somewhere to talk about ideas and projects and stuff like everyone else
I watched a recording of Rob Pike’s talk Simplicity is Complicated a few weeks ago, and I was struck by his sentiment that many popular languages seem to be converging by adding popular features from other languages. In particular, it seems that many popular languages combine aspects of object-oriented and functional programming— support for classes, high-order functions, and reduction. Sometimes…
It was 4am this morning, and I did something stupid. I was trying to write something which would automatically delete all empty documents. Within a few seconds of running it, all my precious data was gone. Oops. There’s probably some grander lesson to be learned about keeping routine backups and not being an idiot. But the strength of that parable is somewhat weakened because I did manage to get…
At some point I developed a habit of perusing Slickdeals. I don’t have all that much disposable income, so I’ve been able to generally avoid making particularly embarassing and regrettable purchases. But some time in late August, I just saw a deal that was too good not to blow a hundred dollars on. Best Buy was having a sale for the prepaid LG Optimus Exceed 2 Android Smartphone. It’s prepaid…
Welcome to the exciting June edition of Tales From The Backlog . This particular entry is from two semesters ago, when I took 6.819/6.869 Advances in Computer Vision taught by Professor Bill Freeman and Antonio Torralba . For our final project, we had to reproduce some computer vision algorithm from a list. One of them was Eulerian Video Magnification , that cool demo which has made its rounds on…
For my final project in 6.115 , a microcomputer electronics class which I (and apparently nobody else) affectionately refer to as “leeblab”, I built a simple gestural input system. At its core lies an ordinary 8x8 LED matrix hacked into a low-res CCD and display coupled with a gutted expo dry erase marker used as a light pen. And per class requirements, it used a rube goldbergian cascade of TTL…
Technically this is a Hough transform and isn't at all related to the FFT*, but it looks a lot cooler than any of the actual FFT/DCT pictures I have, so I might as well stick it here Almost a year ago, I wrote a simple script for computing perceptual hashes in Javascript (it’s going to be part of a forthcoming Naptha feature which allows it recognize source images for memes and do perfect…
This is my submission to blogdom’s burgeoning class of eternally “work in progress” sites. I’ve been working on this blog reboot for nearly a year at this point (rest assured, I haven’t worked on it for any appreciable fraction of that time— but it’s nonetheless traumatizing for me as “blog posts written” is my primary metric for personal productivity). There’s still a lot left to be done, but…
“We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.” — Douglas Adams At MIT we get a class ring called the “brass rat”. It’s rather amusing that the ring is neither made of brass, nor features a rat. It’s actually Gold, and features our mascot— the beaver.
I guess it’s a trivia site and I’m never actually going to legitimately finish this README, as it’s substantially over 3,000 words and I haven’t even finished the introduction to the prequel. I might as well distill the whole thing down to what actually matters— the little bits of trivia that really don’t matter but might be amusing to some people with particularly derranged senses of amusement.…
Look! It's a snake! To be precise, it's a Boa photostolenfromnationalgeographae constrictor. Oh Lord, I’m so sorry . I once heard a story about a magnificent exhibit at the 1964 World’s Fair— there was a great monument to the synergy of mind, hand, and electromechanical accomplishment— a fully functional 40 foot steel typewriter. Children and adults alike would carefully crawl up the giant black…
I don't actually understand what the units of the Y axis are Well, so my blog got hacked. Even more unfortunate is that I can’t seem to locate any trace of what it looked like when it was hacked. I guess that’s the problem when you write a post-mortem literally a year after the original incident. All that’s left is some eerie hints that something happened. My blog was averaging around 350MB of…
I was doing some experiments with clustering colors, and it turns out that RGB euclidean distance is woefully inadequate, so here’s a neat little visualization of the colors in an certain image (an obligatory cat) in L a b space (specifically the axes represent L and a ). So it turns out that comparing the difference between RGB colors is actually a really shitty way to determine color distance.…
So, well, this kinda finally launched .
