Category Archives: computing

No Google for you

Posted on January 30, 2007 | 2 comments

Google Reader is awesome and all, but man, their error messages are quite useless sometimes:

Posted in computing, funny, meaningless, tech

The device that betrays your thoughts?

Posted on January 20, 2007 | Leave a comment

Through the Illinois Genetic Algorithms Laboratory blog, I learned of the Lemelson-Illinois Student Prize, a $30,000 award given to outstanding student inventors. The selection process for the prize is down to eight finalists, one of whom has created an amazing method to translate thoughts into speech:

Michael Callahan Graduate Student – Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering, College of Engineering

Michael hopes to assist individuals without the use of speech and mobility communicate through the application of neuroscience. By interfacing near the source of vocal production, he has been able to translate unspoken thought of the mind from intercepted neuronal activity at the vocal cords. The method that Michael has developed produces complete fluent speech with 70% accuracy from neurological signals.

Incredible. I can’t wait to see this kind of technology in use. It might complicate poker games, though.

Another article on Michael Callahan

The Demon’s Paintbrush

Posted on December 15, 2006 | 1 comment

Sweet Lord, my Genetic Algorithms course has ended. The giant pile of work is now behind me. I have to say that despite the large amount of work, the course has been one of the most rewarding in recent memory. There are a lot of exciting ideas in this field. The course instructor is David E. Goldberg, who is an influential luminary in the field.

For the course project, I decided to return to my decades-old interest in graphics programming by developing a genetic artwork program. The basic idea was to “breed” new images by figuring out which images in a random population are better than others. I needed a way to rank which images were better than others. Inspired by Flickr’s concept of interestingness, I decided to use color comparisons to popular images from Flickr.com as a way to rank images. An image that has a close match in color to a popular or interesting Flickr image is given a high rank. The genetic algorithm runs over successive generations to produce images with higher ranking. Eventually I got a lot of good results, and then a scary demon appeared:

Picture 69.jpg

The picture on the left is the Flickr image that the generated images resembled most. Lower numbers mean higher rankings. Look at 392. The demon got 4th place! Maybe that’s why he looks angry.

Here are some other interesting results I got with the demon’s paintbrush. Click to get to a more detailed writeup, including the many thousands of generated results:

UPDATE: Click here to see some giant tiled montages of artwork generated by the technique.

1 Comment

Posted in art, bizarre, computing, tech, toys

Some subjects go well together

Posted on December 8, 2006 | 4 comments

I like the fact that Amazon.com, in their product recommendations, offered me books on these two subjects right next to each other:

Yes, computers and anger are a natural fit. Amazon.com knows this. The technology wins every time, and we are left to fume at its dominance over us, as this classic clip perfectly captures:

(link to video)

4 Comments

Posted in computing, funny, meaningless, pain, tech

Haiku explosion

Posted on November 14, 2006 | 2 comments

I was inspired by the random-haiku-spewing IRC chatterbot at work to make a version that works in Javascript. It uses the same phrase fragments that drive the IRC version:

I think it will probably only work in modern browsers. If it doesn’t work for you, don’t worry – you aren’t missing much.

Alternate version without the explosion effect:

(if you are seeing this in an rss reader, please come directly to the post, since the javascript probably won’t work in your reader)

(see also: GOOSE)

2 Comments

Posted in computing, crackbaby, meaningless, projects, toys

Chat room robot haiku post of the day

Posted on November 10, 2006 | 2 comments

Here’s an amusing randomly-generated haiku made by our chat bot today on the IRC channel at work:

who let the dogs out?
when the revolution comes
camels cannot dance

2 Comments

Posted in computing, crackbaby, funny, meaningless

Offensive virtual festive gourds

Posted on November 7, 2006 | 6 comments

I upgraded my Mac text editor today and saw the following surprising entry in the release notes:

[REMOVED] TextMate no longer pays tribute to human sacrifices, rape, nor does it show a picture of the God of the deaths in your dock — ticket 945BEB5D

Normally I’d expect to see a list of bug fixes or new features. The above entry surprised me, and I had to find out why it was there. It all spawned from the company deciding to push out a Halloween-oriented theme for the software. The theme included this dock icon:

Inevitably, someone found it offensive, and their complaint caused it to be removed: “I found this offensive and promptly removed the theme. Please understand I do not think it is offensive because I am some fanatical weirdo. But the roots of Halloween are in animal and human sacrifices as well as rape in the name if Satan.”

Here’s the full story with more detail. I can only imagine what will happen if they push out any Christmas-oriented imagery in their December updates.

