Random Developments

This weekend I went for a walk in the Sherbrooke Forest, part of the Dandenong Ranges National Park. I followed a track described in the book 150 Walks in Victoria, by Tyrone Thomas and Andrew Close, and everything went fairly well.

To get to the track, I took the train to Belgrave and, from the station, walked approximately 1km (uphill) on Old Monbulk Road to the gates of the park. From there, I followed the trail in a clockwise direction, first north up to Grant’s Picnic Grounds (close to Monbulk Rd and “infested” with cockatoos trying to get food from the families eating there), then approximately south-east on Lyrebird Walk, continuing south on Neumann Track then south, and later west, on Paddy’s Track leading to an apparently unnamed track going west from a clearing known as Jack the Miners back to the starting point. A map of this path is here, including some pictures I took on the way (more pictures at my Flickr page).

The length of the path is around 6.3km, with some significant vertical movement as well; the first leg of the track leads steadily up, while the southward leg goes a bit up and then steeply down. The final few hundred metres go steeply up and reduced my average speed significantly…

This was also the first “field test” of the GPS unit I bought (and mentioned here), a Magellan eXplorist 400. It did very well (as the map linked to above shows), but I did find a few things out:

• the “trip odometer”, which should tell me how far I’ve moved, is either very inaccurate or using the wrong units; at the end of the track it was showing “4.0km”, while the recorded route was actually 6.31km long (which equals 3.92 miles…); this is definitely not good
• when you turn the device on, it takes around 60 seconds to lock to the satellites and get your initial position; that’s normal and more or less unavoidable because of the way the satellites transmit data; however, if you are moving — however slowly —, it seems the device won’t reliably find the satellites after any amount of time; this is not very good, but I can live with that (after it finds your initial position, it can be moved with no problems; also, being inside a backpack is not a problem)
• it won’t find the satellites from inside a train; I’m honestly curious about how it will perform inside a car
• marking positions is a very easy and quick process, but “typing” using that on-screen keyboard and mini-joystick is a pain

I really like GPS; it’s one of the cooler “general use” technologies out there.

GPS is the closest thing we have to a worldwide information network. Granted, it doesn’t really give you that much information: it will tell you where you are and what time it is (assuming you know your time zone), but nothing else. And, ok, it doesn’t really work indoors and accuracy is not great in urban areas (because of shadows and reflections caused by buildings), but it’s still very cool. Think about it: I can be (almost) anywhere in the world and a small handheld device will be able to tell me, in just a few seconds, exactly where I am using only information from a constellation of satellites flying overhead, unseen and ignored by most people. Fifty years ago this would be the stuff of sci-fi.

The reason I’m mentioning this is that I recently bought a handheld GPS receiver, and I spent a few hours playing with it yesterday. The reason for that is that I’ve recently started engaging in bushwalking (or “hiking” for those outside Australia and NZ) with the Melbourne Bushwalkers. After my first somewhat “serious” walk, in the area of the Lorne waterfalls (about 13km downhill in the rain…), I tried to identify the path the group followed on a map and failed miserably. So, I thought “wouldn’t it be nice to be able to record the track so I could, later, trace it on a map?”. Well, a GPS receiver is a good way of doing that.

The model I bought is a Magellan eXplorist 400. It’s a discontinued model, but it is fairly decent and there’s a healthy market of new units on eBay for very good prices. It can track up to 12 satellites and will use ground-based (WAAS) and satellite-based (EGNOS) auxiliary signals to increase accuracy where available; none of those are available in Australia, alas. It has a grayscale LCD display with a reddish (amber?) backlight and can display fairly detailed background maps (it won’t give you address-based directions or convert addresses to positions without additional software), and it uses SD cards as additional memory to record tracks, routes, points of interest and maps. It’s also fully waterproof (full immersion of up to 1m for up to 30 minutes), which is great for rainy days… And it comes with a USB cable to upload and download data from/to a computer.

I haven’t yet used it “in the field”, so I can’t talk much about it’s performance there; I hope to remedy this soon enough. I can’t talk about battery durability either, for now. I did try to use it in central Melbourne yesterday, with sort of mixed results… it does well in areas that are somewhat open, but “canyon-like” streets (with tall buildings on both sides) are usually blind spots (I wonder how it does in real canyons…). I uploaded the track log to Google Earth, generated a KML file and made a public Google Map from it, which is here; the recorded path is in a barely-visible light blue, and it actually covers about half of the path I followed; I guess it lost the signal in the other areas. The receiver was inside my backpack, which may also not be the best possible position for it.

