Been playing with the build up script again. Ran my f16 piece through it, comes out quite nice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iK0acwOnSo

Touch of Evil on IMDb

Synopsis: Charlton Heston and Orson Welles play “Good Cop, Bad Cop.”

Pros: Wow, I was watching this and got so sucked into it that 45 minutes went like *snaps fingers* that. It was very riveting, and very well done.

Cons: The reefer boys were…interesting. Very old skool.

Verdict: Yeah, this was a pretty sweet movie, and by sweet I mean awesome. Definitely check it out.

For Ubuntu 8.04 one of the projects I helped work on was a new xrandr-based screen resolution tool.

Unfortunately, Xorg currently requires you to specify the "Virtual" option in xorg.conf in order to do dual-head, if the combined desktop would be larger than the default maximum. This is nearly always the case, so it meant that in practice Screen Resolution couldn't setup multi-head displays for you.

Alberto Milone developed a Python xorg.conf reader/writer called X-Kit. Using this backend, we've been able to hook in a script that will detect when you need to adjust your Virtual setting, and offer to take care of it for you.

Here's some screenshots:

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Eventually, upstream will be eliminating the need to manually specify "Virtual", so maybe by Intrepid+1 we'll not need this extra package, but for now it'll enable this (IMHO important) feature to work.

screen-resolution-extra and X-Kit are uploaded but haven't been promoted to main yet, so stay tuned for now.

For your amusement, here are my goals for the upcoming school semester. While many things are listed, working on my thesis will be my top priority. I would like to get the research done by Christmas so I can spend some of the remaining time (as per my funding) working on other things.

• Thesis
• Develop milestones to reach so I always have a clear goal in sight
• Finish research and be ready for writing by Christmas
• TA
• Take TA training courses and try to get the Teaching Certificate (don't have to do it all this semester!)
  
• Will be TA'ing first year game development course
  
• Seminars
• Do a really good talk for OCICS seminar series (requirement for Masters students)
  
• Attend weekly algorithms seminar put on by our computational geometry group
  
• PhD?
• Apply for NSERC just in case (due around the end of September)
  
• WISE
• Continue with planning and participating in events (one per month)
  
• Attend Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (should try to present next year!)
• Get experience working with younger girls in high school/elementary events (such as GoEng Girl etc)
• Schedule
• Develop a weekly schedule (reading time, lab time, seminars, etc) and stick to it
• Mini-course
• Hoping to have paper about this year's course published in ACM SIGCSE's December inroads (submitted July 31)
• Apply to run a similar course again (around October/November)
  
• Technical writing
• Keep practising by updating blog regularly (including Nerd Girls)
  

I just posted 2 fresh tutorials on the inkscape tutorials blog! be sure to check them out and give them a go!

Playing with Spiros and Path Effects by Andy Fitz

Creating a Coffee Cup using inkscape by Peter Anglea

This is a detailed tutorial on creating an impressive coffee cup using inkscape.

Note: This tutorial was done with a development (unstable) version of inkscape. To play with these features you will need to download a development version of inkscape or wait until Inkscape 0.47 is released.

Here is another awesome tutorial from Andy Fitz. In this tutorial, Andy experiments with the new spiros Live path effect, combining it with the existing and equally awesome patten on path LPE. The link to the tutorial is after the break.

After many months of toil and frustration, I finally tracked down the root of my problems with the Wacom tablet on Ubuntu. It was quite frustrating, since the tablet worked fine if I ran from a live CD, but failed once I installed to the hard drive. Everything else worked but the tablet. So I suffered and found work-arounds.

After compiling and installing new Wacom drivers yet again and another round of fruitless poking, I stumbled across a reference to a similar sounding problem. There was a post by some end user that was completely non-technical and involved talking about his admin and things that he had done when I hit a mention of the culprit...

It was the dreaded, the insidious, the crafty...

Mouse-Emu!!!!!

It turns out that the mouseemu software normally used to make a touchpad on a laptop more friendly had turned evil in this case. It perhaps was handling the touchpad fine, but it also got greedy and grabbed the external Wacom itself. The simple fix was to just go into Synaptic and remove mouseemu there. Voila! Happy-happy Wacom time!!!!

So if a tablet is showing up properly in the low-level view, but stops responding... it might be the tricky mouseemu.

Some Like It Hot on IMDb

Synopsis: Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon dress in women’s clothing and hang around with Marilyn Monroe.

Pros: Old school mafia stuff is awesome. Marilyn Monroe was hot. There were some pretty funny parts, that’s for sure.

Cons: OK, there’s one scene where something unexpected begins to happen to someone, and they don’t react the way that they should. That struck me as odd. Yes, this was vague on purpose.

Verdict: Very good movie! Rent it today.

The Carleton University Women in Science and Engineering group, also known as CU-WISE, is really picking up steam now!

We have our final logo finished up. Some configurations of it can be seen here, with one example shown below.


We also made a brochure to be printed professionally and passed around to students at various events and fairs. You can take a peek at the PDF version.

