Stephen Skory

Bookmarks for November 10th through November 25th

Stephen Skory — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 00:00:37 +0000

These are my links for November 10th through November 25th:

Mercurial binary packages for Windows and Mac OS X -
WordPress Images Hotlink protection plugin - Protect Blog Images from images theft / hotlinking - You can also go the manual .htaccess way, but this is nice, too.
Jumpcut: Minimalist Clipboard Buffering for OS X - An opensource Mac OS X clipboard buffer, which will save your copy/paste history.
SUPER OBAMA WORLD - Super Mario World -> Super Obama World!
UCSD Math Thesis Archive - Are you going to try to get a UCSD PhD? Use this LaTeX template!

Sell My Volvo?

Stephen Skory — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:57:13 +0000

I am considering selling my Volvo. I drive it perhaps two or three times a week because I ride my bike to school. Melissa has a fine automobile that she would let me use. My car is a 1997 model (it was actually sold in 1996) 850 T5 Vovlo wagon with every premium package except for the ‘winter’ and multidisc CD changer packages. Kelly Blue Book says I can sell it for between $4000 and $5000. I encourage you to tell me what do to in the comments. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Do I sell my car?
Yes, sell it:	No, keep it:
I hardly drive my car, but I have to pay car insurance all the time. Also, I need to register it by January ($100) and get it smogged ($30?). It’s twelve years old and things are breaking: the key fob; the odometer; the backlight on the radio display; the driver-side seat is ripped. Who knows what’s next? It’s likely going to be something I can’t just live without. Melissa’s car is nearly a decade newer, more fuel efficient and almost as spacious. $4000+ in my pocket is nice. Until I graduate, I don’t picture myself needing a car except on the weekends. And when I graduate, my new job will pay more, so if I need to commute, I will be able to afford a car more easily. If I sell my car, I’ll split the car insurance costs with Melissa on her car which will save both of us money.	If I am going to own any car, this is just about the perfect car for me. I really like it. It’s spacious enough, but not too big. It’s got a killer roof rack system that would be hard to do on another car. It’s safer than Melissa’s car, primarily because it’s heavier (gotta love Volvos!). I already own the car fully, so the only recurrent costs are insurance and fuel. I could call up my insurance agent and get much lower coverage, especially collision coverage.

Corvallis Photos

Stephen Skory — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:41:45 +0000

I’ve posted my photos from Corvallis. There aren’t any truly spectacular photos, but the fall colors in town and on campus (below) were nice. The outcome of the Cal/Oregon State game was disappointing, as you can see on our faces. Everything in Corvallis and on campus is beaver-themed; he jumbotron in Reser stadium is called the “Dam Cam.” On Sunday Matt, Tona, Jenny and I walked around campus, which is quite nice with many brick buildings and leafy tree-rimmed quads. The weather was great on game day, but cold and overcast on Sunday.

Losing in Corvallis

Stephen Skory — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 01:01:06 +0000

The Bears lost to the Beavers today. Another season of mediocrity for the Bears is confirmed.

I attached the GPS to the window on the plane from Oakland to Portland. Check out the speed (it’s in M.P.H.)!

More photos to come!

Bookmarks for October 24th through November 5th

Stephen Skory — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 19:18:04 +0000

These are my links for October 24th through November 5th:

LaTeX/Mathematics - Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks - One of many concise latex-math guides.
Air Mouse - Turn your iPod touch or iPhone into a remote for your Win or Mac computer. Not free, but pretty darn awesome.
LaTeXiT - Make small image or PDF files of latex code, suitable for export into Powerpoint, Keynote or webpages.
Scanf - A Python C-like scanf tool.
Poladroid project : the easiest and funniest Polaroid Image Maker - Make your digital photos look like a Polaroid.

Content of Their Character

Stephen Skory — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 17:56:20 +0000

I think, considering last nights events, we all should listen to Dr. King’s most famous speech again, and contemplate the history of yesterday:

Yes

Stephen Skory — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 06:12:06 +0000

Amazing.

I can’t wait for January 20, 2009.

By Popular Demand

Stephen Skory — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 18:11:19 +0000

Voltron retrieving:

Play Quicktime version

Work Buddy

Stephen Skory — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 04:40:02 +0000

As a computational astrophysicist, I can work pretty much wherever there is an internet connection (except the San Diego public library, but that’s another story), so at least a day or two a week I work from home. And when I do, I have a little work buddy who sits by my chair waiting for me to throw a foam ball across the apartment so she can fetch it (seriously!). I try to ignore her so I can get work done, but as soon as I even look at her:

Play Quicktime version

She’s cuter than my work buddies at school, of course.

