Eclectic Mayhem

Industrial Breakfast Robots

2009-07-09T21:47:00.000-07:00

My mental model of how manufacturing works is basically the Sesame Street video of a crayon factory, with everything queued up just so, and feeding one at a time into the next step of the process. Thanks to advances in computer vision and robotics, modern manufacturing can look a lot more disorganized since it's apparently easier to make robots that can tolerate variations in their input than to keep everything perfect throughout the pipeline. Here's a video of robots toiling in some sort of breakfast factory:

It's especially cool that the sausage-aligning robot (at 0:30) doesn't need to line things up parallel to the conveyor because the next robot is also capable of picking up the whole set at different angles.

One more video, of a series of robots stacking pancakes. They don't appear to be following any particular pattern as they grab pancakes from the conveyor, but by the end of the line of robots nearly all the pancakes are neatly stacked.

[via Singularity Hub]

Predictably Irrational

2008-07-21T23:18:00.000-07:00

I really enjoyed this talk by Dan Ariely (author of Predictably Irrational). The most interesting part to me starts at the 25:30 mark, where he discusses how an unattractive third option can influence people's choices between two better options. The example he uses is a subscription offer from the Economist:

Online-only subscription for $59
Print-only subscription for $125
Print and online subscription for $125

Since the print and web combination is the same price as the print subscription alone, no one chose the print-only option. However, when the print-only option was present 84% opted for the print/web combination, compared to only 32% when that option was removed. It's counterintuitive, but I've noticed myself doing the same thing. When you're making objective comparisions between different kinds of apples, it's tempting to leave oranges out of the picture entirely.

[via Reza]

FriendFork

2008-05-08T02:29:00.001-07:00

I've been playing with Google App Engine and I've created a little app to make the experience of using FriendFeed with Google Reader a little nicer. This app, called FriendFork, lets you create separate feeds for different groups of friends, so you have a little more fine-grained control over them in Reader, as well as providing a little integration with Reader's shared items.

The app can be found at http://friendfork.appspot.com. I've created a separate blog for FriendFork-related announcements (the spliced "me" feed linked from this page includes both this blog and the FriendFork one)

Muscle memory and a broken keyboard

2008-03-09T23:34:00.001-07:00

Last week I moved to a new office, and in the process somehow the left alt key on my keyboard got broken. The right alt key still works, but my brain isn't compatible with it. Whenever I would try to use a keyboard shortcut that would normally use the left alt key, I'd accidentally type the mirror-image version. I'd hit alt-backslash instead of alt-tab, and in emacs I'd mix up M-d and M-k or M-space and M-backspace.

Some of you may be noticing that space and backspace aren't mirror images on your keyboard. The keyboard in question is a Kinesis contoured keyboard, which moves several keys to more convenient (but apparently more vulnerable) thumb-accessible positions. I highly recommend it for anyone concerned about Emacs Pinky.

Now that I've moved the ctrl and alt keys to my thumbs, I think it might be nice to do something about the shift keys (especially since I've never been able to break myself of the bad habit of typing capital letters one-handed). For my replacement keyboard I traded up to the "Pro" model which includes a foot pedal that can be used as a shift key. (This possibility came up at a recent lunchtime discussion about keyboards in which I uttered the completely ridiculous sentence "I need a memory upgrade for my keyboard so it can work with a foot pedal.") I'm not sure I'd have any better luck training myself to use a foot pedal than I have training myself to use normal shift keys properly, but it's an interesting idea.

A tale of two shooters

2007-09-13T23:08:00.000-07:00

Mike Bostock writes:

I just played Metroid Prime 3 for thirty minutes, and now have a crippling pain in my right hand from mashing the A button. Not to worry, I can still type, especially when livid enough to rant; I'll type through the pain for this.

Amen. I'm a little more positive than Mike (I lasted longer than him before getting frustrated), but my enjoyment of Metroid Prime 3 is still limited by my tolerance of the terrible ergonomics of the Wiimote as a first-person-shooter controller. I loved the original Metroid Prime, and liked Metroid Prime 2, but when I'm thinking "your save points are too far apart" because I cannot physically endure the controller any longer, there's a problem. (Unlike Mike, I think the problem has less to do with repeatedly mashing the A button and more to do with holding the wiimote on a target while mashing the A button, but either way it's a poor design).