Keep your eyes peeled as there's lots more to come, including a promotional booth poster, and our brand new website!

A lot of people think that girls just don’t “do” math. In fact, many of these same people believe that this is related to girls just being better at different things than boys. This might be true in some areas, but recent studies have shown that, when it comes to math, girls just might be as good if not better!

Read the rest of my story at NerdGirls.com.

Miguel Ruiz asked about Ubuntu security repositories. Here’s how things are done:

The “security.ubuntu.com” archive contains explicitly only the “$RELEASE-security” pockets. It is included in all Ubuntu sources.list files so that the package manager knows what the most recent security release of a package will be.

The central “archive.ubuntu.com” server (and all the Ubuntu mirrors) also contain the “$RELEASE-security” pockets, in addition to the rest of the archive (and will continue to have all pockets — which answers the core of Miguel’s question). While mirrors are not required to mirror the -security pocket, it certainly helps with the load on the primary Ubuntu archive servers.

The “security.ubuntu.com” entry is last in sources.list, giving the option of pulling an updated package from an earlier mentioned mirror (resulting in a faster download for the user, and less bandwidth used by the central Ubuntu archive servers). In the case that the mirror is behind, the package is available directly from “security.ubuntu.com”. In this way, mirrors cannot (accidentally or intentionally) “go rogue” — the latest security updates are always visible on the security archive server.

A series of tubes (or not)

I'm using this network stuff for about a decade by now. I always just filled the required values in and never thought about it much. Well, until yesterday that is. It began with something simple; I wanted to read something over at one of Sun's sub domains.

"Address Not Found", Firefox complained. I briefly looked outside the window to confirm that it doesn't rain frogs or something. Alright, it's Just one of those random DNS issues.

It's just a temporary problem, but it didn't really feel like waiting this time. One forehead slap later I grabbed some DNS server IP, added it to my TCP/IP configuration, and everything was sorted.

read more

Day two of the Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry featured a few treasures. There were a couple of talks that, in my opinion, showcased how to give a good presentation.

A quick side note before I begin. Imagine my surprise when Martin Demaine, Erik's dad, told me at the conference banquet that he had read my previous day's blog post that included a mention of him. When asked where he'd found it, he said "the Internet" quite matter-of-factly. Of course ;). I suppose he had a blog watch on his or Erik's name? In any case, he told me he thought I wrote well, which was probably more flattering than he knew. If you're reading this now, Martin... hi! You guys are great!

Ok, back to the presentations. I first have to give a hat tip to my own academic supervisor, Jit Bose. He started his talk with a story. In this story, Jit explained how he didn't really want to give the talk (these things are stressful!), but hadn't heard from his other co-authors, so did what any mature adult would do: go on vacation for three weeks and ignore email. Alas, when Jit returned, the other author who would be at the conference was surprised to learn that Jit, like himself, thought the other would be giving the talk. So Jit told us he'd come up with a compromise. He'd do the odd slides and Stefan (the present co-author) would do the even slides. Stefan pops up in the audience, pretending to be completely surprised (and very convincingly, too!). He finally gives in and helps out with the talk. The slides were formal looking at first, but as they advance, funny scriblings and beer-related changes are made to the formal problem definitions. These guys pulled off the humour thing perfectly and did a good job of switching speakers to keep things interesting.

The other tag-team that worked out remarkably well consisted of Erik Demaine (yup, him again!) and his girlfriend Vi Hart, who is apparently not a computer scientist, but a math hobbyist (how cool is that?). I think Erik did most of the talking, but Vi was able to interject throughout the talk, at times often enough to read every second item from a list. By the fact that my favorite talks had two speakers, you should be able to surmise that I strongly believe in this technique for presenting (assuming speakers have prepared enough to pull it off properly). Another trick to learn from Erik and Vi is the generous use of photos and minimal amount of text on their slides. Nobody wants to read on the screen exactly what somebody is saying (I could do that from home!). In the same vein, nobody wants to read a lot of text that's different from what a speaker is saying because, in the end, it's impossible to pay attention to either. Finally, the dynamic duo were able to make use of something that's not always easy to incorporate: props. Their talk was on balloon twisting, so, of course, they brought balloons to twist!

These two talks skillfully incorporated several seldom-used but highly effective presentation techniques to make their talks the most memorable. Of course, none of these will help you if you happen to speak unclearly or unenthusiastically in front of audiences. But once you've overcome the basics of public speaking, consider trying to incorporate these ideas into your next presentation! Your audience will thank you.

3 alignments and their origins

What for?

If you're writing a game with ActionScript3 you've basically two options: either use the scene graph or handle it yourself. I.e. extend Sprite, create some Bitmap, attach it to your Sprite, and blit onto its BitmapData via copyPixels.

Skipping the scene graph is certainly more fun. If you wrote some games in other languages, you'll quickly feel at home. Apart from that external main loop it's basically the same deal. Additionally, if your game requires full redraws either way (i.e. dirty rectangles won't help), using copyPixels is the fastest option.