Bookmarks for October 8th through October 16th

Stephen Skory — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 23:08:15 +0000

These are my links for October 8th through October 16th:

RegExr: Online Regular Expression Testing Tool - Yet another online javascript regex builder/tester.
LinkChecker - check websites and HTML documents for broken links -
Passwordless ssh - Linuxconfig.org - How to make a passwordless login to other machines. Many people have asked me about this from time to time.
IIPImage » Images - How to create tiled tiffs using several image tool packages.
VIPS - VipsWiki - Image processing tools, focusing on extra-large images.
GraphicsMagick Image Processing System - A graphics toolkit based on and branched from ImageMagick.

Finally, a Triton

Stephen Skory — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 21:16:30 +0000

UC Berkeley has bear statues, UCLA has their bruin statue, UC Irvine even has an anteater. Now UC San Diego has a Triton!

As I walked to lunch I saw the unveiling ceremony ending while the UCSD band (we have a band?) played the UCSD fight song (we have a fight song?). Below the statue there is a few streams of bubbly water and a a plaque which explains that the Triton doesn’t get to use his awesome trident, he just blows really hard on his conch which scares all the other gods and baddies away.

I, for one, am now waiting for the UC Santa Cruz banana slug statue.

SDSC Optiportal

Stephen Skory — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 17:30:17 +0000

My adviser Professor Mike Norman, as part of his job at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, purchased an optiportal system for the new SDSC building which is opening today. An optiportal system is a wall of monitors powered by networked computers such that the screens behave as one monitor. Very high resolution images and movies can be tiled across the screens, as you can see below. Movies and animations can also be tiled across the screens.

My labmates and I (Rick Wagner in particular) spent the last week feverishly building the system. The primary work was to build the monitor rack. It has many bolts and sliders and adjustments. We arranged to have two holes drilled through the wall for the monitor cables. The 30-inch screens require a very particular kind of cable and getting enough of the right kind that were long enough to reach all the screens was surprisingly difficult.

My main task was to convert some of the publicly available high-resolution astronomical images into tiled TIFFs. Tiled TIFFs break the data up into easy to scale tiles, which is essential for the optiportal. I used many of the images from this page, including the 403 megapixel Carina Nebula image linked there. It was quite frustrating. I tried half a dozen computers and iterations of ImageMagick and VIPS before I finally got a combination that worked.

In some ways, this is worse than a projector. There are gaps between the screens. This requires multiple expensive computers and many, many cables. However, there are some big advantages to this setup. There is no projector that has anywhere the same resolution as this optiportal (2560×1600x20 = 81.92 megapixels). Just one of the monitors is better than all but the most specialized and expensive projectors. The screens are bright and clear, even in normal lighting conditions. Unlike a projector, standing in front of the screen doesn’t shadow the image. It has to be seen for yourself; twenty 30-inch monitors are awesome to behold.

Each four-monitor column is powered by a HP xw8600 workstation with one 4-core 2.33GHz Xeon processor, 4GB of RAM, two NVIDIA Quadro FX4600 768MB video cards with dual output, running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. There is a sixth identical workstation that serves as a head node which sits in front of the screens and controls the output on the wall. There is also a HP ML370 server that has a 1TB RAID5 disk array, and has room for an additional 1TB. Eventually, all the machines will be connected by a 10Gb CX-4 network using a ProCurve 6400cl-6XG switch, and the head node and disk server will be connected to the outside world with a 10Gb optical connection. The monitor array is controlled using CGLX which is developed at Calit2, which is here at UCSD.

Science will not be performed on the optiportal, at least the major calculations won’t. Instead, visualizations of simulations run on supercomputers will be displayed and analyzed. The human eye and brain is still a superior judge of the accuracy and meaning of data than a set of conditional equations. It is often necessary to actually see the raw data as clearly as possible. The point of the eventual 10Gb optical connection is that various parallel visualization programs like VisIt and ParaView will be practical. These programs do the data analysis on a remote supercomputer and the visualization is sent to the optiportal in real time for display. In this way, terabytes of raw data don’t have to be transferred off the supercomputer, and the computationally intensive part of the visualization takes place on the supercomputer, which has far more processors, RAM and disk space than the optiportal. I hope to someday have some of my data displayed in this fashion.

I’ve put up some pictures and movies in my gallery, and I encourage you to check it out. There’s a really fun roller coaster animation I think you’ll like.

