Cottleston Pie

Recently, I went wireless with my laptop connection to the Internet. As I setup my new apartment, that has worked out brilliantly. I've got almost all wires confined to one piece of furniture: TV, VCR, DVD player, Cable-modem, Wireless-base-station. My laptop roams, and consistent with the desires made in my earlier post, this post is being made from my sofa. I can also use my laptop at my desk in the study and continue to access the Internet without me stringing any wires.

This is particular significant since I don't own the apartment. Back in high school, I wanted the main home stereo system (with the CD player!) to play music at opposite corners of the house. So, my dad and I drilled some holes in the floor and ran wire through the basement so the stereo could drive speakers in either or both rooms. It was a great success. That type of modification isn't practical here.

So, my next problem, what about my stereo in my apartment? I want to be able to stream music to it from my laptop, either mp3s or Internet radio, whether I'm on the sofa or in the study. It was a trouble that would have had Colonel Mustard flustered.

Mr. Jobs knew how to scratch my itch: AirPort Express. I picked one up at the Austin Apple Store (payed $5 more than I would have on Amazon + local sales tax, but the sales tax is money back into my own community minus that which falls into the hands of Texas conservative politicos which seek to control or destroy my community). It's an amazing little device. Now, I can stream my music to my stereo from my laptop anywhere in the apartment, like now, sitting on the sofa, listening to Solsbury Hill.

The Express is amazingly small, just a little larger and in the same style as my iPod power adapter. It uses 802.11g and WPA, so my everything on my network remains at the faster g standard and using the WPA security protocol.

I considered Slim Devices Squeezebox which is a neat little device, but it was considerably more expensive. The wireless version would have required that I degrade my wireless network to the slower 802.11b protocol (mixed g and b) and use the known-broken WEP security protocol. However, for about the same price as a wireless Squeezebox, one could purchase the wired version and a considerably more capable Belkin wireless router. I avoided the additional cost and complexity of this strategy by going with the Express, which has one additional excellent feature...

It's so small that I have a very handy portable wireless base station that I can take on the road. I'll definitely be taking it to Maine the next time I visit my family there.

Now my problem is this darn power-cord. I believe my laptop battery is dying. 2-3 years is the normal lifetime for a battery of this type, and mine is 3.5 years old. I used to get hours out of it. Now it always seem to run out of power quickly (half an hour maybe?). Even with a good battery, I imagine all this wireless broadcasting would be draining. We need better portable power options. Fortunately, in maybe three years, fuel cell technologies may come to laptops in a practical way and improve the situation.

I really like my new sofa. I wanted to sit on it more often when using my laptop. So I bought myself a wireless router and PC Card (PCMCIA) for my laptop, both by Belkin about which I'd heard good things. Setup was simplicity itself. And I'm posting using it now.

UPDATE: And it just works at work too. I work for a very large corporation that doesn't support anything interesting (well, a couple recent versions of MS Windows OSes like managers and secretaries use; most of the interesting people around here do work on Unix-style OSes like AIX, Linux, OS X). The instructions online talk about downloading some custom application from Cisco to use with Cisco-brand cards -- all other card types are unsupported of course. Well, my Belkin wireless card in my Mac works just fine. I just selected LEAP security and gave the network name, username, and password and I'm off to the races. This is being posted wirelessly from my office. Yay for Mac OS X and its implementation of standards. Can you imagine how I get everything to work when it is all so unsupported? :-)

A couple of weeks ago, I took a couple of pictures of the Austin skyline above the trees along the edge of Town Lake. My two best images had different strengths. One had a better contrast of the buildings against the sky, but the details of the tree foliage were lost in darkness. The other had better exposed the shadowy details of the trees but the skyline was not as well defined, being a bit over-exposed.

Today, as I jogged over the MoPac bridge today where I'd taken the photos, I wondered if maybe the best of the dynamic ranges could be combined into a single images with details in both the highlights and the shadows. I'd done some work my freshman year at Duke for a researcher where multiple images were combined to create a 3D image and some of that work, with aligning similar but not identically aligned images, seemed to suggest it was possible.