I admit that part of my problem is that after an hour I thought "'normal' mode is too easy, I'll try 'veteran'". I have since switched back to 'normal' mode from 'veteran', and when/if I catch up with my previous saved game I'll see how that turned out.

My experience with Metroid Prime 3 has really put my experience with the other hot first-person-shooter of the moment, Bioshock in perspective. When I finished Bioshock, I thought it was too easy and it wasn't as good as my memories of System Shock 2. So I reinstalled and replayed System Shock 2. After that experience, I decided that Bioshock was close to the right difficulty, and even System Shock 2 wasn't as good as my memories of System Shock 2. SS2's story still holds together a little better than Bioshock's under close scrutiny, but of all the games I've mentioned in this post, Bioshock is the one I'm most likely to play again.

Remap Macbook Pro Enter key to Exposé

2007-04-12T23:08:00.000-07:00

Apple's laptop keyboards have an "Enter" key to the right of the space bar and command key (it's different from the "Return" key which is in the usual place). I have no idea what it's supposed to be useful for, but since it's so easy to reach from the touchpad, I like to assign it to the Exposé function. You can reassign the Exposé hotkeys in System Preferences, but it limits you to the F-keys. This tip explains how to assign Exposé to other keys, but it doesn't work for the Enter key on a Macbook Pro because the keycode has apparently changed. I used Full Key Codes to determine that the correct keycode for the Enter key on a Macbook Pro is 76 (it was 52 on the G4 Powerbooks).

I assign "Expose all windows" to Enter, and "Expose desktop" to Command-Enter (I don't use "Expose application windows", so I left it on the default, F10). If you want to use this setup, you can save my configuration file to ~/Library/Preferences.

If you try to edit this file yourself, be aware that there's some incorrect information in the tip linked to above (it's corrected in a later comment). Here's my summary of the process:

Go to the Dashboard/Exposé System Preferences pane and touch every hotkey setting to ensure that the file is created.
Open ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist. You can either use Property List Editor (included with Xcode, I think) or any text editor (it's xml).
The sections within this file are numbered, and they're in a strange order:
- 32: Expose all windows (default F9)
- 33: Expose application windows (default F10)
- 34: Slow motion expose all windows (default Shift-F9)
- 35: Slow motion expose application windows (default Shift-F10)
- 36: Expose desktop (default F11)
- 37: Slow motion expose desktop (default Shift-F11)
There are three parameters in each section.
- The first is always -1 as far as I can tell; I don't know what it does.
- The second is the keycode (F9=101, F10=109, F11=103, Enter=52 for Powerbooks and 76 for Macbook Pros. Use Full Key Codes to find codes for other keys).
- The third is the modifier key: None=0, Shift=131072, Control=262144, Option=524288, Command=1048576. You can add these numbers together for multiple modifiers (for example, 1179648 is Shift+Command)
After you've edited this file, save it and log out. Once you've done this, don't touch anything in the Dashboard/Exposé preferences, or you might lose your customizations.

Updated Gmail search bookmark script

2007-03-18T21:08:00.000-07:00

Recently, Gmail changed the URLs they use for non-gmail.com domains (i.e. Google Apps). This change meant that my Gmail search bookmarks were reloading the page more often than they should (which slows things down and interferes with Gmail's chat features). I've fixed it now, so if you use my Gmail search bookmark script with a customized domain, you should recreate your bookmarks to pick up the change.

Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss

2007-03-02T11:08:00.000-08:00

I grew up reading Dr. Seuss. I especially liked the elaborate machines like the ones in The Sneetches. Years later, when I was learning about computers and programming, I would visualize computers working like some sort of Seussian contraption. The longer I've been in the software business, the more appropriate the analogy seems. The Star-On and Star-Off machines started out as small boxes and expanded via an outgrowth of components that never quite fit together correctly. Sylvester McMonkey ~~McAfee~~ McBean also pioneers the business model of fixing problems with software by selling more software.