I will be using it in future walks (and in a trip to remote areas later this year, where I plan to use GPS data to geotag the pictures I’ll take — and to not get lost, also), and I’ll write about how it does later on.

For those in Melbourne interested in seeing an iPhone “in real life”, there is probably going to be one at the Melbourne Twitter Users Meetup, this Thursday, 5:30pm, at the Horse Bazaar (397 Little Lonsdale St), courtesy of Ben Barren.

You can’t make calls with it here, but everything else works, and the Horse Bazaar has free wi-fi.

I attended the Google Developer Day, “Sydney edition”, yesterday. There were lots of interesting announcements: the first session was about Google Gears, and it was very exciting. The demonstration (achieved by, literally, unplugging the laptop from the network mid-presentation) went very well, and gave everyone ideas. Soon after, Mapplets were also introduced (well, actually they had been mentioned briefly at Where 2.0 the day before); they’re sort of gadgets for Google Maps, allowing the creation of “instant mashups”.

Also interesting were the “non-announcements”. Everyone got a brochure at the beginning of the day with a list of several Google products, and one of them was the Google Mashup Editor; when I read it, it sounded like it was something new, but it wasn’t mentioned by anyone during the day, so I kind of assumed it was actually something “old” that I hadn’t heard about. It turns out it wasn’t.

It was a great event, and it was interesting being the first ones to learn about Google Gears (as one of the presenters mentioned, usually Australia wakes up to news from the US; yesterday, it was the other way around). It was a bit ironic that, being at the event, I couldn’t play with the tool (or even write about it) yesterday, while everyone else who got the news online could start right away. But they didn’t get the great free food Google gave us

Well, not here. Here.

If you don’t like the idea of the AACS being the only organisation that owns a number, now you can have your own. And you, too, can demand that people remove your number from their website, thanks to the DMCA!

This is how it works: by visiting the page linked to above, created by Edward W. Felten, you will be assigned a unique, 128-bit integer number. That number is used to encrypt a haiku written by the author of the page, becoming, then, a circumvention device as defined by the DMCA. All rights are transferred to you, and thus you become the legal owner of a number. Or so goes the movie industry’s thinking.

My number is F9 21 B7 FD DD BE 56 91 92 13 63 FD 4A 2C A5 E7, but it’s illegal for you to know this, even if I’m the one telling you.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read this and this.

Yesterday, at lunch, we had an interesting problem. Our group wanted to order a chicken pizza; however, we had one person who wanted red capsicum on the pizza, but no mushrooms; one other wanted mushrooms but no capsicum; and a few others wanted both. We ended up ordering a chicken pizza, half with capsicum and 3/4 with mushrooms; what we had in mind was something like this:

It took us a while to get the waitress to understand the order; we had to draw a diagram not unlike the one you see here. The fact that she was taking the order in a PDA-like handheld device can’t have helped. And we could see from our table that it took her quite a while to explain the order to the guy actually making the pizzas.

And it didn’t quite work out. In the pizza we actually got, the quarter that should have both mushrooms and capsicum had only mushrooms; so, it was a chicken pizza, 1/4 with capsicum and 3/4 with mushrooms. We’ll try again next week.

Does anyone know of a pizza place that will accept arbitrary areas for toppings and allow for the toppings to partially overlap? It’s probably not a common requirement, except maybe for places that frequently cater to geeks…

Forget 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42. The new numbers are 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.

I’ve been hearing about Twitter for a while now, but recently it has reached a peak: you can’t read a tech-related blog without seeing a comment about it.

Well, I already had an account (created back in November, updated only once with a generic “working”), so I decided to log in and take a second look. Man, is this thing slow! It takes forever to do anything; the process of loading the home page and logging in took almost five minutes. Is it always like that? Or is it peak time now (8.30pm in the SF Bay Area)?

My guess is that they became more popular than they expected.

I’ve just finished watching the first season of Star Trek: Enterprise (yes, I know that I’m a few years behind). For those not familiar with the series, this is a prequel to all other Star Trek TV series and films, and it follows the adventures of the crew of the starship Enterprise NX-01, the first human ship to reach warp 5. The first episode is set in the year 2151.

