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Jason Parker-Burlingham (20 unread)

pFriends, like so many of you, I ...

Posted: October 28th, 2008, 4:37am CET

pFriends, like so many of you, I have often been unhappy, dissatisfied and listless in life./pbr /pRecently I discovered a NEW way to live...and its so EASY to join!/pbr /pI can honestly say that my life has been changed forever, that I have never had a moments sadness since discovering a href=http://tarvu.com/Tarvuism/a./pbr /pI sincerely hope YOU discover its joys in your OWN life as soon as possible./pbr /pPraise Tarvutrade;!/p
Berries all around

Posted: October 21st, 2008, 5:01am CEST

div style=float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;a href=http://www.flickr.com/photos/nooks/2946403200/ title=photo sharingimg src=http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3166/2946403200_5385f92cff_m.jpg alt= style=border: solid 1px #000000; //abr /span style=font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;a href=http://www.flickr.com/photos/nooks/2946403200/Berries all around/abr /Uploaded by a href=http://www.flickr.com/people/nooks/Nooks/a/span/divI dont even know what these are---any plant-aware folks want to venture a guess? Theyve been growing on a large tree with low branches outside the Perry Public Library and I can hardly walk past them without taking a picture.br clear=all /
I come bearing bees

Posted: October 15th, 2008, 3:58pm CEST

pspan class=ljuser lj:user=jdev style=white-space: nowrap;a href=http://jdev.livejournal.com/profileimg src=http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif alt=[info] width=17 height=17 style=vertical-align: bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px; //aa href=http://jdev.livejournal.com/bjdev/b/a/span, avert your eyes!/p a href=http://flickr.com/photos/nooks/sets/72157608057789605/detail/img src=http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3184/2944496474_34c01d1423_m.jpg width=159 height=240 alt= //a
pI was walking around downtown Pittsburgh tonight ...

Posted: October 8th, 2008, 5:22am CEST

pI was walking around downtown Pittsburgh tonight taking picturesmdash;Id just spotted an amusing angle where a brontosaurus appeared to encircle a statuemdash;when a voice from behind me asked how much Id charge to take his picture. I had no idea that going out with a camera and tripod entailed having a rate!/p pI did my best, quickly picking an angle with a relatively neutral background and few distracting passers-by (we were out in the street after all) and got off about 8 shots. I remembered something Id read a day or two ago about putting one foot in front of another and leaning back a little, facing away from the camera and so on, so I gave a little direction as I took pictures./p pId say that about 4 were good, mostly because the subjects eyes were closed or distracted. Im quite pleased with one of them./p pThe man then attempted to pay me, though I explained that just the day before I had realized there seemed to be millions of interesting faces in Pittsburgh and about one person per day might be willing to have a complete stranger take their picture. I was completely willing to do this for free. When he offered $20 I accepted by default, but fought him down to ten./p pMy only problem in all this is that while Id like to show his picture here Im not sure thats right. Ive always been a little offended at the way professional photographers are so proprietary about what is, in fact, a picture emof you/em. Because this gentleman paid me, I now kind of feel as though he should own his pictures instead of me. I may be able to talk myself around to adding a small copy of the very best image. Well see./p
Our browser tabs, our selves

Posted: September 16th, 2008, 9:19pm CEST

pIt strikes me that my current list of open browser tabs sums me up kind of well just now:/p ul lia href=http://retrospec.sgn.net/game-overview.php?link=wizballA port of Wizball to Windows, Linux and the Mac/a. I really, really wanted to play this game in color when I was a kid, and computer games were something that had to be ordered from a magazine or enjoyed vicariously from the reviews therein. lia href=http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/Blender/a, recommended by a friend for managing my 3D meshes. lia href=http://www.plentymag.com/magazine/the_whole_earth_effect.phpa history of the Whole Earth Catalog/a, which surely sounds like my kind of publication. I have a feeling I might always regret not making an opportunity to meet Stewart Brand while I lived in California. lia href=http://speechification.com/2007/12/17/all-your-tommorows-today/a Radio 3 histoy of the RAND corporation/a. /ul pThree out of four of these things are retro to some extent. Lately Ive been reading and listening to Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners, but I wonder if a slew of influential books from the late 1960s and 1970s might not be a better choice./p
Progress of a kind