I found it a fascinating technique. The goal was to make a 3D image of a protein from a series of electron microscope images of the protein that had been processed and attached to a lipid bilayer. The alignment was done by processing the images via some variation of a Fourier transform and the result was a rough grid of points that didn't resemble the original image at all. My job was to use some human pattern-matching skill and intuition to correspond points on the grids of the various images on a computer. Using that data, the computer employed some algorithm to create the 3D image.

While the transform was ultimately and usually performed by computer, it could also be done by shining a red laser through a celluloid negative (film) from the electron microscope and then using some refracting device. The result was the strong points of light that define the same grid that the computer would produce. It could be a bit tricky to use the laser device -- I never quite mastered it that year. A good negative would produce a well-defined, regular grid. Using this technique, the best negatives could be identified. They were then scanned (by me using an amazing high-quality negative scanner) and computer processed.

The good researchers, a husband and wife team, had invited me back to work with them the next year, and were pleased enough with my work to suggest that if I wished to continue from year to year, I could probably join in the research effort in time and get my name on a paper or two. Unfortunately, the Univ. of Florida gave them a good offer and they moved their research down to Florida before I returned for my sophomore year.

Getting back to the topic of combining images to maximize well-exposed detail, imagine my surprise a couple of hours later when I saw this on MacInTouch:

Photomatix Pro 2.0 extends the dynamic range of digital photos or scans by combining images taken with different exposures into a single new image. It offers five different methods for computing the optimal combination of aligned images, 16-bit support, an alignment tool for out-of-register images, and more. The new version adds generation of an HDR image from 24-bit photos, an HDR viewer, and a Tone Mapping tool for scenes with a particularly high dynamic range. Photomatix Pro is $99 for Mac OS X and Windows.

Quoted from: MacInTouch

Perfect! Well, almost. I'm not sure that it's worth $99 dollars to me. But I'm glad that the software is readily available.

Aha, so a Fujitsu sponsorship has helped the PostgreSQL development team come out with such an outstanding list of improvements for the next release! I read Robert Treat's PostgreSQL Weekly News which includes a summary of each week's development progress as seen on the development mailing list and I have been quite amazed at how quickly development of major features was progressing.

Thanks to Jeremy's linkblog for this tip. I imagine that the sponsorship was probably mentioned sometime in the Weekly News but I didn't remember it because I didn't realize how significant it would be.

There were several things that had been irking me about Movable Type (MT) which I won't bother to detail. So I decided to switch to WordPress (WP).

The switch was very easy, with one caveat I'll get to in a minute, and I'm glad I did:

• No more re-building pages
• Faster web interface
• Easier web interface
• Easier backup
• Very easy initial setup and configuration
• Multiple blogs can share a single database (simplifies both setup and backup)
• I can use WordPress at work if I wish because the license is more liberal (GPL)

The caveat involved the MT Import/Export trouble that I had back in March. The data export from MT and subsequent import of that MT export file into Wordpress suffered that same problem. I tracked down the problem this time. The import process was becoming seriously confused because of dashes in MySQL tables. MT is incorrectly exporting data that it cannot import. I was able to correct the problem for my purposes by escaping the dashes myself: changing the dashes in the table to - entities. This problem should not have occurred. That entry, like all my entries, is validated XHTML 1.0 Strict.

I'm glad I spent a few hours today making the switch. I think I'll find it very worthwhile in the long term.

Oh yes, and I've renamed the blog. I think that the old title, Wind in the Wires, might be misconstrued as being too computer-technical. The Wires primarily referred to the humming sound produced on a sailing vessel when a strong wind causes taught lines (stays, shrouds, sheets, halyards) to vibrate like guitar strings. As a double entendre, it also alluded to the wires of the Internet over which information is communicated. There is something ironic about my mentioning that the less-technical meaning should dominate at the end of this this very technical post.

