Like Having Fairies at the Bottom of Your Garden

Margaret Atwood tweets. She posted a delightful essay about the experience at the New York Review of Books blog. She describes it as having 33,000 precocious grandchildren.

Photoshop Features

The next version of Adobe Photoshop comes out soon. This video shows off some of the neat new features that are useful for publishing and web production.

But Tom & Pete were much more impressed with this video which shows how useful these features can be for students.

Versions of Avatar

The kids both really enjoyed Avatar.

Do you realize how many different versions of the movie they created? This article says that there were a total of 100 different “prints”. The variables include:

• 3 aspect ratios (cinemascope, flat, & imax)
• 18 dubbed languages
• 52 subtitled languages
• 3D & 2D versions

Gee, that’s getting close to mass customization for the movies.

Disabling Cars Remotely

Did you see this news article the other day? A car dealer in Austin fired an employee. He got mad and hacked into their computer and started disabling customers’ cars. Did you know that car dealers are installing black boxes in the cars they sell which allow them to disable the car if you don’t pay your bills? Isn’t that kind of creepy? The box is made by Payteck.

Habib Koité

We’ve been listening to a lot of music from Africa recently; especially from Mali. One of our favorites is Habib Koité. We got a chance to hear him live last night at the Somerville Theater.

They put on a great show. They use a mix of western instruments and African instruments like the balafon and the n’goni. Koité plays guitar, but using an interesting, pentatonic tuning that goes well with the other instruments. The result is a distinctive sound that really rocks. They played some of their quieter songs, but for most of the night they were really bouncing. One of the drummers was having a great time dragging girls out of the audience to dance with them on stage.

Here’s an example of what they sound like on a couple of our favorite songs:

Wassiye - Habib Koite

 

N’Teri - Habib Koite

Before the concert we had dinner at the Tibetan restaurant Martsa on Elm. We had a yummy dulum gyabra followed by amdo-tse and this neat looking capsicum chicken.

Afterwards, we went to a creperie to have a banana and honey crepe for dessert.

Flame

We found this cool program called Flame. It’s a Processing app written by Peter Blaškovič. It lets you paint with a paintbrush made of particles which chase the mouse around. You can make really neat pictures with it, like this one I made.

Blooming

I know these are the easiest orchids to grow, but I’ve never actually managed to get one to rebloom before. That is, they’re usually blooming when you buy them, and the flowers eventually fade.  Then mine always put out more leaves and air roots, but never any flowers until this one. I’m pretty excited.

Hiding the Works

Apple’s release of the iPad has generated a lot of angst and gnashing of teeth amongst a certain class of geek. Ben Fry’s latest post on the subject is fairly typical. Or as Tim Bray said:

For creative people, this device is nothing.

I agree with their points completely. The basic problem is that although the iPad looks like the latest 21st century personal computer, it’s missing one of the key features of a personal computer. That’s the ability to program it to do what you want it to do. Programming the iPhone or iPad is much more like developing for a gaming console. You need to pay special developer’s fees and you can’t release an application which isn’t approved by Apple. This is a device which you use to consume, not create.

This fits in with something that has been going on in a lot of engineering fields in recent years. In Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew Crawford refers to this style of engineering as “Hiding the Works”. It’s very noticeable in automobiles. I grew up working on cars, but I don’t find the new ones inviting at all. They’re completely sealed up like an iPod. Some of the new Mercedes don’t even have a dipstick. Even if you do manage to pry it open and try to work on it, you’re going to find out that a lot of the critical data you need is encrypted.

I’ve seen the same sort of thing happening in programming too. Just today I was talking to a senior developer who writes really low-level code at the core of big multithreaded applications. It turns out he had no idea how virtual memory is actually implemented. As someone who grew up writing microcode and counting gates, I was pretty amazed by this. But when I talk to a lot of modern programmers, it’s clear that they’re completely isolated from how computers actually work, and they don’t seem to even think that’s an interesting thing to worry about.

A few people are now rebelling against this trend with things like Maker Faires, circuit bending, and Right to Repair laws, but a lot of people seem perfectly content with the situation. Richard Sennett argues that modern Capitalism depends on the people losing the aesthetics of craftsmanship because the craftsman cherishes the items he works on, while Capitalism depends on consumers discarding objects in favor of the new and trendy.