The animated version of the Sneetches is difficult to find on DVD, but it's available on Youtube:

Wii-view

2007-02-26T00:23:00.000-08:00

I've had my Wii for a little over a month now, and thanks to Gamefly, I've been able to sample a number of games for it. I think the system has a lot of potential, but it will be a while before developers really take advantage of the system, and the best games for the Wii will almost certainly be very different from the best games for other systems.

Wii Sports is the best Wii game I've played so far. Zelda may be a better game overall, but it's not really a Wii game - it's a conventional game that happens to be available on the Wii. Going through the motions in Wii Sports is a lot of fun, and shows once again that having the right controller can make or break a game. It's unclear how well the software is actually modeling your actions, since random motions are often rendered as well-formed swings in the game, but Wii Sports demonstrates that the underlying model doesn't have to be perfect to be fun.

The controller is really three devices in one - a conventional controller with a joystick and buttons, a pointing device (using the sensor bar), and a motion sensor (using the accelerometers in the the two parts of the controller). The trouble is that these modes don't work together all that well - you can't really wave the wiimote around and hold the pointer on the screen (although Rayman's "point with the remote and act with the nunchuck" pattern works fairly well), and no matter how you hold the controller some of the buttons are going to be awkward to reach. The relative lack of easily-reachable buttons is the biggest problem for games designed with other systems in mind - developers have to use motions like "shake the nunchuck" to accommodate the variety of actions found in many games. This hidden-button syndrome doesn't really add anything to the games and probably makes them less approachable to novice gamers than they would be on a more conventional system (in contrast to Wii Sports, which is the epitome of approachability).

My biggest disappointment in the controls has been the pointer mode. It takes a steady hand to, for example, pick a letter from the on-screen qwerty keyboard and press the button without moving the pointer, and I find the hand position required to keep the pointer on the screen to be very uncomfortable. I've put the sensor bar on top of my TV but configured the Wii to think it's below the screen. This way I'm always aming into the space above the screen, which I find to be a more natural hand position. Playing this way isn't as weird as it sounds. You already have to watch the on-screen cursor instead of the angle of the remote (since there's no calibration for the size of your screen), so you don't really notice the added vertical offset.

I had hoped that the pointer mode would mean that the Wii could accommodate the kinds of games that are still at their best on PCs with a mouse and keyboard (primarily real-time strategy and first-person shooters), but now I'm not so sure. The control scheme used in Red Steel is worse than the usual two-joystick approach in my opinion. To turn your character, you have to position the cursor near the edge of the screen and leave it there while your character turns. It's like having a mouse you can't pick up when it reaches the edge of the pad. The Rayman-on-Rails plunger-shooting levels were a lot more fun because you could focus on aiming and shooting; movement was out of your control.

Taking movement out of the player's control is a recurring theme in the Wii's best moments. Wii Sports Tennis removes tennis video games from their Pong-based roots by making the challenge not about putting your player in front of the ball (the game moves for you), but just about making each shot (which mostly means timing). Conventional games have used most of their control "bandwidth" for controlling character movement (often using two analog sticks for position and orientation), while the actions you take once you're in position are abstracted behind simple button presses. The Wii turns that around, with the potential for richer and more immersive control of your actions, but less control of movement (at least in comparison). This is a relatively unexplored area of game design, although some of the best games I've played recently fall into the "actions, not movement" category: Guitar Hero and Trauma Center (DS). Now that the Wii has become a commercial success, I'm hopeful that we'll see some interesting new ideas for it.

Quick comments on the games I've tried:

Wii Sports - Simple and fun; the best reason to own a Wii.
Zelda - Excellent as usual, but doesn't break any new ground.
Elebits - Katamari Damacy meets the Half-Life 2 gravity gun, although it's not quite as awesome as that sounds. The controls can be frustrating when you're doing anything but flinging objects around the room.
Warioware - By far the most varied use of the wiimote. Slightly less frantic and unpredictable than other games in the series since it has to tell you how to hold the wiimote in each round.
Rayman Raving Rabbids - Great sense of style and humor.
Excite Truck - It's no Mario Kart, but it's enjoyable as long as you don't care about realism in your racing games.
Red Steel - It's an OK game, but I got really frustrated with the controls.

