James Tauber's Blog 2008/07
Pinax Project and Cloud27
The initial growth of Pinax was helped by us building a demo social networking site, but it often led to confusion about Pinax the platform as opposed to Pinax the social networking site.
The demo social networking site was (and still is) at http://pinax.hotcluboffrance.com/ but that URL also confused people not familiar with the original django-hotclub mailing list I started to discuss how to better build reusable Django apps.
Furthermore, it was becoming clear that the demo social networking site was actually useful, not just as a demo of Pinax, but in its own right.
And so, a few weeks ago, I decided that the demo site should migrate to a new, standalone site and that Pinax, the platform, needed a home.
The former will soon be launched as Cloud27 which, at the moment, is just a splash screen, but which will eventually replace http://pinax.hotcluboffrance.com/. Users of Cloud27 need not necessarily care that Pinax is underlying the site.
That leaves a site about the Pinax platform to point people to. I just launched that this morning and it's available at:
http://pinaxproject.com/
This new domain is what anyone talking about Pinax should link to — it's the new home of Pinax itself.
by James Tauber : Created on July 30, 2008 : Last modified July 30, 2008 : Categories django pinax cloud27 : 1 comment (permalink)
Dr Horrible
Last week I kept seeing people twittering about a new episode of Dr Horrible. I had no idea what they were talking about and assumed it was some show on TV.
Then last Saturday I was on iTunes and saw mention of Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog featuring a picture of Neil Patrick Harris. I'm a huge NPH fanboy, so had to check it out.
It was then that I discovered it was a made-for-Web show from Joss Whedon consisting of three 13 minute episodes. Joss Whedon + NPH — it had to be good. So I bought the trio of episodes and watched them right away.
It's a huge amount of fun — the songs are catchy, the writing awesome, NPH and Nathan Fillion are both brilliant as, respectively, the wannabe evil mastermind and self-centered super hero. And Felicia Day is downright adorable as the ingenue.
This isn't your ordinary made-for-Web series. The production values are very high -- judging from the crew credits, this was shot like hour-long TV show.
After watching it a couple of times, I spent a few hours last Sunday doing a cover of the first song from Act III, the hilarious "So They Say". I've put up an instrumental (with vocal lines on synth) mp3: http://jtauber.com/2008/07/so_they_say_0_1.mp3
I'll probably do a bunch of the other songs too.
UPDATE: Main title version 0.1: http://jtauber.com/2008/07/main_title_0_1.mp3
UPDATE 2: By request, here's On the Rise version 0.1: http://jtauber.com/2008/07/on_the_rise_0_1.mp3 Enjoy!
UPDATE 3: Now see More Dr Horrible and Dr Horrible Ringtones
by James Tauber : Created on July 25, 2008 : Last modified Aug. 6, 2008 : 2 comments (permalink)
iPhone Stopwatch Comparison
Below is a photo of my original iPhone next to my new iPhone 3G.
The original iPhone (on the left) is still running 1.1.4 (4A102) whereas the iPhone 3G (on the right) is running 2.0 (5A345) which it shipped with.
The first thing you might notice is that 2.0 has fixed the problem with the stopwatch taking up too much space when it goes over 1,000 hours (although not the lap time)
You might also notice the colour temperature difference (the original is more blue, the 3G more yellow) that has been much talked about.
But other than that, they look pretty similar. Except that's where it surprised me. The stopwatch is almost the same on both: about 2,200 hours. But that's three months and the 3G only came out a week ago.
That's right: when iTunes synced the data between my phones, it kept the stop watch going!
As far as I can tell, the 1.4 second difference is actually due to the clock in the iPhone itself not the stopwatch specifically. If the old iPhone could still sync its time from the cellular network, the two might show identical times on the stopwatch.
by James Tauber : Created on July 18, 2008 : Last modified July 19, 2008 : Categories iphone : 1 comment (permalink)
iPhone 3G First Impressions
I stood in line on Friday to upgrade to an iPhone 3G. It took about 2.5 hrs to get to the front of the line but the process after that was very easy because I was already an AT&T customer.
By the time I'd left the store, my old iPhone no longer worked as a phone.
The iPhone 3G felt funny at first but I've gotten used to it now. I think actually prefer the feel of it in my hand but it did take a day or two to get to that point. The screen also felt rougher initially but that might have just been some temporary coating and it now feels just as smooth as my old iPhone.
