Stimulating Pixels

I have no idea if this will work, but I’m trying to use Google Maps to figure out what lens I should shoot the Shuttle launch with tomorrow night. Taking data from the awesome celestrack.com AGI Viewer Launch Scenario STS 128 launch I plotted where the shuttle should be when the main engines cut off. You can’t see that point without scrolling, but it’s where the lines the head off to the upper right are pointing.

The other locations are the positions I’m looking to shoot from and Launch Pad 39a where the shuttle will blast off from. By sticking a protractor on the screen, I get the angles of view which I cross reference with either this chart or this tool.

Hopefully, we’ll see how this all pans out tomorrow night.

This is awesome. The fact that it can catch things blows me away.

This thing would totally be able to pull off the Bishop knife trick from Aliens. Do not taunt Fast Moving Robot Hand

See the original article for more details.

I’ve been in my fair share of meetings where a Power Point presentation was the key focus. Even if print outs are provided, you’ll often here attendees asking if the presenter can e-mail them a copy of the Power Point file. Sometimes the info in the presentation is enough to stand on its own, but often it falls flat when taken away from the talking points of the presenter. This got me thinking about another approach to the display portion of a presentation that could be called “WebPoints” or something like that.

The basic idea would be something like this:

• Instead of using a desktop application like Power Point, a browser would be used to create the presentation via a web application that provides the same basic layout tools.
• In addition to the core presentation, talking points and notes can be added to each page as well.
• When the presentation is being given, the talking points would be turned off, but when attendees come back to the web app, they would have the option to see the notes as well as the main presentation pages.
• There could even be discussion board type functionality built in so that there would be an ongoing discussion for each individual page or the presentation as a whole.

Other features could include:

• The ability to export either the presentation, or the presentation and its notes to a PDF or other file. Among other things, this would ensure that the presentation could be given even if it was on a computer without access to the web site.
• For conference calls, the web site could sync what page is being shown to multiple locations. This way the presenter could control the display for everyone instead of trying to constantly try to ensure everyone is looking at the same page or having to install something like WebEx to provide the functionality.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there are already services like this out there, but if there aren’t, it is something worth exploring. The overall setup of a system like this wouldn’t require a tremendous amount of development. The biggest obstacle would be in creating a nice interface for creating the pages in the web app. Of course, it could just take images as uploads. Or, better yet, just ingest an existing Power Point and convert it directly.

Dear Congress,

Now that you have gone through it again and decided not to push back the date for the transition to DTV, please drop the matter. No matter what you do, such a fundamental change is going to cause issues that piss people off. Better to go ahead and get it over with. Plus, you have much more important stuff to be worrying about.

David Bergman setup a GigaPan system at the inauguration. Check out the 1,474 Megapixel photo that was created. That’s 1,474 not 1.474 like I thought when I first read the description.

Zoom on in, and then zoom some more.

Update: check out the snapshots on the GigaPan site. Helps to key into the level of detail as it zooms.

Regardless of your political affiliation, it would be hard to make a case against the idea behind Recovery.gov.

SEC. 1226. RECOVERY.GOV.

(a) REQUIREMENT TO ESTABLISH WEBSITE.— The Board shall establish and maintain a website on the Internet to be named Recovery.gov, to foster greater accountability and transparency in the use of funds made available in this Act.

You can read a little more about it at OpenCongress.org.

Just putting the data out there is one thing, but they also have the following mandate: “The website shall provide data on relevant economic, financial, grant, and contract information in user-friendly visual presentations to enhance public awareness of the use funds made available in this Act.” This will be tremendously helpful if done well. Hearing about spending ones, tens and hundreds of millions, billions and trillions of dollars is tough to digest without context.

Those amounts always seem like a lot (and rightly so), but when they are covered in the media it tends to be an abstract number. A reference point or a comparison can lead to surprising realizations about how some of the amounts compare. One of the best examples of this I’ve seen is the Death and Taxes maps. (That one is from 2004.)

The Recovery.gov web site is based around the bail out money. I hope that it is expanded to cover all our Tax spending. I, for one, would like to have a better grasp on where my tax dollars are going.

IBM has started releasing a new set of offerings they are calling “Skill kits” built on their Toolkit for Custom and Reusable Solution Information. The kits themselves are packages of reference information their developers have identified as being valuable to a given topic. This content is then assembled into a single package for easy consumption via a mini web server that runs locally on your machine.

When I’ve been working in a new language or dealing with part of a language I haven’t used in a long time, I go straight to the web and search for what I need. After years of doing this, I’m pretty good at getting to what I need quickly but the fact that I’m searching the open web has a few main drawbacks:

1. It’s not topic specific. Even keying in on terms to help limit the results, irrelevant information leaks in.
2. It’s not vetted. Most of the time answers you find will get solve the issue, but they may be a poor way to do it. The result could be as simply as a process running slower than it needs to, or something more severe like opening up a security hole.
3. It may not be up to date. Technology moves fast. The answer you find that worked for version 1.0 may not work or cause issues in the 1.1 release.
4. Only a partial solution may be presented. Problems in programming often involve multiple step solutions. It may take cross referencing several potential solutions and assembling various parts from each to get to the answer of a related but distinct problem.