Poorer than a CEO

Stephen Skory — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:47:38 +0000

Above is a graph showing my net worth since January 2007. I have removed the actual dollar values for the bars because I’m ashamed of how poor I am. Or wealthy I am. I’m not telling. But remember that I’m a grad student, not a former CEO of a failed investment bank… you get the idea.

I’ve put two numbers in orange on the graph. If in my richest half month I had one dollar, now I have 68 cents. Put another way, I’m now about two-thirds of my former self, and this took five months. The graph above includes my cash accounts, which haven’t gone down, so my investments have declined even more than a third. Luckily, I don’t need that money any time soon (I have to graduate before that), but it’s a bit depressing.

It’s also an opportunity to buy some really cheap bank stocks and hold them until they recover. Which would more or less cancel out the inevitable tax increases my generation will have to pay to bail out our selfish parents.

At least I can say that I’m ahead of the curve on the grad school thing.

Bookmarks for September 19th through October 6th

Stephen Skory — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 23:00:58 +0000

These are my links for September 19th through October 6th:

Best of Hubble: Large Images - Links to ultra-high resolution Hubble images.
bbcp - High-speed multi-threaded scp file transfers.
Perian - The swiss-army knife of QuickTime® components - Increase the number of video formats Quicktime can play.
Hulu - Arrested Development - Full Episodes and Clips streaming online for free - Arrested Development shows online, all the time, for free (modulo short commercials). Why did I not know about this earlier?
Majestic-12: Distributed Search Engine - An interesting distributed search engine, but I find prime numer searches more compelling than this to run on my computer.

The Experiments End

Stephen Skory — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 03:39:28 +0000

Play Quicktime version

1 min 6 sec, 2.6 MB, no sound

My beard experiment has ended. As part of the journey, I did an experimental time lapse, above. As you will see, I slowly shaved my beard and rotated the chair. I should have thought more about exposure consistency between frames. Doing it inside would have worked better but I thought the outside view was more interesting.

I admit that a few hours later I am still occasionally reaching up to stroke my beard, and finding nothing there.

I took a break when my mustache was in full flight and posed with Melissa. As you can tell by her expression, she loved the ’stache.

Bookmarks for September 15th through September 19th

Stephen Skory — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 22:38:48 +0000

These are my links for September 15th through September 19th:

pngout - A Mac OS X & Linux png file size optimizer.
Oosah - Homepage - Yet another online storage site, but this one offers 1 TB of free storage.
QuickRef.org - all your docs are belong to us - PHP, Perl, CSS, HTML, Java, JavaScript, MySQL, Ruby, Python, and more - Quick reference for many programming languages.
FiveThirtyEight.com: Electoral Projections Done Right - A site that collects election polling data and produces a ridiculous amout of plots and tables from it.
.Pear – Trac - A gallery2 theme that mimics Apple's .me gallery.

Note: (Added by Stephen by hand) For the top link above, if you have a bunch of pngs in a bunch of folders, you can use this script to shrink them all at once:

^?View Code BASH

#!/bin/bash
 
for i in $( find . -name \*.png\* -print  )
do
~/bin/pngout -y $i
done

Bookmarks for September 10th through September 15th

Stephen Skory — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 18:00:41 +0000

These are my links for September 10th through September 15th:

The Sect of Homokaasu - The Rasterbator - Turn images into multi-page pdfs to make wall posters.
iStat Menus - Monitor your macs CPU, network and other levels.
Welcome to MusicBrainz! - MusicBrainz - Correctly tag your music files.
The FactCheck Wire - A blog checking the truth of statements made by candidates and goverment officials.
Philip Barclay and Grace Mutandwa - A blog about Zimbabwe from British Diplomats.

Bookmarks for September 4th through September 9th

Stephen Skory — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 03:02:29 +0000

These are my links for September 4th through September 9th:

YouMail Home - Free online, customizable cell phone voicemail.
Enzo1.5 - Enzo - Trac - Enzo 1.5 wiki homepage
CHDK - CHDK Wiki - Canon digital camera opensource firmware.
Google Earth Satellite Database - This file shows in real time the positions and names of thousands of satellites around earth.
TocMacro - Trac Hacks - Plugins Macros etc. - Trac - A hack to make table of contents lists for Trac wikis.

Failed Time Lapse

Stephen Skory — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 18:31:40 +0000

Two days ago Melissa and I drove from Berkeley to San Diego. We drove on US 101 for most of the way, but used Hwy 1 between Monterey and San Luis Obispo. The weather was fantastic and the scenery beats I-5 any day, even on 101. It does take longer, but it’s worth it if you don’t have arrive at the destination at any particular time. I wanted to record the journey, as I have before, but this time looking forward. Using the Canon A620 my father gave me and my laptop connected to it using USB, I managed to do this without too much interference. However, the batteries on the camera died early on, so I didn’t capture the whole trip, or even the most scenic parts of it. In the future I’ll need to use an external power source.

