Archive for July, 2006

Siggraph 2006

Sunday, July 30th, 2006

Siggraph 2006 is in Boston, and they had a free public reception this afternoon (which I saw in one of the free weekly papers, but was unable to confirm through official channels). I headed over there with Marty, and fortunately the paper was right. We were able to check out the emerging technology area (their page is here and a video preview is here) There were many really neat applications. Lots of what my advisor at Tufts would call reality-based-interfaces (RBI) where the user interacts with a computer application by manipulating real physical objects. There were many table top devices, one where multiple users could collaborate to create “music” (more like sound) by manipulating a large number of objects on a projector table. Turning objects to make them louder and softer and moving them around to change their interactions.

I think my favorite demo that I actually got to use was the Forehead Retina System because it made me really able to sense objects through physical sensations on my forehead. The effect really has to be experienced to be believed. It worked really well for linear objects, where it was easy to feel a line moving back and forth on my forehead, but not so much for a round object where the effect just felt mushy.

We also got to see the Art Gallery where there were some cool works, including an exhibit where you could interact with butterflies in side a mirror.

Stuff like this makes me wonder what I am doing with my career…

Posted in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI/CHI), Technology | No Comments »

More macbook wireless

Tuesday, July 11th, 2006

I spent over an hour on the phone today with Apple support about my macbooks’s tendency to drop wireless connections when on battery power. I didn’t really expect a resolution going in, rather I just wanted to have them increment the counter on the problem so they’ll finally fix the real issue, which still appears to be power management settings when the network is idle. I worked with level one support for a while changing this setting and that, and finally got transferred to a product specialist. He of course insisted there was no problem with the macbook’s wireless. Instead he blamed my linksys router. The one interesting thing we found out is that If I have my iMac create a computer to computer network and share its internet connection, my macbook will stay connected to that just fine.

The official apple workaround is to buy an apple airport base station, which seems like an expensive fix to me.

I’m also amazed that the techs I spoke to profess they haven’t heard of this issue, when it does seem to be happening to an awful lot of people. There’s this thread at apple in particular.

In the meantime running iStumbler in the background seems to help, so that’s what I’ll do until apple comes out of denial and fixes the problem.

While we’re on the topic – anyone who runs a macbook with only half a gig of RAM is out of his or her mind. It is a dog configured like that. Now that I have 2 gigs this machine screams. Don’t even think about having less than a gig.

Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »

My Naturalization Interview

Tuesday, July 11th, 2006

I had my naturalization interview today. Scheduled for 1:30, but didn’t actually start until 2:40, then it only took 15-20 minutes at the most. Although I passed the tests of English and US history, a decision cannot be made yet – apparently my security check is still pending.

Some highlights:

  • The waiting room had a bulletin board that hosted the Association of Immigration Attorneys Essay Contest – from 1997
  • If you’re not into nine year old essays or terrible MSNBC anchor-bimbos you can always stare longingly at the official portrait of Michael Chertoff, head of homeland security. What is it about being a cabinet level leader that makes it so you want to have your picture hung all over the place like some kind of minor deity?
  • If anyone from homeland security or the NSA is reading this, let someone know that “naturalization” is spelled “naturlaization” in the middle of form N-652 “Naturalization Interview results”. Scratch that, I mentioned the mispelling on the phone earlier, so I’m sure the NSA already knows. Thanks AT&T!
  • Writing the sentence “I like good food” is enough to prove that one has a command of writing the english language
  • Apparently you know enough about the principles for which the US government stands if you know the answers to the following questions: What colors are in the flag? How many stars are on the flag? How many states are there? Who was the first president? Who’s the president now?. What do we celebrate on July 4th? Pretty demanding!
  • There seems to be a delicious irony that one of the questions asked is about whether I am opposed to the violent overthrow of governments, coming from a government that started that way and keeps on doing it all over the world? Could George Washington have answered yes to that question truthfully? Let the record show I don’t believe in the violent overthrow of governments.
  • The sentence “You passed the tests of English and U.S. history and government.” seems to be pretty ambiguous to me

I hate being asked for information by anyone more than once, but that was how most of the session was spent – confirming the answers I had already given.

Now we wait.

Posted in Life | 3 Comments »

My Itunes Library: many unplayed songs.

Wednesday, July 5th, 2006

I’m interested by data and information visualization, but unfortunately know next to nothing about statistics or data analysis. I’m trying to learn some stats on my own, so I’ve been casting about for some “interesting” data to mine.

While using iTunes one day, I noticed that there were quite a few of the ~2900 songs in my library that had never been played even once. I was curious about the distribution of play counts, and while I was at it wondered how strong the correlation between the length of time a song had been in the library and the number of times it was played. I exported the Library and wrote some python scripts to extract data (using this helpful library to parse the plist-in-XML file that itunes exports).

It turns out I have 208 unplayed songs in my library, and additionally lots of low single digit playcount songs. Here’s an (ugly excel generated) histogram:
playcounts.png

It doesn’t really hold to the power law well because of the way it seems to level off for a while, and the dip at zero playcounts.

While I was delving around, I figured I would see if theres any correlation between the length of time a song has been in my library, and the number of times it’s been played. The dot plot turned out interesting. agevsplay.png

Looks like there’s a weak positive correlation between age and playcount, which is to be expected. What intrigued me more is the vertical lines of dots that seem to indicate music being added in significant bunches which at least on first glance seem to be bigger than one album.

One of these days I’ll have to slap together something interactive so I can see what songs those clusters actually are.

Posted in Musings | No Comments »