The Skill Kits idea avoids the first two issues completely and if you have the proper version, the third issue dissolves as well. The last issue about only partial solutions being available will depend on the depth of the kit that is assembled. Once it hits a certain level, even if it doesn’t have specific answers, it will provide the framework for developing the answer.

Right now, there is only one kit listed: Project Zero WebSphere sMash skill kit, but I expect there will be at least a few more on the way. Of course, it wouldn’t have to be limited to programming. Just about any topic could be put into the framework.

Even though there is very little difference between these kits and a really good reference/tutorial site, I love the idea. Of course, this could also be the basis for building a system like Trinity used in The Matrix to learn how to fly a Huey by downloading flight skills directly into her brain. Just gotta figure out where to plug in the wires.

There are a few tools out there that let you take a long URL and turn it into a short one. One that I’ve used in the past is tinyurl.com, but I’ve recently found another service at http://tr.im/. For a shortening service, that’s about as short a name as you can get. Bonus for the fact that it makes sense and applies to what they do.

To use tr.im, all you have to do is copy a long URL from the address bar, paste it into the box on their home page and hit the “tr.im!” button. They’ll take your long URL like:

and turn it into something like this: http://tr.im/71mv. The trimmed URL is much easier to deal with in email messages and status updates.

The tr.im service provides an additional tracking services as well. Each time someone uses one of your trimmed URLs, the browser will bounce through their server momentarily while it figures out where to send them for the final page. The tr.im server uses this to capture stats on how your shortened URL is used.

Going to back to tr.im on the same browser that you used to create the shortened URLs will show you the stats. If you create an account, you can log in and see these stats from any browser (and you won’t loose the information if you clear the cookies on your machine).

There are a few concerns with the service. For one, you have to make sure you are okay with the fact that you are sending traffic through their servers. This shouldn’t be an issue for anything that’s not sensitive information, but it’s something to think about.

The other thing to think about is permanence. I’m not sure how tr.im makes money, but it surely costs them something to host the service. If you post all your links through them, but their company goes away, those links would stop working. Not a big deal in cases for things like old status messages that you’ll probably never look at again.

It is also possible at some point that they change the way their service works. For example, instead of immediately jumping to the destination URL, they could easily put an ad in between, or even launch a pop-up that you have no control over. It seems unlikely that they would be that aggressive, but as with any free service like this, it is worth keeping in mind that they can change the way things work at any time.

The online comic strip xkcd recently posted the following panel:

For me, it was my sophomore year in college instead of 11th grade. Also, I was never that good about doing my homework so I’m sure I had much fewer hours for that part of the graph. The usefulness of hacking around with Perl on my own, though, is well represented.

The other thing I would add to the graph is the semester of Typing I took in high school for an easy “A”. I never would have thought that out of all the courses I took during school Typing would be the most useful.

When you shoot a normal video, the camera captures individual frames at a rate around 30 frames every second. When viewed normally, and at the same speed, each second that went by during the recording takes one second to watch in playback. If you use a camera that captures a higher number of frames per second and play that back at 30 frames/second you get what we know as a slow-motion video. By slowing time down in the playback, we can often see fascinating things that would normally be missed because they simply happen to fast for our eyes and brain to keep up with.

One of the first examples of this are the set of photos from 1878 called “The Horse in Motion.” by Eadweard_Muybridge who was the first person to prove scientifically that a horse has all four hooves off the ground in a gallop. Fast forward 130 years and the technology has, unsurprisingly, improved significantly. Today, anyone can buy a consumer level camera that shoots at 1,000 frames/second. The sample videos I’ve seen from this camera aren’t studio quality, but are certainly an example of how far technology has come.

Professional grade cameres are even more impressive. Take the self-promotion piece created by the production company Action Figure. The video is a series of people getting punched in the face by a boxing glove with the Action Figure logo. Since it was released, this video has spread all over YouTube and similar sites, but all those versions seem to be compressed to the point where they loose the sharp details. The original QuickTime movies on the Action Figure site really highlight the quality.

When I was trying to dig up the link for this post, I came across a few supplemental videos on the Action Figure site as well as the main one.

• Main edited piece with funky track (quicktime .mov)
• Directory of all clips, including individuals
• String of the punches with out additional editing or sound (quicktime .mov)

While I like the main video with the tune (Shazam’s remix of “Sweaty” by Muscles), I am more mesmerized by the sting of individuals where you see each punch uninteruppted. Watching the way everything moves provides a glimpse into time that feels almost supernatural. Also, it’s good motivation to try to keep from getting punched in the face.

If you’d like to see some more examples of this, check out Discovery channel’s new show “Time Warp” that is centered around high-speed camera work.