I wanted some online space quickly, so I ended up buying a hosting package for myself. It came with a hostname registration, so ziphstric.com is now mine. (I actually would probably have chosen another variation on that name now that I've had more time to think it over, but now it's done and I'll stick with it as it cannot be easily changed.) I've moved my homepage and this blog here and configured the old locations to re-direct to this location (301 Permanently Moved).

I took the opportunity to upgrade to the latest Movable Type software (2.661 from 2.64) to take advantage of some minor spam-deterrence features. It turned out to be a lot more difficult that in should have been. I tried the Export/Import features and the import got sadly confused by MT's own export and greated a bunch of junk. This does not bode well for future upgrades. I was able to bypass the issue for the moment by using a MySQL export/import of the supporting database. I was able to do a search-and-replace on the exported db data and fix the links in my entries to ensure they all point to ziphstric. As long as they don't change the db schema, MySQL export/import remains a viable alternative.

Many and long thanks to the two friends who have helped have an online presence before I made this move.

I found myself wandering around the world of language encodings, Unicode and Indic languages in particular (South Asian languages as one would find in India).

I am certainly pleased that the English alphabet has only twenty-six characters, which fit neatly on a keyboard, uses few to none diacritical marks and no combination characters. Some English words have optional diacritical marks (such as in résumé) often in salute to the foreign language from which the word was adopted, but these accents may be safely dropped without penalty. Combination characters are appear a real significant complication for computers, especially because there are so many ways to achieve the same result.

English has all kinds of ideosyncracies of its own, but its simple character set can be a boon for computer applications. (Other languages may have this feature, but most with which I am familiar do not.)

That all said, I can see where combination characters are useful and efficient when handwriting, as are the many characters of the East Asian scripts that carry dense meaning.

While a simple character set is useful for input, on sufficiantly high-resolution displays, complex characters that convey a lot of meaning are potentially very useful for output where physical screen size is a limitation (and to various degrees, it is always a limitation).

I don't know much about East Asian scripts. Is War And Peace only half as long when translated into Japanese?

MacOS X 10.3 (aka Panther) is fantastic. The performance improvements are dramatic on my 2.5 year old PowerBook G4 (Titanium) laptop (500 MHz G4, 384 Mb). The interface and improvements to Apple's applications such as the Finder, Mail, and Safari are all great as well. Exposé really shines as a new interface feature; I already make heavy use of it.

Further, a friend in the office installed it on his 1999 iMac (400 MHz G3, 384 Mb) and said that the performance improvements were dramatic for him as well.

This was great news, because I plan on giving the gift of Panther to my parents this Christmas for their 1999 iMac (500 MHz G3 320 Mb) which is currently still running MacOS 9. I plan to increase their iMac's memory as well because I think that Fast User Switching will be a boon for them. Even with my laptop, there have been times where it would have been nice to allow guests a nice clean account without me needing to clean up and log out.

Since I recently suffered a hardware failure, I made a clean install. There's nothing like moving to help clarify what is important and what is just cruft.

This seems like an appropriate time to catalog the software that I find particularly useful and necessary. This will especially help me as I set my parents up with OS X.

It surprises me how frequently people mistakenly comment on the wrong entry, but though I don't have many comments here, it has happened more than once.

It is mystifying why one cannot move a comment to a different Entry with the Movable Type application (mt.cgi).

Fortunately, I chose to use external SQL database support rather than the built-in support for Berkeley DB. If I hadn't, I don't know how I would be able to move a comment.

So, my data is in a MySQL database. Given a choice, I'd prefer PostgreSQL, but MySQL is what was available and it serves well enough.

Let me document what I did for myself and anyone else in a similar straight.