I think that another part of the dynamic here is that during the 80’s and 90’s engineers got their hands on all of these great new development tools which allowed them to make devices more and more complex. As they did, more and more people just gave up on trying to understand how their gadgets worked. This rising tide of blissful ignorance eventually swallowed even some of the most tech savvy portions of the populace.

And to be honest, even us engineers who create these complex devices are just as happy to have the users out of the way. Our jobs are more difficult if we need to design complex devices in an open and accessible way. But something has certainly been lost here. In his book, Crawford argues that we need to teach our children how to make things for their own psychological well being.

Ben Fry ends his essay on something of a hopeful note. He says:

I’d never bet against people who tinker …

I hope he’s right. What do you think?

HTML 5 Canvas in Blogger

The purpose of the previous post with the port of Starlings to JavaScript was to learn how viable it would be to use the HTML 5 canvas element to embed graphics in our blog. The purpose of this post is to record what we learned.

There are two basic categories of issues. The first is support for the canvas element. The second has to do with the fact that it’s hard to put things in the head element of a blog post.

Canvas Support

The most obvious problem is the fact that Internet Explorer doesn’t support the canvas element yet. At some point I’ll try out ExplorerCanvas, but I didn’t want to add that to the mix on this first example.

In Chrome, the canvas element seems to work great on every platform we’ve tried.

It works OK in Safari on the Mac, but it’s a bit slower than Chrome.

It draws OK in Firefox on the Mac, although it is quite a bit slower. Firefox also has the problems with mouse event coordinates which I describe below. The other tricky bit with Firefox is getting the coordinate system correct on mouse events. In a browser which supports the clientX and clientY fields in the mouse event, then you’re all set. Otherwise it gets a bit tricky. I tried using the layerX and layerY fields in that case, but that’s not the entire solution. There appears to be a Y offset which still needs to be accounted for.

It sort of works in Safari on the iPhone. It’s really, really, really slow. The mouse event handling appears to be OK in this case, but it’s so slow that it is really hard to tell. It also has problems loading and blting the image sometimes.

We haven’t tried it on various other combinations of browsers and platforms. If you have a different setup, you could leave us a comment telling us how it works for you.

Scripting in the Body of the Post

The other problem is that it’s difficult to insert scripts into the head element of a blog post. This means that all of the scripting has to be done in the body element. It turns out that this adds a bit of difficulty. Each script element is executed as it is encountered when the page is first loaded. This causes problems with asynchronous operations like image loading.

If you look at the source for that page, you’ll see that I added the background image for the canvas as a separate img element with an onload function which started the interval timer which draws the canvas. This approach seems to work reasonably well, but you can see a tiny rectangle to the right of the canvas where the img element is.

Canvas Starlings

Your browser doesn't support the canvas element.

This is a version of the Starlings demo written in straight JavaScript. It's probably going to have problems in some browsers.

Specifically, Internet Explorer doesn't support the canvas element yet. There are some fixes workarounds for that. I'll come back later and try adding one of those. In addition, some browsers (e.g. FireFox) have problems with the offsetX and offsetY values in the mousemove event. I'm using layerX and layerY on those browsers. That appears to be close, but not quite right.

Anyways, I'm just hacking around with the canvas element to see how hard it is to embed in the blog. I'll try to do something more interesting with it later.

No Coffee!

We moved into the new Media Lab building a little more than a month ago. There were a lot of things that were not quite finished when we moved in, and there was a big event planned for the dedication of the new building last week, so folks were working on getting ready for that. As a result, some normal problems have slipped through the cracks. But the biggest problem is the coffee machine - this machine has been broken for a few weeks, and the back up machine is having problems too. Can you imagine a research group with out coffee - how about a whole building! Now that the dedication is past, I hope they get around to fixing the coffee machine.

Tarragon Chicken Crêpes

I think I copied this recipe down from a magazine or newspaper back when I was in college. [Ok, this is just a little too weird - I just went searching for the original name I have in my notebook Crêpes de volaille a l'estragon and I appear to have found the actual recipe in the NY Times from 1982. I know it's the same one because I have the other recipes mentioned copied down in my notebook even though I never made them.] Over time things have changed a little - here's my version now.