I immediately downloaded Monkey Ball. The accelerometer-based controls are harder to get used to than they looked in the demos. I've also bought the Things app and look forward to when it supports synchronization with the desktop version.
The App Store experience itself was pretty impressive. It is pretty amazing sitting at the airport, deciding you want a new app and buying, downloading, installing and using it right there and then.
The GPS worked nicely in conjunction with Google Maps when my girlfriend and I were going to pick up a pizza last night.
I haven't really done much data stuff over 3G yet as I'm on wireless when at home so can't really comment on how much faster it is. Certainly the signal I get in my apartment isn't any better which is unfortunate.
I haven't played around with the Mobile Me integration yet.
I'll be configuring Exchange support tomorrow at work, so I'll report how that goes.
Overall: the original iPhone was so impressive, getting the new phone was somewhat anti-climactic in comparison. If you don't have an iPhone, the 3G version will be at least as impressive as the original was a year ago. If you do have an iPhone already, the value obviously depends on how important 3G and GPS are to you.
by James Tauber : Created on July 13, 2008 : Last modified July 13, 2008 : Categories iphone : 0 comments (permalink)
iPhone Upgrade
So, I'm planning on upgrading my iPhone, if not Friday then pretty soon afterwards. I may upgrade my existing phone to the 2.0 software right away, though, just for a sneak preview (assuming the software update is available on Friday too).
I'm not clear what happens to my existing contract. I hope I can just roll it over to the new plan (and obviously stop using my existing iPhone, except as an iPod Touch with a camera). Surely they won't make me have two contracts in parallel if I only plan to use one phone (and transfer my number across).
I'm definitely looking forward to the faster data speeds. I'm also hoping it works better in my apartment. Location doesn't seem to be the problem (it works fine outside) but rather the building construction prevents me getting a signal inside. No idea if 3G will make a difference there or not.
by James Tauber : Created on July 8, 2008 : Last modified July 8, 2008 : Categories iphone : 1 comment (permalink)
Turing Chess
At the HTM Workshop there was a lightning talk by David Doshay on Computer Go which is another application I thought of as soon as I read On Intelligence.
During the break after his talk a bunch of us were talking and he basically said that a lot of researchers were moving to Go because Chess was a solved problem (perhaps I should have pursued Go research more back when I was interested in 2001).
I asked if he knew of anyone who, instead of switching from Chess, was going back to make Computer Chess more human-like rather than simply better. He wasn't aware of any such work.
It seems to me that an interesting pursuit would be a sort of Turing Test of Chess where the goal is not to beat the human but to trick other humans reading a transcript of the game as to which was the human player.
(Yes, I read Blondie24: Playing at the Edge of AI a few years back)
by James Tauber : Created on July 7, 2008 : Last modified July 7, 2008 : 5 comments (permalink)
The Rocker
My friend and filmmaking partner, Tom Bennett used to manage a band and still owns a Silver Eagle Coach from back in the day. About a year ago, he was contacted by 20th Century Fox interested in using the coach in a film.
The film was The Rocker (official site, IMDb) which comes out this month. It's the story of a failed drummer (played by The Office's Rainn Wilson) who, after 20 years of seeing the band he got kicked out of rise to stellar heights, finally gets a second chance.
Tom invited me to an advanced screening last week (it was fun going into the cinema and saying "we're on the list" :-)
The movie was a lot of fun. A predictable plot but well handled. Wilson's character seemed to me to have just the right balance of flaws and virtues. Solid acting all round, although the highlight comedically was Jason Sudeikis as the band manager. He got the best lines and delivered them with impeccable timing.
The original songs were excellent as well.
Pete Best (appropriately) has a cameo but I missed it.
Tom and his son Travis (who travelled up to Cleveland for a few days of shooting) also had roles as background and I spotted them (not that Tom would have let me miss that :-)
by James Tauber : Created on July 6, 2008 : Last modified July 7, 2008 : Categories filmmaking : 2 comments (permalink)
On Intelligence and the HTM Workshop
Like a lot of geeks, I've been interested in how the brain works for most of my life. Artificial Intelligence was always one of my interests within computing (and part of what got me interested in linguistics at a very early age).
Within my linguistics research, I've always been interested in models that are biologically plausible so it was a huge delight to read Jeff Hawkins' On Intelligence back in early 2005 and find a theory that was biologically-based and believable from a linguistics point of view. One prominent psycholinguist told me in 2006 that it was one of the most promising theories he'd ever read.