I was never really “into” any of the Star Trek series, and I don’t think I ever watched a full episode of any series other than Enterprise. That said, I had a fair idea of the “feel” of the Star Trek universe; I did watch some of the movies, and, anyway, Star Trek is part of popular culture.

However, living in Australia, I have to say one thing: the quarantine procedures of the Enterprise crew are appalling! Granted: scientifically speaking, the series leaves a lot to be desired (in one of the episodes, two crewmen land on a comet and walk around in what seems like Earth gravity…). Ditto for social and practical issues; it’s definitely no Battlestar Galactica, you’ll never see engineering going into a strike or the crew looking for a planet to mine for fuel. But, still, they should be aware of the risks of coming into contact with alien life forms. And they get bitten by that at least twice in the first season; you’d expect them to learn after the first one.

However, coming to think of it, the Vulcans are as cavalier about biological isolation as the humans (and any other humanoid race we’ve seen). Is everyone living in denial?

In 1964, an IBM 1401 computer was delivered to Iceland; it was one of the first large computers in that country. Now, 43 years later, the result of that event is this:

That’s a segment of the stage performance of “IBM 1401, A User’s Manual”, by the Icelandic musician Jóhann Jóhannsson. It has to be seen to be believed. The CD of his work has titles such as “IBM 1403 Printer” and “IBM 729 II Magnetic Tape Unit”. More details at his web site.

The front page of Techmeme has an article from Zunerama about, say, difficulties sharing songs between Zunes (Zune is the Microsoft answer to the iPod, and one of its exclusive features is the ability to wirelessly send songs to another Zune). It seems that the owners of the rights to some songs — the most popular ones, apparently — decided that they should not be shared between customers, even if the shared copy can only be played three times and expires in a few days.

Now, the famous response from Steve Jobs to this “sharing” feature of the Zune is that, by the time you manage to try to send a song to a girl, she’s already gone; it’s much better to get close to her and share the earphones instead (preferably with an iPod).

So… any bets on how long until record companies try to outlaw the sharing of earphones?

As I said, I started watching BSG somewhat late; I finished season 1 just after Channel Ten started showing season 2, and have been catching up with the episodes since. And this weekend I did it: I watched the sixth episode of the third season (”Torn”), and had a very weird feeling afterwards: there were no episodes left to watch! (until next week, that is) That’s a first for me.

About the latest episodes (possible spoilers ahead): the start of season 3 redeems any problems from the end of season 2. Episode 4 (”Exodus pt 2″), in particular, is probably the single best TV episode of any genre of the last several years. Although… it’s a bit odd that, at the end of episode 5, we’re almost back to the middle of season 2: Laura is the president, there’s only one battlestar, Adama Jr. is the CAG, Thigh is drunk… even the number of survivors is sharply down from the peak reached right after the Pegasus showed up. At least Thigh’s very annoying wife is gone.

The “cylon disease” plot shows some promise; I still can’t quite figure out what Baltar plans to do, but probably the best guide is what Lt Gaeta (is he still an official?) said: his ability for self-preservation has no match. He may now be about to realise that staying with the cylons is not the best way to do that.

Waiting for the next episode…

I got “addicted” to the new version of Battlestar Galactica somewhat late; I watched the miniseries on DVD a few months ago, and then ran through the whole of the first and second seasons as fast as I could (which was not that fast; I just finished season two this weekend, and I’m already four episodes behind in season 3). The rest of this post may contain spoilers to anyone who has not finished watching season 2 yet; in Australia, the last episode broadcast on Channel Ten was 2-12, “Resurrection Ship, Part 2″, with eight episodes left to the end of the season.

For those who don’t watch it: the story is basically a war between humans and intelligent robotic assistants created by them, known as cylons, who rebelled against their creators; the humans don’t live on Earth, but on twelve planets known as the “twelve colonies”, with Earth being a mythological thirteenth colony. As the miniseries starts, a truce is in effect and humans and cylons live in separate solar systems in relative peace; the cylons break the truce with a surprise attack and manage to kill almost every single human being on the twelve colonies. The few remaining ones (mostly people who were in transit between planets at the time of the attack), protected by the only remaining military ship (Battlestar Galactica) flee their solar system and are pursued. The rest of the series follows what happens next; at the end of the second season, there are just over 47,000 humans left.