Posted: September 13th, 2008, 5:26am CEST

p80 images of the Lincoln Memorial have been combined into a mesh of about 7000 points. Abe is clearly recognizable in outline, the structure of the memorial itself much less so. MeshLab appears to have some issues creating a surface from this./p pNext steps:/p ul liget my changes checked in to source control lirewrite build system to use makemdash;its crying out for it: the stock images could be converted to PNM and passed through the SIFT phase in parallel, its the bundling process that doesnt appear to be parallelizable. litake pictures (or video!) of a static subject of my own so I can evaluate performance and have stock images of known focal length and CCD size. liwrite a tool to scrape Flickr for images with known focal length and camera model. liwrite Processing code to place the stock images, mesh and cameras in a single 3D scenemdash;I wonder if theres a Java or Processing library to load these files already. I dont think I want texture mapping, neat as that might be. /ul pbETA:/b Actually, if anyone reading this wants to take a bunch of pictures of a small but detailed object sitting on a tabletop, from a variety of angles and distances, Id be happy to use that as input from now onmdash;Abe takes 90 minutes to run from start to finish. Its okay if the object is slightly obscured from some angles. Largish images straight from the camera would be best: if theres no focal length information in the EXIF then I dont *think* that the process works anywhere nearly as well as it should./p
You got Zawinski in my Greenspun

Posted: September 10th, 2008, 4:01pm CEST

pI propose a merging of Greenspuns Tenth Law with Zawinskis Law:/p blockquoteEvery program tends to grow until it contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of SMTP./blockquote
p*Someone* told my son that the Sun ...

Posted: September 8th, 2008, 5:39pm CEST

p*Someone* told my son that the Sun is made of fire. Didnt even *try* to explain nuclear fusion./p pI got as far as trying to explain Helium and Hydrogen before Henry inexplicably lost interest and started pretending hed never seen a balloon that floats./p
Two car seats

Posted: September 8th, 2008, 4:34pm CEST

pOn Saturday Henry and I went to Rochester to try to buy a car safety seat that would actually fit well in Anns car; Id been unhappy with the fit for some time (the receiving end of the seat belt extends too far from the seat bight to get a snug fit). We showed up at BabiesRUsmdash;Im happy to shop there despite their execrable name) only to find that the Monroe County Sheriffs Department was having a child safety seat test and fit. Apparently we should have needed an appointment (and maybe we should have lived in Monroe County, too?) but we got in anyway; the officer taking the sensible line that we were talking about someones safety inside the car, so lets take a quick look anyway./p pHooray for not needing a new car seat! Though the one in my car is now nominally too small and should be replacedmdash;it goes to 40 pounds whereas Henry is 42./p pIt appears to turn out that I have superhuman strength and should not be trying to yank quite so hard when testing the seats fit. Im dubious but if the cops are happy with the seat then I am too. He tried to convince me that Id forgotten to pull the seat belt out all the way to engage the ratchet, which I know is untrue (Id double-checked that before letting Henry even sit in it just a few hours before) but I also know better than to try to argue with the police./p pYou might wonder why I have experience arguing with police, so heres a flashback: blockquote pSome weeks before, unhappy with the seats fit, Id tried to take it to the troopers office in Warsaw. After waiting 30 minute in the sweltering heat for someone to show up, I was chided for giving them the wrong phone number (Yeah, I thought they got that wrong You should have corrected them, then I did, I think they still got it wrong Theyre not idiots at Dispatch (What? So suddenly I dont know my own phone number? Its impossible that Dispatch got the number wrong twice? Its not okay to imply Dispatch are idiotsmdash;not that I didmdash;but okay to imply that I am?) and then the trooper refused to even come outside and test the fit of the seat unless the child was present. Yes, officer, putting my kid into an improperly fitted seat, driving to the cop shop and waiting in 90+ degree heat sounds like an excellent idea to me, why didnt I think of it? I left that place mad as hell./p pI suspect the officer was employing what I think is a common tactic of the police to retain the upper hand in a conversation. Even as I was leaving, she said something about being too busy now, asking that I make an appointment and come back. Eager to please authority I replied that I didnt want to take up any of her time. Youre not taking up my time came the reply. Uh, what? Bizarre./p /blockquote pMy experience in Rochester was night and day. The officer there was prompt, polite, courteous and patient through the entire process (which Ill note took less time than it took for the State Trooper in Warsaw to argue with me and ultimately point-blank refuse to even come outside to look at the problem)./p
Palin!?!