Grey Legoo

2007-01-09T21:58:00.000-08:00

Legos don't need humans to reproduce anymore - check out this automated Lego car factory. Of course, this Lego duck assembly line still has a long way to go before it catches up with the old-fashioned duck factory. [via Laurence and zefrank]

Gmail search bookmarks

2006-10-01T23:47:00.000-07:00

I've found a few Gmail searches to be very valuble in my email management. The main search I use is [(label:inbox label:unread) OR label:star] - that is, unread items from my inbox plus all my starred items. This search turns gmail's read/archive pattern on its head - once I've read a message, it disappears from view unless I take explicit action to save it (i.e. star it). This works well for my mail, since I receive a lot of mail that doesn't need any response.

Of course, [(label:inbox label:unread) OR label:star], or even its shortened form [(l:^i l:^u)|l:^t] is too much to type all the time. Mihai has a greasemonkey script that can add links for your favorite searches below the labels box, but it slows things down (or at least it used to), and it's a two-step process to perform your saved search when you're not already in gmail.

I've written a simple tool to generate bookmarks that will perform gmail searches. These bookmarks will work even if you're not currently in gmail, but if you're already in gmail it will use your current session instead of reloading everything. I've been using these bookmarks for a while now and I'm happy with them, so I figured it's time to share them with the world.

Daily WTF for other industries?

2006-09-03T17:04:00.000-07:00

The Daily WTF is a showcase for shockingly bad code and computer systems, all claimed to be found "in the wild". It's a fun read if you have both the right sense of humor and the appropriate background to understand what's going on. I wonder if there are similar websites out there for other industries. It's kind of scary to think that there might be, for example, doctors so bad that other doctors have websites devoted to mocking their work.

Maybe the reason is in the low barrier to entry to so much computer work. It's easy to transition from amateur to "professional" with minimal training. Maybe the equivalent to the Daily WTF is the story that a couple of mechanics are probably telling about me right now (or, as they probably call me, "that kid who broke something changing a flat tire and had to get his car towed in").

Useful obscure firefox extension (Mac)

2006-06-19T22:55:00.000-07:00

In Firefox on the Mac, whenever you press Cmd-N to open a new window, it tries to place the new window slightly below the current window (so you can see both titlebars), even if that puts the bottom of the new window off-screen (bug 218214). It only seems to happen with Firefox, and only on the Mac version. This is especially annoying since Apple's fondness for widescreen displays makes vertical space even more precious. It turns out there's a workaround: this extension (direct link to onscreen-0.1.xpi) will move all new windows as necessary to fit on the screen.

Linkblog and new feeds

2006-04-18T01:06:00.000-07:00

I've set up a linkblog using Google Reader's sharing feature. It's actually been visible on http://eclectic-mayhem.com for a few weeks now, but those of you who read this blog in a feed reader wouldn't have noticed. For those of you who are unfamiliar with linkblogs, it's a lightweight way (one click) for me to publish things I find interesting without writing up a full blog post.

Using the links in the "Feeds" section of the right-hand column, you can subscribe to this blog, the linkblog, or a combination of the two using Google Reader or another feed reader. If you subscribe to the combined feed, you'll also automatically get any other feeds I may create in the future (like photo feeds, etc). Note that I've moved the linkblog feed (the old address ends with "/starred", the new one ends with "/linkblog") - if you've already subscribed to it under the old location, you should update your links. The new arrangement allows me some more flexibility for possible future changes.

In case you're curious about how exactly to do this, here's what I did. First, I made my starred items in Google Reader: Under the "Share" tab, check the "Shared" box next to "My starred items". There are a couple of links in the "Tell your friends" section. Copy the orange one (looks like http://www.google.com/reader/ public/atom/ user/[20-digit-number]/ state/com.google/starred)
and paste it into the search box at the top of the page. Now you can subscribe to your starred items and apply another label to it (for example, you might label your starred items "linkblog" or "me"). You can subscribe to your own blog and give it the same label to create a spliced feed containing both your blog and your starred items (this is my "me" label). You can then make that label public and put links to it on your blog (or the clip you see on the sidebar of this page).

Pin-pen merger

2006-02-25T20:27:00.000-08:00

Brain processing of speech sounds is different in some southern English speakers.