1. Connect to the server:

   % mysql -h <SQL-db-hostname> -u <id> -D <db-name> -p
   

2. Identify comment

   In this case, this was the only comment from a particular IP number:

   mysql> SELECT comment_id,comment_blog_id,comment_entry_id,comment_ip,comment_email FROM mt_comment WHERE comment_ip = '10.0.0.182';
   +------------+-----------------+------------------+----------------+---------------------+
   | comment_id | comment_blog_id | comment_entry_id | comment_ip     | comment_email       |
   +------------+-----------------+------------------+----------------+---------------------+
   |         36 |               1 |               16 | 10.0.0.182     | kom48ff84@yahoo.com |
   +------------+-----------------+------------------+----------------+---------------------+
   

3. Change the comment_entry_id. In this case, moving from Entry 16 to 27:

   mysql> UPDATE mt_comment SET comment_entry_id = 27 WHERE comment_ip = '10.0.0.182';
   Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
   Rows matched: 1  Changed: 1  Warnings: 0
   

4. Check the result:

   mysql> SELECT comment_id,comment_blog_id,comment_entry_id,comment_ip,comment_email  FROM mt_comment WHERE comment_ip = '10.0.0.182';
   +------------+-----------------+------------------+----------------+---------------------+
   | comment_id | comment_blog_id | comment_entry_id | comment_ip     | comment_email       |
   +------------+-----------------+------------------+----------------+---------------------+
   |         36 |               1 |               27 | 10.0.0.182     | kom48ff84@yahoo.com |
   +------------+-----------------+------------------+----------------+---------------------+
   

5. Rebuild pages.

I'm afraid my laptop has gone down for the count: the hard-drive has failed. I was creating backups in preparation for my upgrade to MacOS X Panther. One backup failed with an I/O error. I restarted it and about 80% through, my IBM-branded OEM hard-drive started clicking constantly and loudly. I believe that it will never serve data again. Fortunately, I was making multiple backups and have one complete full-image backup from earlier that day and two others (incremental, maybe a week out-of-date; partial full image when failure occurred) which are not complete but include all the really important data.

I have six months left on my AppleCare extended warranty, so the failure should be covered under warranty. Much better that it happened now than six months from now.

A long time ago I read a maxim to the effect, "Your hard-drive has either just failed or is about to fail." Hard drives don't fail often in my experience, but now that it has happened to me, I'm very glad that I have backups.

Unfortunately, this means I will be without a laptop for a little while, which will definitely crimp my style.

Update [06 Dec 2003]

Apple did a great job turning around this fix!

12/04/2003 Thu 22:08:33 PT  Closed
12/04/2003 Thu 10:24:00 PT  Unit Shipped/Completed
12/04/2003 Thu 09:43:00 PT  Begin Testing
12/04/2003 Thu 03:09:00 PT  Begin Repair
12/04/2003 Thu 02:51:00 PT  Unit Received
12/01/2003 Mon 11:48:43 PT  Repair Requested
12/01/2003 Mon 07:55:00 PT  Request Acknowledged

Apple shipped a packing container to me. There was some confusion with the shipping company such that I didn't get the container until Wed. That same day, I shipped my laptop to Apple just over in Houston (Apple paid for all shipping). Apple received it, fixed everything, and sent it back to me all in one day!

So, now I've a working 30 Gb hard drive (another IBM model). They asked if there was anything else they could look at it while it was in, so I mentioned that the DVD drive which didn't spin up correctly occasionally (since the day I got it; but I use DVDs and CDs seldom enough that it hasn't been too much of an issue). I also mentioned a little paint chipping on the back corners and hinges of the display. I didn't expect that to be fixed, I just wanted it on-the-record just in case it were to come back with significantly more chipping.

Well, according to the parts list, it looks like they replaced the DVD drive. They also replaced a bunch of case parts including a new display housing! That really was not strictly necessary, but definitely appreciated, so here I am making that appreciation public. The titanium top is just like new.

Finally, I got a new cord for my power adapter, so now I have two. My Apple cord started sparking about a year ago (blue sparks inside the cord; it was rather pretty really, like lightning). I didn't want to deal with AppleCare at the time because I needed a replacement quick (in hindsight, AppleCare probably would have been quick), so I bought a new power adapter from MadsonLine. Power adapters are pricey (from anywhere)! The MadsonLine one is as nice and small as I've ever seen and I'm happy to have two adapters. Now I can leave one at work and one at home and that's one fewer thing to shuttle back and forth.