6 Comments

Posted in bizarre, computing, meaningless, tech

N-Day

Posted on October 12, 2006 | 3 comments

A software development war story follows. It will bore you to tears if you are not interested in software development. On second thought, it will probably bore you to tears if you ARE interested in software development. Because it truly IS boring. But it was painful, so I purge here now.

We finally went live with our web-based legal case management system for Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy and, as is typical of any software deployment, we encountered problems. A nasty search performance issue cropped up. Searching for trial cases in the app took over two minutes on average. Which is really terrible when you consider how little time it takes for Google to search the entire fracking internet !

So, while troubleshooting for many hours, we extracted the SQL and ran it by hand. Was there an issue with the database itself, or the indexing, or the query SQL?

Nope. The results returned from the database instantaneously.

Weird. We thought, “OK, is there maybe some weird connection pooling problem?”

Nope. Pools were working fine.

“Funky garbage collection janitor thread in the Tapestry web components?”

Nope. The thread was well-behaved.

“Slight differences in the syntax of the SQL generated by different JDBC query modes?”

Nope. Trying different modes resulted in the same fast queries.

We spent about three long days poking at this really obnoxious problem. Finally, through obsessive Googling, I found some obscure forum post explaining a peculiarity of SQL Server’s Unicode-based parameterization of SQL. Turns out that under certain situations, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 is really inefficient when sending Unicode-encoded parameters to queries. So inefficient that it turned our blistering fast search queries into depressing mush.

So, we’d have a database query like this: select [blah] from [table] where [column] = @P

where @P is a Unicode-compatible parameter (in SQL Server, it is of type nvarchar). Then, I added a setting to turn that Unicode stuff off. The result is that in the SQL, the parameter type of nvarchar is replaced with varchar, and the searches went from taking 2 minutes to taking a second or two.

nvarchar vs varchar.

One character. THREE DAYS of lost time. The needle in the haystack almost kicked our asses.

3 Comments

Posted in computing, meaningless, pain, tech

It’s like comparing apples to apples.

Posted on October 11, 2006 | Leave a comment

Galen, our technical manager, experienced a daily WTF moment of his own today. Here are the Java errors he quoted to us in our IRC channel:

15:35:28,248 ERROR [BasicPropertyAccessor] IllegalArgumentException in class: com.legaledge.harmony.summary.MinimalPerson, setter method of property: modelObjectType

15:35:28,248 ERROR [BasicPropertyAccessor] expected type: com.legaledge.harmony.model.objects.EntityType, actual value: com.legaledge.harmony.model.objects.EntityType

“classloaders. love ’em.”

“Hey, I was expecting an APPLE. Instead, you brought me an APPLE. Why in the world did you bring me an APPLE?”

Credit card info was free at McPhee!

Posted on October 6, 2006 | 3 comments

First off: I really like Archie Mcphee. They have awesome, fun stuff and you should go there right now and buy a cool gift for someone for the upcoming Christmas season. But I found a Web security expert there who graduated from WTF University.

A few months back, I attempted to purchase a gift certificate from Archee McPhee’s wonderful online store, McPhee.com. In the middle of filling out the form, formerly located at http://mcphee.com/info/gc.html, I noticed that it had fields for credit card information; however, a quick glance at the URL showed me that there was no SSL connection, and thus any info I’d submit would’ve been in the clear for any enterprising person to snatch. So I started a conversation with Mr. Archee McPhee, who served as a very helpful and friendly go-between for me and their IT person. After explaining to their IT person that credit card information submitted via plain old port 80 HTTP is as naked as a newborn, the IT person replied thusly:

“the gc buy page is NOT secure, in that it doesn’t use SSL, but in this case it doesn’t matter. this particular page kicks off a script on the server which then transfers the information to us via an encrypted email. no credit card information is ever passed on via HTTP, therefore the SSL certificate doesn’t come into play. A sniffer would have to be running on our actual server, since no internet traffic is generated by the form post. In fact, the gc.html page does not even touch the cookie.”

Those of you who are familiar with how the web works will see the flaws in this logic right away. Basically, it’s like a waiter at a restaurant putting my credit card information in their protected safe while taping a copy of the information to the front door.

Thankfully, they have taken down their online gift certificate ordering page. Hopefully they will put up a secure form soon so I can resume giving the gift of bacon strip bandages, bobblehead Jesus dolls, and avenging unicorn playsets. Despite my experience, I still highly recommend Archie McPhee – don’t let this post stop you from buying stuff from them!

And here is an interesting related post from spugbrap.