignored and it would appear discarded.

It seems to me that Linux could use a universal (or nearly) –API switch that converts the command line and stdin/stdout/stderr to something like JSON with extensive and aggressive checking for validity in all inputs along with tightly specified outputs.

Most programmatic usage of command line tools that I’ve encountered to date makes broad assumptions about the details of the input and output formats for human usable tools. In most cases I’ve seen the checks for unexpected data are weak and porous. This generally results in tools that are fragile and often either need manual tweaking or are simply tied to a specific version of a particular distro. The alternative (less common but I’ve encountered it as well) is to force tools whose primary interaction is with humans on the command line to lock down the original output formats in ways that don’t necessarily work well for people in order to avoid breaking programs and scripts.

Daily Blog, Sandbox

Dead Computer, Live Computer

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Looks like the spare core-2 machine is likely down for the count. Even with the motherboard completely out of the chassis with nothing but the power supply and the power switch plugged in it seems to immediately shut down the power supply. I may give it one more shot on the possibility that it just doesn’t start properly without at least memory and video but I’m not hopeful.

I’ve started an install of Ubuntu 16.10 on ‘madhatter’ my back basement lab bench machine. This should do nicely for now. I’ll probably wind up buying some low-ish end hardware to replace the dead machine when the back lab bench area gets set up with a 3D printer. Until then this provides a decent Intel based linux machine that should meet my needs.

Once the base install is complete I need to get

  • xrdp installed for easy remote UI access
  • SSH installed (if not there out of the box) and configured for secure command line stuff.
  • tightvnc installed mostly to see if it works better than the free version of realvnc that came pre-installed on the RPi
  • samba to make files available to my windows boxes and hopefully set up for cleaner network visibility.

Hoping that this one goes smoothly. Disappointing the number of machines that have gone flaky recently.

Ubuntu install appeared to succeed. The machine was waiting at a ‘press enter to restart’ prompt when I checked on it this morning.

It is running on a WD ‘green’ drive so may be a bit slow booting. When I left it was still showing just a black screen (after dropping through a ‘how should I boot’ screen) so I’ll see tonight whether this system loaded up successfully. The machine seems ok overall as the windows 10 boot disk works fine.

I did start downloads of the Ubuntu 16 and 14 LTS releases to try tonight if the 16.10 image fails. Hoping there isn’t some incompatibility with core-2 era computers in newer Linux builds.

Daily Blog, General Technical, Projects, Thoughts

Digressions and returns…Lisp, NUC and SQL.

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I’ve mostly got the pieces of SQL DDL together that I need to define the tables for my sandbox project to manage file archiving. Hit this weekend after a tiring week and let myself get distracted.

I had bought an Intel NUC 6i5 to replace my ‘test target’ machine img_20161211_112015that has been randomly hanging and rebooting lately. The NUC setup and OS install went well except for the NIC driver. Wireless worked perfectly but the driver for the gigabit NIC either wouldn’t see the controller (Intel driver install packages) or saw the controller but then timed out before completing. As this was on a clean Windows install with nothing present except for the Intel driver img_20161211_112034packages I’m getting a replacement from Amazon. Should arrive today…hoping all goes smoothly as the NUCs are very nice little machines.

I let myself get distracted by some articles on Clojure and then wandered down into Scheme and Common Lisp. The various lisp dialects have always had a bit of allure to them as hugely expressive languages with very simple syntax. Nothing that I’m likely to every use professionally (though you never know) but cool toys to play with.

Clojure seems to be the closest to mainstream relevance with its JVM hosting and functional programming focus. Not sure I’ll do much more than poke at these but who knows.

Trying to get aimed back at DDL for the tables I need and then start piecing together C# code and native PInvoke stuff to get me where I need to go. Would be nice to be able to thumbnail canon raw files and PDFs (even better to get at metadata) but that will come later. Expecting that to involve serious native code execution as most of the SDKs for such things are in C or C++.

 

On The Web, Thoughts

Using resistance to probe for mechanism…

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A post in Derek Lowe’s blog pointed to an interesting technique for probing the mechanism by which a drug acts.

These guys came up with a molecule that was effective against several diseases and then used selection pressures to breed a strain that was resistant in the laboratory. When they sequenced the genomes of the original and the resistant version, they looked for differences that would point to the drug’s target. Seems like a cool and effective way to let nature guide the investigation. As long as the resistant organism never leaves the lab you’ve got an effective drug and a good idea about why the drug works.

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/08/15/three-diseases-at-once

On The Web, Thoughts

Blood viscosity and gold corkscrews…

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I think this article from Ars Technica shows the true power of modern nanotechnology. This isn’t little nano-bots crawling around, this is serious applied science and that fact that these guys can now get amazingly specific items custom made.

This process started with a need to measure the viscosity (thickness) of the fluid in blood samples in order to diagnose health problems. This is complex because blood is a mess of various tiny items that get in the way. Existing approaches involved separating the liquid part from everything else and then testing it on its own and were slow and expensive. Continue reading Blood viscosity and gold corkscrews… →

Daily Blog, Thoughts

Disney Imagineering laying off significant staff

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According to the LA Times the Disney corporation is significantly trimming down their imagineering staff in Glendale, CA. Suggestions are that the teams were bulked up for work on Shanghai Disney and now that the park is complete the imagineering team is being pared down to its usual size.

Given the challenges and opportunities ahead for the Disney parks with expansions ongoing in Orlando and digital media and new technologies coming into play, I’m hoping that they’re right.

The Disney parks have been a place of wonder and magic for my family for the last two decades and I’m very much hoping that they can remain at the top of their form for my daughter’s children (should she have any).