However, if you take a look at BitmapData's documentation you might be in for a big surprise — there is no drawString function. How can you draw some text on top of your entities for quick debugging now?

read more

It looks like HK will be my home for the next 1-2 years. Drop me a line if you live in the area!

a few people have asked me why I’ve left Singapore. To be honest, I had no reason.
Singapore is a beautiful city. In business it punches higher than its weight and for my lifestyle, I loved everything about it; The climate, my friend and the region.

My girlfriend Brenda has followed her career to HK and I’m here to support that. We both tried to make it work in Singers and after 6 months we’ve realised the best opportunities were further north. A hard pill to swallow when you’re so comfortable with such a lovely area.

But living in Hong Kong changes the perspective a little. The proximity to mainland china presents insight into what i saw growing 2 years ago, a furiously scalable resource pool, something I should be paying attention to. Plus, the tech and design communities here seem more grass-roots and enterprising (most design magazines I read growing up featured HK artists) it’ll be exiting to be a part of that culture.

This is an exciting move, thanks for letting me share the news. I’ll keep you posted.

Day one of the Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry has just wound down here in Montreal. Most of the Carleton crew is currently hanging out at what is allegedly the equivalent of our grad bar Mike's Place. I say allegedly because this place is more like a castle than our windowless watering hole. Anyway, the conference so far has been really cool, and I'm learning a lot.

I took the bus from Ottawa to Montreal yesterday, and then we walked uphill for about 30 minutes to the residences we would be staying in. Luckily, it didn't rain, but it was uncomfortably hot compared to home. The rooms turned out to be decent, though basic.

There was a reception in the evening in the better-than-Mike's Place. Because this edition of CCCG marks the 20th Anniversary and the return to McGill University, registration is free. So we got printed proceedings and a bunch of free food. Not bad! I chatted with a bunch of Carleton people I haven't seen in a while as well as some new folks. One of the most interesting was Erik Demaine's dad. Erik's a bit of a celebrity academic in my books. His dad was saying that he hasn't lived in the same place for more than five years or so (I can't remember exactly). He was pretty surprised to learn that the only time I moved in my life, I moved just down the road.

After the reception, we went to Brutopia, a brew pub I thought I had been to before (turned out I was confused). I tried to impress everyone with the beer knowledge I'd learned from Andrew, but eventually I got confused and had to back track on that.

There was a pretty good variety in talks today (Wedesday), both in subject and quality. The highlight of the day was the invited speaker Ron Graham. Not only did he work closely with Erdős and come up with the Graham Scan for convex hulls, but apparently he juggles!

I think that'll have to be it for now, given that we haven't had dinner yet and need to pick a place. All I can say is that hanging out with smart people is actually really fun!

When I taught at San Francisco Art Institute, I taught a class basically on Artist as Artwork, meaning one needs to work on him or herself regularly.

I updated my bio to reflect Jon 4.0 changes.

I need to spend some more time in the shop to work out the kinks before I really jump into any other big adventures like Creative Commons is the summary of my last few days

Perhaps, just as I had hoped in April, telemedicine really is helping to improve the state of health care.

A recent study "assessed whether telemedicine (real-time, two-way audio and video, and digital imaging and communications in medicine [DICOM] interpretation) or telephone was superior for decision making in acute telemedicine consultations". The results sound pretty positive (emphasis added by me):
The authors of this trial report that stroke telemedicine consultations result in more accurate decision making compared with telephone consultations and can serve as a model for the effectiveness of telemedicine in other medical specialties. The more appropriate decisions, high rates of thrombolysis use, improved data collection, low rate of intracerebral haemorrhage, low technical complications, and favourable time requirements all support the efficacy of telemedicine for making treatment decisions, and might enable more practitioners to use this medium in daily stroke care.Check out Video: Emergency Room Stroke Exam with a Webcam from Wired for more.

In July I talked about using evolutionary artificial intelligence to create realistic animations. If you found that interesting, then this video from 1994 is a must-see.



Karl Sims,a graduate from MIT who studied computer graphics and life sciences, used Darwinian evolution to come up with the block creatures in the video, along with their behaviors. As Karl says on his site about the project:
A population of several hundred creatures is created within a supercomputer, and each creature is tested for their ability to perform a given task, such the ability to swim in a simulated water environment. Those that are most successful survive, and their virtual genes containing coded instructions for their growth, are copied, combined, and mutated to make offspring for a new population. The new creatures are again tested, and some may be improvements on their parents. As this cycle of variation and selection continues, creatures with more and more successful behaviors can emerge. The last challenge shown in the video involves two creatures battling it out over a green block. Whichever is closest to the block at the end of the simulation is declared the winner. Some of the strategies for winning are actually pretty impressive, including what looks like actual hand-to-hand combat. Remember, this was done in 1994, when the beta for Windows 95 was released and Netscape was just founded.

You can read more about the technical aspects of this evolution system in Karl's paper here.