So this is why no one in California understands me when I say my name. See also this Wikipedia article. Via amitp.

The Internet in a nutshell, part 2

2005-12-27T22:08:00.000-08:00

Wookieepedia: a wiki site set up by Star Wars fans "when wikipedia users began to complain of the overabundance of minutiae related to Star Wars" on Wikipedia. (via Ned Batchelder)

My original Internet in a nutshell comment predates this blog, so I'll repeat it here: An image from Bert Is Evil, a site self-conciously created to qualify for Internet Underground's "Weird Wide Web" column is included in a pro-bin-Laden poster because the image ranked highly in a Google Images search for [bin laden].

Filling code in Emacs

2005-12-06T22:56:00.000-08:00

My friend Ryan has writen a neat addition for Emacs: fillcode-mode lets you word-wrap code just like M-q already does for text. It knows how to indent parenthesized expressions, break lines at commas, etc. It's not perfect, but it gets the common cases right and sure beats fixing up the indentation by hand when you change a function signature.

Fighting with Civilization IV's copy protection

2005-12-04T21:14:00.000-08:00

(Note: if you're looking for information about how to get an illegal copy of Civilization 4, you won't find it here)

After downloading the Civilization 4 demo, I went out and purchased the game. Once I got it installed, I found that I immediately got a blue screen of death whenever I tried to start the game. The windows crash reporter was no help this time, but since the demo worked fine I suspected some sort of attempted copy protection. As it turns out I had an old version of the Safedisc copy protection software on my system (c:\windows\system32\drivers\secdrv.sys, dated 2002), that I think may have been broken by Windows XP SP2. Civ4 apparently won't install its version of Safedisc when it sees another version already installed. Macrovision publishes an update to Safedisc, although it's not easy to find on their site. Unfortunately, attempting to install the update directly triggers another BSOD in the old version. The procedure for upgrading looks something like this:

Go to Device Manager and turn on "Show Hidden Devices".
Under "Non-Plug and Play Drivers", find "Secdrv" and double-click it.
On the "Driver" tab, change "Startup Type" to "Disabled".
Reboot.
Run the Safedisc update installer. You'll get an "error 101" because the driver is disabled, but the installation still works as far as I can tell.
Go back to Device Manager, change "Startup Type" back to "Automatic" and reboot.

Now I try the game again. The CD spins up and I see the splash screen this time, which says "Loading" even though it really means "Please wait while we waste your time and verify that you still have this otherwise-unneded CD". A dialog pops up and says "Please insert the correct CD and try again", with a link to the official support website. The website says the CDs are mislabelled - the CDs say "Disc 1/Install" and "Disc 2/Play", but you're actually supposed to use Disc 1 to play. Oops.

I swap discs and try again. Same message. Some searching reveals that Safedisc tries to detect CD emulators like Daemon Tools and Alcohol 120% and refuse to start if it sees them (of course, now that it's caught a pirate red-handed, it doesn't want to give you any hints about how to evade the protection, so it just says "please insert the correct cd"). I've never used either of those programs, and I'm pretty sure I don't have anything like them installed (If I did, I'd probably be using it, since I can see plenty of non-piratical uses for such a piece of software). The solution is a little program called sd4hide, which temporarily removes a few registry keys that Safedisc looks for. The registry keys it removes in my case are entries in the SCSI section of the registry, entries for my hard drive and DVD drive. I have no idea what they're doing there (both drives are IDE) or why SCSI would be taken as evidence of piracy (does no one use SCSI drives anymore?), but it did the trick, and now I'm able to play the game.

It's things like this that make me about ready to give up on PC gaming. The consoles may be closed systems with their own copy-protection schemes, but at least I know that up front, and the games still work.

Project timelines

2005-09-17T22:14:00.000-07:00

Don Knuth has a different perspective from virtually everyone else in computer science:

"I don't want to delay The Art of Computer Programming by an unnecessary week; I've been working on it for 43 years and I have 20 more years of work to do"

(via Dare Obasanjo)

Desktop Reversal

2005-04-29T22:18:00.000-07:00

Ever since Windows 95, I've hated the concept of the desktop "folder". This was partly due to flaws in Microsoft's implementation, but mostly because the whole concept seemed broken to me. The desktop is too awkward to access (because you have to minimize other windows instead of simply switching to another window) and lacks a unifying purpose. Mac OS X Panther softened my resistance somewhat - Expose solves the access problem, and on the Mac it's generally easier to keep a clean desktop (As a rule I don't use the desktop on my powerbook for long-term storage of anything. Right now my desktop is completely blank).