I’m almost certainly an outsider, so I can’t speak for the gaming or VR communities, but to me the Facebook acquisition (and the Abrash onboarding announcement ) signals that the new Oculus is more interested in bringing to fruition the Metaverse from Snow Crash , and that the hardware (Rift DK1, Crystal Cove, DK2, etc.) has been reduced to a mere means to attaining that end. I think the…
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. — Parkinson’s Law For the past four or so months, I’ve been working on just one major project. It’s rather depressing to think that I built a reasonably impressive initial prototype over the course of about a dozen sleep-deprived hours, and that all I’ve accomplished since then is minor polish. Technically, there have been at least…
I have a habit of writing blog posts in Sublime Text in lieu of legitimate READMEs. This project was simple and short enough that I think I did manage to write something with a passable semblance to a functional README before initiating this quest to craft a blog post. This is hardly a project that I’d expect to go down in the annals of my blog as particularly interesting or notable. Instead, it’s…
As with any minor stepping stone on the road to hell relentless trajectory of Atwood’s Law, I probably don’t need to justify the existence of yet another “x, but now in Javascript!”, but I might as well try. After all, we all would like to think that there’s some ulterior motive to fulfilling that prophesy. On tablet or other touchscreen devices- of which there are quite a number of nowadays (as…
If the frequency of these progress reports is to say anything, it’s that I’m terrible at sticking to a schedule and even worse at estimating progress. I was hoping that I’d be able to use the Thanksgiving break in order to be productive and get ahead of my various projects– in particular, getting the text-detection and OCR extension to a state complete enough to publish. For the past few days I’ve…
It’s Halloween, and I still haven’t posted a monthly blog post and I don’t quite feel like retroactively posting something next month. I’m understandably quite starved for free time with my attempts to reconcile sleep with college with social interaction- and from the looks of it, I probably won’t be able to publish the blog post that I’ve been working on for the better half of this month before…
For the past four years, I’ve been using a Casio W-201 watch. It’s plastic and cheap and light, and there isn’t really much more I would ask for. I presume Douglas Adams would be rather disappointed by my fondness of digital watches, but I’m frankly just not smart enough to read an analog dial. I haven’t migrated to those fancy-schmancy smartwatches, and I don’t currently have any intention to…
Recently, the American public has been forcefully made aware of the existence of various programs by the NSA- including massive infrastructure for intercepting all domestically routed communications to better protect us from imminent foreign threats. With legions of patriotic analysts, the NSA methodically ranks communications on the basis of their “ foreignness “ factor to determine candidacy for…
It must be infuriating to be in a situation where there’s a clear problem, and all the obvious remedies continually fail to produce any legitimate result. That’s what this blog is like: every month rolls by with some half baked ideas partially implemented and barely documented. And in the last day of the month, there’s a kind of panicked scramble to fulfill an entirely arbitrary self-enforced…
Longer passwords are more secure. But if you’ve ever been on a website or computer network which mandated that you change your password every 30 days to a string which you haven’t used in the past 180 which could not contain any part of your username or an English language word without being liberally adorned with num3r1cal and sy#b@!ic substitutions and aRbiTRarY capitalization, you should be…
It’s times like these that I’m reminded of my favorite childhood TV show (actually it’s kind of a close contest between this and Spongebob), Mythbusters, and that perennial warning: “don’t try this at home”. But this isn’t actually dangerous in any physically life-damaging way, it’s just dangerous in that it’s a very bad idea. The whole thing started with a friend who was irked by a few Javascript…
Before the 29th of January, I had a rather irritatingly Rube Goldberigan scheme for using my CanoScan LiDE 80. It didn’t have native Linux support, so the only way I could scan documents was through a Windows XP (Technically MicroXP) installation inside a VMWare virtual machine extant for the sole purpose of indulging my blue moon scanning requirements. But after that fateful day, I had a new…
The rationale behind this is actually pretty contrived, but one of my friends had an imminent birthday, and I had no idea what kind of present to get her. Incidentally she sent had been working on some project and sent me a copy to look over- a request that I honored by perpetually promising to get to it eventually . Sure, it was interesting enough, but several months elapsed and I was beginning…
Every once in a while some gadget has the misfortune of epitomizing the next first world problem. I guess right now, this is owning a Retina (or equivalent) laptop, tablet (arguably phone, but most web pages are scaled out so it’s not that big of a problem) and being irked at the prevalence of badly scaled graphics. So there’s a new buzzword “Retina Ready” for websites, layouts and designs which…
Swipe2 I’ve actually had this post fermenting in my blog’s draft folder since at least September, but I never actually got around to finishing the post. And now that Google’s enabling the new swipe-to-go-back by default on the dev channel versions of Chrome OS, it finally feels like the right time to post. As in, I feel like posting things right when they’re soon to be absolutely useless (Which,…
On December 15th, 2012 12:15pm, I was accepted Early Action to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, so I’ll be there starting this fall :) This blog isn’t principally here to boost my ego, so I’ll leave it at that, because I’m writing this post some six months after-the-fact with a fake retroactive timestamp in order to fraud my monthly post-count goal.