After reading the book, I promptly went out and built a library (as I am wont to do) of about 20 books on general neuroscience, computational neuroscience and the relationship between the brain and language. I started thinking about how to implement the ideas and, after reading some of Jeff's and Dileep George's early papers, augmented the library further with books on Bayesian networks, belief propagation, etc.
When Jeff and Dileep started Numenta and eventually released an early version of their Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) platform in Python, I was particularly excited to try it out, in particular applying it to linguistics. I started the htm-ling mailing list to gather other people interested in applying HTM to models of language. It turned out to be hard to get word out to other people interested in HTM and linguistics, however.
I never got very far with Numenta's code, mostly because there were just too many other things I was working on.
But then a couple of months ago, I found out Numenta was running a workshop / conference. I thought it would be an excellent opportunity for me to (a) get back up to speed with what Numenta was doing and how to use their NuPIC platform; (b) meet other people interested in applying HTM to linguistics.
So a couple of weeks ago, I attended the first Numenta HTM Workshop. I had a great time. It was great to meet Jeff and the rest of the team. Dileep's talk on the algorithms in NuPIC was particularly helpful to me in understanding how things work.
There were a number of people who expressed an interest in the application to linguistics so in the evening I ran a BOF. None of the attendees (as far as I could tell) were linguists by training so I didn't really get to talk too technically from a linguistics perspective. The boost to the mailing list membership hasn't created any more discussion yet either.
But I am still hopeful that an HTM-like approach (whether in the form of NuPIC or some other implementation) might be useful in building biologically-plausible models of language processing.
by James Tauber : Created on July 5, 2008 : Last modified July 6, 2008 : Categories linguistics computational_neuroscience : 2 comments (permalink)
Changes to Google Maps Satellite Images
It used to be obvious in Google Maps where the boundaries of different satellite images were. Each image had different brightness, contrast, colour, etc which gave away the stitching.
I always wondered whether there were techniques to normalize that.
I guess there are: Today I noticed the satellite images are stitched together seamlessly.
I also noticed some level-of-detail differences between land and ocean and that is also done pretty seamlessly.
It actually makes navigating around the satellite view a little eerie.
Anyone know when the change was made?
UPDATE: Actually it depends on the zoom level. Compare this to this. And notice the image credits are different. Interestingly, my home town of Perth looks fully normalized at all scales, even though the image sources are still TerraMetrics for the large scale and DigitalGlobe/GeoEye for the small scale.
by James Tauber : Created on July 4, 2008 : Last modified July 4, 2008 : Categories google : 2 comments (permalink)
The Annotated Turing
Some books entertain, some inform; some confirm what you already knew, some make you change your mind about something. But then there are some books that just make you think "wow! I wish I'd written that".
For me, Charles Petzold's The Annotated Turing falls into that last category. It's a book worth reading not only for the topic itself but the way it's presented.
He provides the necessary background before working through Turing's famous 1936 paper "On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem" with rich annotations at every stage, including biographical details.
If you are interested in the foundations of mathematics, computability, Turing's work, or even just ways of explaining mathematics in a historical context, I highly recommend this book.
by James Tauber : Created on July 3, 2008 : Last modified July 3, 2008 : Categories mathematics books : 0 comments (permalink)
Pinax Progress III
In the six weeks that it's been around (that's not six weeks since launch, that's six weeks since coding started), the Pinax platform and community has grown in ways I never expected.
Since I last blogged about it, we've added:
- localization into Brazilian Portuguese and Hebrew
- timezone localization
- external blog aggregation
- wikis
- threaded discussions
- bookmarks with voting
- contact import
- blogs with tagging and threaded comments
It is becoming clear that what was originally intended to be a demo site is a useful site in its own right, irrespective of whether you care or even know about the Pinax platform underlying it. So it will be moving over to a new site with a new identity soon.
by James Tauber : Created on July 2, 2008 : Last modified July 2, 2008 : Categories django pinax : 0 comments (permalink)
Back to Blogging
Last month was my worst blogging drought ever.
It happened for a number of reasons: I was travelling almost 3 weeks out of the month; free time was spent on other projects; Twitter replaced a lot of my drive to blog (and subsequently, the django-hotclub IRC channel replaced a lot of my drive to Twitter).
I'm going to try to blog a lot more regularly this month. I have a long list of things to blog about.
by James Tauber : Created on July 1, 2008 : Last modified July 2, 2008 : Categories blogging : 0 comments (permalink)