Posted: August 29th, 2008, 5:39pm CEST

pPack er up, ladies and gents, were done!/p pObama/Biden can now run a very good more of the same campaign against McCain/Palin and drive this thing into the ground until election day. We have here a scandal-ridden governor from a state not known for straight-dealing politicians lately, and McCain wants her to be VP? Yeah, I dont think so./p pUltimately I think this is a play to get the votes of everyone who wanted to see a woman in the White House but if McCain thinks theyre going to vote for him on the basis of identity politics I think hes sorely mistaken./p pAside to Some Folks who think this kind of loose talk jinxes things: even if McCain is elected hes going to face one hell of a hostile House and Senate, I think we can probably afford to look optimistically toward four years better than the last eight (though Id like to see the Congressional Democrats Get Shit Done, real soon now.)/p
A modern president

Posted: August 29th, 2008, 6:17am CEST

pIm still trying to think my way through this but a few comments on LJ and a conversation with span class=ljuser lj:user=annburlingham style=white-space: nowrap;a href=http://annburlingham.livejournal.com/profileimg src=http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif alt=[info] width=17 height=17 style=vertical-align: bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px; //aa href=http://annburlingham.livejournal.com/bannburlingham/b/a/span prompt me to consider that what Id really like is a President (or governor, or whatever) who is clearly a modern animal. I dont object to my leaders practicing politics or making bargains and concessions I dont like. At least, its not a deal-breaker. I like leaders who can get stuff done./p pAs far as I can tell the current batch, at least at the Presidential level, are firmly rooted in the past. Any Democrat is compared immediately against JFK (and what a stick to measure with!); Senator Obama gets the Dr Martin Luther King treatment as well. Republicans fare a little better but still there are comparisons to Nixon or Reagan. (I wonder who Senator Clinton would have to be compared to, if she were the nominee?)/p pAll the Presidents and candidates Ive had a chance to observe up close seem to be pretty clearly rooted in the pastmdash;have any of these folks blogged? used a computer? enjoy rap music? They all apparently have ipods, which I guess counts for something./p pI want to see a President whos read science fiction, or knows what the Singularity is, or has embarassing early USENET posts archived by DejaNews. Someone who knows what a Transformer is. (a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natasha_Stott_DespojaNatasha Stott-Despoja/a springs to mind.)/p pI dont really mean this quite literally but Sarkozy seems to be the kind of thing Im after. He may not be young but, wow, a President whos not just a divorcee but got divorced right after taking office, who then almost immediately remarries a woman who has chart-topping songs about drug use. And the country seems to be largely okay with that. Yeah./p pPerhaps Dennis Kucinich wouldnt be a disaster after all./p
Jesus H Christ

Posted: August 27th, 2008, 5:56pm CEST

pToday I seem to have questions about regligion/Christianity:/p ul liIn Jesus H Christ, does the H stand for Henry? Thatd be cool. liWhat is christian debt elimination? liWhy do I abhor country music and religious music, but love Johnny Cash? /ul pI guess that last one doesnt really need an answer./p pbETA/b: Okay, if this keeps up, I may have to change my mind about Country music. Pandora is playing a pretty darn pleasant series of songs in the key of Cash, and I cant stop smiling./p pI still draw the line at Gospel, though./p
"Driving to Conditions"

Posted: August 25th, 2008, 5:18pm CEST

pOn Saturday I was driving back to the farmhouse with Ann and Henry and we hit a deer./p pI suppose it was technically a fawn or something---about half-sized I guess. The poor thing nosed out onto the road and then darted out as I swerved away to avoid it; it went up the hood and onto the windscreen and then out of sight./p pAnn wanted to go back and look, but I just didnt see the upside in getting close to an animal that was already dead in the best case and only slightly wounded and spooked in the worst. The car is okmdash;some hair and deer poop, no dents or breakage. Im okay too, not as shaken as I should be given my history with accidents, but if the deer had been fully-grown or Id been going faster, things could have been pretty unpleasant./p pMy position on driving has been that the unexpected can and will happen, eventually but I always figured I was doing well in that department. Now Im just more convinced than ever that its impossible to be ready for absolutely anything./p pPoor critter. I hope it didnt suffer for long./p
Further Computer Vision adventures