I am sharing it because there’s no harm. It’s not very good, so I didn’t bother to add any music. Below the video you can see rough route the video covers on a Google map.

The video lasts 1 minute 44 seconds, is 5.6 MB in size, and the frames are separated by eight seconds.

Play Quicktime version

View Larger Map

The Skinny Guy is Favored in the Eating Contest

Stephen Skory — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 15:22:35 +0000

Now this is what I’m talking about (click for full size):

Original here.

Bookmarks for August 21st through August 29th

Stephen Skory — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 05:02:46 +0000

These are my links for August 21st through August 29th:

Google Reader - Stephen’s shared items - A page showing my shared items on google reader.
Stormpulse / Hurricane tracking, mapping - A cool web 2.0 storm tracker.
mykle systems labs » Blog Archive » Speed-Vest! - A cycling speed vest. It shows the speed on the back.
WordPress › FeedBurner Widget « WordPress Plugins - Show how many subscribers you have to your Feedburner RSS feed.
URL Absolutifier WordPress Plugin | SYP - Make relative links in posts have the full path in RSS/Atom feeds.

‘Real’ Medal Count

Stephen Skory — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 17:40:01 +0000

As a follow-up to the announcement that all judged sports are being eliminated from the Olympics, I’m publishing below an updated medal count. Unlike the medal counts you’ve seen, this one only counts the ‘real’ medals; events that aren’t ridiculous.

You’ll notice that China, which leads the gold rankings by a fair amount in the link above, is by far the most affected by this correct ranking. Indeed, only three of the American golds are improper, while 25 Chinese golds are trash, which is just less than half their total. Eliminating judged sports is not anti-China, it just happens that China focuses on those kinds of events. Many other nations, including the USA, lose a fair number of overall medals due to this modification.

(If you’re looking at this with an RSS reader, you’ll have to view the full post to see the tally.)

Bookmarks for August 17th through August 21st

Stephen Skory — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:13:28 +0000

These are my links for August 17th through August 21st:

GridFTP | National Institute for Computational Sciences - How to set up a gridftp account on teragrid machines.
MacMP3Gain - Fix mp3 volume levels intelligently
Engrish Funny: Engrish Pictures That Is Your Funny Engrish -
delizzy - del.icio.us Bookmarks Search Engine - Search the contents of your del.icio.us bookmarks (not just their titles).
Dvd Hunter - DVD organizer/library app

Gateway Cycling

Stephen Skory — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:01:13 +0000

I recorded the BMX races last night out of curiosity. (I’ve included some HD screen grabs of crashes for your enjoyment; click on them for the full size image.) BMX has been introduced to increase the interest of young people, those who like Xtreme sports. NBC even has a BMX crashes compilation for you to watch while you drink your Mountain Dew or get another tattoo.

This is the first year BMX is being contested at the Olympics and I’m conflicted about it. While I support any kind of cycling, in order to introduce this kind of cycling, the Olympic Organizing Committee cut two track events (the men’s 1000m and women’s 500m time trials) to make room for the BMX events. This was done to conserve the number of cycling events. According to this page there are 18 cycling events. Swimming has 34 events. So increasing the number of cycling medals wouldn’t have given it a ridiculous number of medals (unless you think swimming has a ridiculous number of events, which I in fact do). Granted, Olympic cycling isn’t as popular as Olympic gymnastics, and that only has 14 medals, but at least gymnastics takes place on different equipment. The cycling events range from 40 seconds to over six hours on four different kinds of venues that require very different types of skills and strategies. Each medal rewards a clearly different set of accomplishments. All but two of the swimming events are in the same damn pool (the 10K open-water swim is new this year) with the same equipment, only the strokes and distances change, and the distances vary by far less than cycling. It’s not clear that adding BMX is a net gain for cycling in the Olympics, and they could have very easily increased the number of cycling events, in my opinion.

Of course, cycling has the Tour de France every year, while swimming has ?

I think the best thing that can happen is if BMX becomes a kind of gateway drug into cycling. Get the young ones into the sport and then push them into the real hard stuff, like the velodrome and road cycling. Then they’ll really be hooked and there’s no going back.

Bookmarks for August 15th from 20:42 to 20:42

Stephen Skory — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 05:07:04 +0000

These are my links for August 15th from 20:42 to 20:42:

North Korea DPRK 북한 - a set on Flickr -