Okay, so I really want to maintain at least one blog post per month , and here I am, right before New Year’s with no apocalypse in sight to rapture me away from having to write a blog post. I don’t have anything particularly interesting ready to share, so here’s something fun that only took a few hours. The rather long Bayeux tapestry of an image I have crammed to the right marks the culmination…
At time of writing, a video is being processed by my v2.py script, it’s only eight lines of code thanks to the beautifully terse nature of python and SimpleCV. And since it’s clearly not operating at the breakneck speed of one frame per second, I don’t have time to write this README, meaning that I’m writing this README. But since I haven’t actually put a description of this project out in writing…
IMG_20120924_231208 Recently, I’ve been racking up on hobbyist electronics components from Sparkfun . Actually, this has been going on for quite a while, and most of that spending was justified by this project, which currently has the working name of the “pedant” (which is like at least a three-layered pun). I won’t say that it’s my very first foray into building some actual piece of hardware, but…
1LlLi I haven’t been particularly raving about Hostmonster for the near two years I’ve been a customer of their’s, and it’s time for a change. In the past week, I moved to a new web host. As of this moment, I’m using Bitcable, specifically the cheapest shared plan plus another discount. I’ve had my share of gripes about the service, but speed and reliability so far have not been among them. I…
screenshot This is sort of a conceptual reversal (or not, this might just be making the description needlessly confusing) of one of my older projects, Weppy . First, what Weppy did was it added support for WebP in browsers which didn’t support it by converting it into a single-frame video. This is instead predicated on the assumption that the browser already has support for WebP (at this point, it…
blog-post-frequency This post has been hinted at by the past few blog posts, but I guess eventually it has to be written. But the basic gist is that rather than making this the home of random announcements of mostly finished projects, it’ll be the home of mostly daily (or weekly, whenever significant progress is made) and probably shorter updates on the progress certain projects. That is, the blog…
I’ve been maintaining this blog, or at least the content inside it for about five years now. It’s been through a handful of incarnations, often paired with significant changes in web hosting. I’ve had a blog for a little bit longer, but I don’t think I have the medium figured out. The structure of the posts and the style has changed over the past few years, but I can’t at this point call it…
4WsjX So I’m trying something new, returning to quasi-daily somewhat short updates about the development of whatever I’m working on rather than withholding everything until something of somewhat acceptable release quality is achieved. I have a blog post about that transition, but I’m still working on it (as in, writing it is somewhat boring). It’s probably better given my development cycle is…
Raspi_Colour_R As part of the shift between long multi-kiloword blog posts which are somewhat more like press releases back into a sort of more personal (i.e. blog-esque) format, I guess I’ll talk about my newly-arrived Raspberry Pi . Right now, there isn’t terribly much to talk about since I’ve only had it for about two weeks. I’ve been planning on getting a Raspberry Pi for a pretty long time,…
Screenshot 2012-08-14 at 4.24.07 PM So I was testing the responsiveness of the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook touchpad and made a short little script which basically continuously adds the mousewheel changes and draws them using canvas. But it appears that the trackpad does some kind of fitting to make things tend to be at right angles, though it’s not hard to get something diagonal or even somewhat…