Tarragon Chicken Sauce
1 lb boneless chicken breasts
1 Tbsp oil or butter
1-2 Tbsp butter
2-3 Tbsp flour
1 cup chicken stock
1 cup light cream
1 Tbsp dried tarragon (more if fresh)
dash nutmeg
dash cayenne
freshly ground pepper
salt to taste

Cook the chicken breasts. I like to saute them in the pan so they get a little brown and crispy on the outside. Technically I think you're supposed to poach them so they're all nice and pale in the sauce, but I like the caramelization. Remove the chicken, and cut it up or shred it into small pieces. Melt the tablespoon of butter in the pan and mix in the flour to make a roux. Whisk in the stock and bring to a simmer. Stir until thickened. Add the tarragon, nutmeg and cayenne. Cook for a minute or two, then add the cream. Add salt and pepper to taste.

If you're going to use it as a filling for crêpes, mix about half the sauce with the chicken, and reserve the rest of the sauce for spooning over the top. If you don't have crêpes handy, it also goes really well over rice - in that case just mix all the sauce and chicken together.

The recipe for crêpes is really quite basic: eggs, flour and milk. I like this crêpe recipe from Alton Brown because you just mix it all up in a blender.

For a very fancy meal, finish off with Crêpes Suzette. These sound difficult, but really aren't all that hard to make if you have some crepes already made.

Crêpes Suzette
(for 4)
8 crêpes, folded in half
6-8 Tbsp butter
2-3 Tbsp sugar
zest of 1 orange
juice of 1/2 orange
4 Tbsp Grand Marnier (plus an extra spoonful)

In a large skillet melt the butter. When it's foamy add the sugar and stir for a minute or two. Add the orange zest and the orange juice. Lay each crêpe in the sauce, flip it over to coat, and fold into quarters. Once all the crêpes are in the pan all coated in sauce, add the Grand Marnier. For the full flambé effect, warm an extra spoonful of Grand Marnier, light it and pour over the crêpes to ignite the whole pan. Serve two per person with extra sauce.

Heiliger Dankgesang

Last night we went to Jordan Hall (one of my favorite places) to see the Artemis quartet.

They played 3 Beethoven quartets. They started with one of the early ones (Opus 18 no. 2) which I don’t know well. They sounded really great on that one. They’ve got a nice, balanced sound and they play off each other very well. They have a really nice stage presence too. Three of them play standing, and the cellist sits on a raised platform so that he’s the same height.

 

Next they played the Serioso (Opus 95). I didn’t think that this one really played to their strengths. They had a really nice sound in the second movement, but they got a little loose in some of the fiery bits. And the Serioso is all about the fiery bits.

They finished with number 15 (Opus 132). I think that this is probably the greatest thing that anyone has ever written, and they did a fabulous job on it. Those last couple of Beethoven quartets (op. 127 – 135) are simply amazing. They really don’t sound much like his earlier work. They’re often compared to Brahms, but I’m not sure that’s really accurate. It seems like most of Beethoven’s work has the feeling that he’s trying to impress someone. These don’t have that feeling at all. They simply sound like he has something important he wants to say.

I don’t know why the A minor has always affected me so much. It’s built from themes he used in other pieces. The development has some interesting quirks, but it is a relatively classical form. But there’s something about it that makes it seem endlessly fascinating. T. S. Eliot said of it:

I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly or at least more than human gaiety about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.

Before the concert, we went to dinner at Petit Robert. This is a small restaurant that’s run by the daughter of the guy who used to run Maison Robert. The food was wonderful. The only problem was that we didn’t have time (or room) to have dessert.

Popular Science

When I was young, I had a vast collection of old Popular Science magazines. I used to spend hours poring over them. I memorized vast numbers of strange machines, weird inventions, and odd facts as a result. Those magazines are gone now. Lost in some move.

But they’re back! Google books now has them all online.

Whee!

John McPhee

John McPhee has always been one of my favorite writers. I remember when I was young and would go over to my grandmother’s house. I would sit on the couch and flip through her copies of The New Yorker for the cartoons. But I quickly figured out that whenever I found an essay by McPhee, that I should read it. It really didn’t matter what he was writing about, it was going to be interesting.

A lot of those essays have been collected into books. I would recommend all of them. You might not realize that you want to know about Arthur Ashe, the Swiss army, train engineers, shad, Deerfield Academy, birch bark canoes, or nuclear terrorism; but you do. He’ll make it interesting.

But even after reading dozens and dozens of essays by him, it has been hard to get much of a sense of who he really is. But apparently, his latest book is much more personal than most of his writing. In addition, the LA Times has an interesting interview with him this week.

 

You might also be interested to know that one of his daughters (Laura) is a photographer. I caught an exhibit of her work at the MFA a while back. They were really good.