One thing that is interesting about this series is that there are no “role models” among the characters; there’s not a single one of them that is not significantly flawed in some way (or, to put it in another way, the characters are human). One could say that the “villains”, the cylons, are usually more admirable than the remaining humans, but the fact that they did kill 20 billion people makes them hard to recommend as role models.

I also like the way in which the human society is not shown as “utopic”; it is depicted more realistically, with dissenters, strikers, criminals, terrorists, religious fanatics, corrupt government officials etc. One particular episode deals with the black market that comes to life across the surviving ships; other, with whether abortion should be outlawed in a society that desperately needs people to reproduce. A recurring theme is whether captured enemies should be treated as prisoners or as “equipment” (they are not human, but machines).

The second season has much less “action” that the first, but it’s much more entertaining exactly because it deals in more interesting themes. I liked all episodes (some more than others… 2-14, “Black Market”, was not particularly good in my opinion), except what happens in the season final after the text “One year later” appears on the screen. It’s not that the rest of the episode is bad… it was more the general feeling of “o how the mighty have fallen”… and the webisodes that advanced the plot before the start of season 3 keep the same feeling going.

Speaking of the final of season 2: Gaius was exactly the kind of president I would expect him to be, but I was left with a few questions (which won’t make sense to people who are not following the series):

• how come Adama (the father) accepted Gaius’s orders so readily? he was always ready to confront the former president and to go against her orders when they did not make sense militarily, but he sets out to do what Baltar tells him with no argument, even after the nuclear explosion that destroyed Cloud 9; why is that? it seemed very much out of character
• how does the cylon occupation of New Caprica fit with the message delivered by the cylon “preacher” and the apparent de-occupation of the original Caprica (and, supposedly, the other eleven colonies)?
• the original Caprica is not exactly a “nuclear wasteland”, as mentioned by the then president Rosslyn; haven’t the rescue-party members (or the rescued people, for that matter) related back about how habitable is the planet?

Maybe some of these are answered in the first episodes of the third season… time to start working on them!

Great article: Faith Based Programming.

I think I know some people who practice it.

Or, diary of a novice amateur astronomer, part 1.

I have recently started giving more attention to something I’ve been interested in for a long time: astronomy. Part of this included being a little more “hands on”; that is, not only reading about it, but also going out there and doing something. Which, in the case of astronomy, means observing.

In my particular case, I am disadvantaged by the fact that I live in the middle of a large city. Not only is my field of view severely limited by tall buildings (and the lack of a backyard), but also light pollution effectively hides from view everything but the brighter bodies (so much so that it is almost impossible to identify constellations; the limiting magnitude from my place is very close to 0).

magnitude is a measure of brightness of celestial bodies; the lowest the magnitude, the brighter the body; Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, has magnitude -1.44; the magnitude doesn’t change with time for most stars, but does change for variable stars as well as for planets, asteroids and other solar system bodies

limiting magnitude is the highest magnitude for which bodies are visible in a particular location (and viewing with a particular piece of equipment, if that’s the case); for locations away from any light sources (”dark sky” locations), the naked eye limiting magnitude is usually around 6 for most people

In any case, one of my first steps into the observing world (or universe) was joining the Astronomical Society of Victoria (ASV). Apart from monthly general meetings, the society also has several special interest sections that meet regularly. It also makes available to members some observing facilities: a small observatory in the suburbs of Melbourne, a dark-sky site in country Victoria, portable telescopes for limited-time loans and some limited access to the historical observatory located at the Botanical Gardens. There are many benefits, such as a subject-specific library, but probably the best one is the contact with other similarly interested people.

The second step, in a way, was to acquire some observing equipment. I’m too much of a novice to be trusted with a decent telescope, and I didn’t really want to spend money with a cheap one (since I don’t plan on being a novice for too long, and I’d want a better one very soon). Binoculars, on the other hand, are reasonably inexpensive, easy to operate, portable and very good for beginners. I’ll write about how to choose a binocular in the next article.

Now, I started this blog intending to write, at least at some level, about subjects related to software development (hence its title). I even did that, every now and then, and still plan on doing. So, if that’s what you look for, don’t despair: it will show up. Possibly even with an astronomical inclination.