nuUgy So here’s a somewhat technical post, actually it’s pretty technical. But either way the premise is sort of simple to understand, and probably so is the context. I’m working on Swipe Gesture 2.0, which basically tries to take Chrome and Safari on OS X Lion’s awesome back-forward transitions and make them work on other operating systems. See, the thing is that multitouch isn’t _strictly _a…
unnamed Here’s an extension which I actually released some time back , but never got around to writing a blog post for. Part of the reason was that the early reviews didn’t quite pan out, in large part due to not working . But I was using my Chromebook and I somehow felt a vague longing for some kind of multitouch gesture, and remembered that I had made this little extension (which I had disabled…
Screenshot from 2012-08-11 22:37:33 So I’ve been interested in distributed computing for some time, since 2007, basically around the time I started doing web development. I’ve always sort of romanticized the notion of distributed computing because of its vast theoretical potential. Projects like BOINC , SETI@Home and Folding@Home have always given me some kind of idealized notion of “computing for…
Screenshot from 2012-07-06 09:05:34 This is probably a horrible time to think of writing an online text editor. The “market”, if you can call it that, is virtually saturated with worthy contenders and (figuratively) every day is marked by the entrance of some other text editor to the already crowded space. Part of the problem is that now, web based text editing components are actually pretty…
Screenshot from 2012-06-19 15:24:28 Last year, for Computer Science 1, I built a pinball game in Java. Yes, Java, as in sans-script. I wrote it in Eclipse and it was pretty functional. Of course, the biggest part of the game was the collision detection, collision detection which, mind you, I built with only the slightest knowledge of how it’s actually done. So yeah, I made up a scheme. It sucks,…
392722_2010404474880_380090264_n You might have noticed that I haven’t written much for this blog in the past few months. In truth, it’s because of school work, which has never really been something of an issue before. This is, quite probably the least productive stretch of time in my life thus far. I have a suspicion that this issue stems more psychologically than due to some radical increase in…
Screenshot Google’s multitask mode was only an April Fool’s joke, but inordinately amused among us (read: me) might even venture into attempting such an irrational feat. While watching the video, it evoked some memories of something which I had stumbled across a few years ago, called Multi-Pointer X. The rationale for creating that wasn’t nearly as insane as the Chrome Multitask video made it out…
Screenshot MusicAlpha works again, and this wasn’t some minor update that fixed a small hole, the entire app has been rewritten. There’s a new user interface which has really quite beautiful animated polar progress bars, but the most significant part is that the mystical protobufs-over-https protocol has been decoded and documented. It really started on January 30th, when Simon Weber contacted me…
Liveswifers Post-Mortem I first registered an account on liveswifers.org on December 11th, 2006. I was 11 years old at the time. It was this time when the Ajax Animator began. I’m not sure of that, because 5 years past certainly constitutes ancient history for a teenager. It was a huge influence on the development of the Ajax Animator, and it was there that I first encountered some of the future…
Not that anyone is going to particularly miss my blog (most of my other web pages will still be up because I’m far too lazy to go through all of them in order to make a slightly less futile protest). But this is one of the most interesting internetwide events that I’ve ever encountered, and I should be shamed to not take part in it. Copyright and its ongoing war with libertarian and anarchist…
Google Circles I realized this a while ago, June 29th and started this blog post and never got around to filling it with content, but I’m pretty sure the the title can stand on its own. For those unfamiliar with tau , there’s this movement that says that pi is a bad circle constant - since more often than not, mathematical equations use 2pi rather than pi, and for purity sake, that should be the…