Posted: August 22nd, 2008, 4:49pm CEST

pI spent last night hacking a href=http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/bundler/Bundler/a into something that would build correctly on my Mac. What the heck is up with making shared libraries on Macs? Im still not sure if the build process needs to have some random environment variable defined to work. Which symbol is appropriate for choosing whether to include codestdlib.h/code or codemalloc.h/code to get malloc? All is mystery./p pI left things at the point of sending my patch to the author (he very kindly thanked me for it despite it being a patch that breaks the build on Linux and Windows just to make it compile on Macs) and thinking of building either Wine or Octave to run a href=http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~lowe/keypoints/the SIFT package for feature detection/a. Probably no hope of source code there---UBC has patented it./p pbETA/b: some of you will doubtless be delighted to know that I had to install a FORTRAN compiler to get some of this to work. Well, codef2c/code, but close enough./p
Developments in Computer Vision

Posted: August 21st, 2008, 5:36pm CEST

pWhile I shot footage of Henry on Sunday I was constantly distracted by the chair he was sitting in---Id picked a nice spot in the side yard with trees in the background, far away enough from the road that traffic wouldnt be an issue, and he went and chose a bright yellow camp chair to sit in. At the time I was thinking that in some kind of ideal world Id be able to edit out that chair and replace it with the trees behind it./p pThe next day---really, the very next day---I read about how computer vision researchers have managed to combine consumer video footage with digital SLR stills of the same scene to drastically improve the quality of the video. Theyre using structure from motion to reconstruct the depth details of the scene, and then mapping the photographs in and transforming it appropriately to account for the motion of the camera. The results are astoundingly good./p pThe technique doesnt deal with moving subjects in the frame, yet; I guess thats hard to distinguish from camera movement. So it wouldnt help remove that distracting background, but it gets one thinking about such things./p pI find this all endlessly fascinating; I want to collect all my pictures of the farm and use them to build a 3-D pixel cloud, edit the video Ive shot. I want to go to crowded outdoor locations and take pictures to remove all the passers-by./p pA bit of digging around reveals that an awful lot of the code to do this is available publicly (though some of it is just awful binary blobs)./p
Happy birthday, henrygrosvenor!

Posted: August 19th, 2008, 11:45pm CEST

pI dont do birthday announcements, but Henry gets a pass and the rest of you may enjoy hearing about how hes doing. He turns five today./p pI went to Perry to visit last weekend and enjoy his early birthday party on Sunday; he correctly predicted that the party would be attended by lots of adultsmdash;his real party with his friends from daycare is today; Ann is showing up with gingerbread which the kids will decorate (making gingerman guys, as Henry calls them). She really is the best parent./p pTo make up for being absent, I took Henry on rides at the county fair while Ann and Gilly went to the library book sale across the street. He met another five-year old on the train ride and she talked him into trying the obstacle course castle, the merry-go-round (which was previously the most terrifying ride), the Centripetal Force Ride, and even the ferris wheel (the big one, not the kiddie one). I have some video of some of this. Erin would suggest a ride, Henry would venture that it looked dangerous, shed reassure him it doesnt hurt and off theyd go, hand-in-hand./p pAfter Erin slipped away home Henry and I went on some rides ourselves (he had a pass for the afternoon; I had a series of complimentary rides given out by the operators) including the large slide he didnt want to go on until I pointed out it was only half as high as the ferris wheel. After a while it struck me that I was, in fact, being a bit of a Helicopter Parent, and the true a href=http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/Free Range approach/a would be to give him his wrist band and take a seat under a tree while he ran around by himself and came to find me if there was trouble. I chickened out./p pOn Sunday I tried shooting a little more video to record the last few days of being Fourmdash;whats your name, favorite food, anything to get him talking. (He reports his name is Henry Parker-Burlingham Grosvenor, not too bad really.)/p pToday, I called him early to wake him up and sing the you smell like a monkey version of Happy Birthday, at his earlier request. When hed woken up a little more I called back and we talked for a while about how he was not a Tiny Baby or a Toddler any longer. A raise in allowance was bandied about, along with a discussion of chores to do around the house./p pIn a few weeks hell start kindergarden; hes been going to daycare and Montessori School for some time now of course but I think this is clearly different in kind because of the academic nature and the bus ride to school, mostly the bus ride I guess. Ann and I are both a little concerned about how hell do. Maybe there will be a plucky older kid to reassure him that its all ok./p
Sweet!

Posted: August 8th, 2008, 7:04am CEST

pNot bad for an evenings work./p
$750 doesn't seem like so much now

Posted: August 4th, 2008, 9:53pm CEST

pThis weekend I learned why other people are happy (well, maybe not emhappy/em exactly) to pay $750 for a Photoshop license. That is one awesomely slick piece of software./p pI have two kinds of pictures I like to take that require post-processing: panoramic images, and HDR (though Im still trying to get it right). Photoshop has automated modes for both./p pThe HDR mode did pretty well even with some hand-held pictures I took last night; it falls down when it comes time to dial down to 8 bits per channel because Im not yet a deft hand with those histogram controls to manage highlights and shadows./p pThe panorama (sorry, Photomerge) mode is the bomb. Select photos in iPhoto, drag to Photoshop icon, run the automated routine and it sorts images from left to right, applies the correct perspective transforms, identifies seams to stitch along (theyre not straight seams, either), and discards images that cant be used (my guess is that theyre at the edge of the image and would make the resulting picture too narrow). All thats required afterward is some color tweaking and cropping./p pAll this got me logged into flickr again for the first time in a long while, and upgraded to a Pro account quite quickly./p pBut dont take my word for it, heres the proof:/p div a href=http://flickr.com/photos/nooks/sets/72157606520517599/img src=http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3010/2726667197_2fb2bd43e3_s.jpg width=75 height=75 //a a href=http://flickr.com/photos/nooks/sets/72157606520442663/img src=http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3039/2726678283_0a911b988f_s.jpg width=75 height=75 alt=Dramatic Gas Station //a a href=http://flickr.com/photos/nooks/sets/72157606520314369/img src=http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3081/2727545132_f9fff42377_s.jpg width=75 height=75 alt= //a /div pI have a 30-day trial of Photoshop. If I cant find good alternatives for these modes or I find other killer features that I cant get elsewhere, Ill probably start saving. (And a donation of similar size to a food kitchen or homeless shelter might be in order, too.)/p
Weekend follies

Posted: July 28th, 2008, 9:23pm CEST

pLast Friday, work was having an offsite so I left a little early to catch up with Ann and Henry in Perry for the weekend. I got to see the best evidence in months that Henry is really growing upmdash;hell be five on August 19th./p pMost of his difficult moments for the weekend stemmed from fairly understandable frustration and impatiencemdash;Ann and I wanted to spend a few hours wandering car lots, for example. There really was very little outright obstreperousness: no arbitrary whining and resisting things like bedtime, potty visits, getting dressed, and so on./p pHenry and I have a bit of a history of gifts which turn out to be somewhat too ambitious, such as the marble run I got him for Christmas a few years ago, or the camera for his 3rd birthday that took a while for him to get the hang ofsup1/sup. But I think he may also be grown up enough that things I think hell like turn out to be amusing. I happened to be in Target last week and picked up a copy of Uno to play with him, thinking it might be amusing even if he didnt like it. Boy oh boy! Between Uno and a travel Ludo (aka Parcheesi) game he bought with his own money, Ann and I were kept pretty busy on Saturday and Sunday, playing together while we waited for food service, mostly. His biggest problem with Uno is holding all his cards at once. Curiously enough there werent any fireworks over his not being able to win, yet, either. Im sure its just a matter of time, since Uno is largely a game of chance./p pTheres only one terrifying moment of grown-up-ness to report: Saturday night is Music Night at the bookstore, so we all went together to enjoy that, and walked to the Chinese takeaway down the street for dinner. Henry was bored with waiting for the food to be ready and wanted to go back to the store, so in a moment that was equal parts inspiration and insanity, I suggested he could walk back himself. Yes, the whole block, even crossing the street, All By Himself. We established that hed look back at us when he got to the street and wait for a thumbs-up before crossing (after checking the light was green). Ann and I waited with our hearts in our mouths; I think I was only moderately more confident than her that our son was not about to become a greasy smear on US 39, despite it being my idea./p pFive! And starting kindergarten! Inconceivable!/p hr olliThe camera finally died about six months ago, perhaps it got wet or too hot. Im looking for a replacementmdash;I could see dropping about $80 on a point-and-shoot with reasonable controls. Hes also responsible enough to handle our SLR cameras, under supervision, including using the eyepiece with both eyes and operating the zoom lens./ol
For your amusement

Posted: July 28th, 2008, 4:37pm CEST

pThis picture of Henry, taken at the Providence motss con:/p a href=http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3049/2701428711_def82076fd_b.jpgimg src=http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3049/2701428711_def82076fd.jpg/a pThis comic:/p img src=http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/blagofaire.png

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Jason Parker-Burlingham (20 unread)

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