Now enter Tiger and Dashboard - a hidden "layer" of widgets that can be brought to the forefront via a hotkey or an icon in the dock. This works the way I always wished the desktop worked in Windows. But now, I find myself wishing that the Dashboard widgets showed up on the desktop, so I could see them under my active windows and didn't need a third hotkey (after mapping the bottom-row enter key to expose all windows and command-enter to expose desktop). It's almost there - you can drag widgets from the Dashboard layer to your main screen, but they always display on top of other windows. Hopefully some enterprising hacker will figure out how to turn off the "always on top" bit (an "always on bottom" bit would be nice, but not necessary).

Yarrr!

2005-04-16T10:13:00.000-07:00

"To the delight of some and the horror of others, The Pirate Captain was elected N.C. State University student body president Wednesday in a landslide."

World of Warcraft and "Pattern-Breaking"

2005-01-28T21:20:00.000-08:00

Damion Schubert nails the reason I'm enjoying World of Warcraft more than other MMO games.

What the WoW quest engine does right is that it convinces you that quests are the best way to advance in the game, and then lets you have 20 of them at a time.

Efficiency is a funny thing in games. Most people don't care about the most "efficient" way to progress through a single-player game, and those who prefer to take their time are in no way impacted by the fact that some people see it as a race. Online, however, the drive for efficiency can be contagious. When you can't make progress solo, you're often stuck in the few areas that have a critical mass of people. There was a lot of fun to be had in Everquest, but you wouldn't know it from the way most people played, killing legions of identical monsters in whichever zone was the hotspot for their level. It was just too hard to find people with whom to explore the rest of the game world. What WoW gets right is that you're never really tempted to take the "less fun" path because it's more efficient.

Tivo's new ads

2004-11-17T09:47:00.000-08:00

Tivo is taking some heat for their upcoming addition of ads that will be displayed while you fast-forward through commercials. While it is a little upsetting that they're making an unwanted change to the existing service (leading to the possibility that they will disable the 30-second skip command to force people to fast-foward through commercials in the traditional way to see these ads), I don't think it will be a big deal. As far as I can tell it's just an extension of the "press thumbs up to record" overlay they're already doing for TV-show ads. The ads will only be there when there's already an ad on your screen that you're fast-forwarding through, but this one will be legible.

This could even be a good thing for users. These new ads are potentially individually targetable and measurable (with a remote-control "clickthrough"). If it works out well (and admittedly that's a big "if"), ads like these can replace the more intrusive TV ads just like Google's and Overture's targeted text ads are replacing banners. I'd be happy to have a few ads on my screen while fast-forwarding if it meant that the Tivo knew when the commercial ended and would resume normal playback automatically.

Sophomore evicted for fliers urging girls to lose weight

2004-10-31T22:34:00.000-08:00

Sophomore evicted for fliers urging girls to lose weight - "Timothy Garneau, 20, of Berlin, said he posted the fliers as a joke because he was tired of waiting so long for the elevator. Garneau lived on the seventh floor of Stoke Hall." As a former resident of an 11th-floor dorm room, I can sympathize with this guy's plight, and think that kicking him out of the dorm for this joke is absurd. I think he's going about it in the wrong way, though. Guys are much easier to shame into taking the stairs (I had friends on the 5th floor who would sometimes take the elveator up to 7 and then walk down two flights of stairs to preserve their dignity), and chasing them away has the added benefit of improving the male/female ratio in the elevators ;-).

Free-market flu?

2004-10-31T21:33:00.000-08:00

This Washington Post column claims that "The reason there's not enough flu vaccine to go around this year is that Americans have decided, consciously or not, that they don't want the government to get too deeply involved in health care." The rest of the article, however, could just as easily be used to argue that the shortage is the result of too much governmental involvement:

Changing flu vaccine production to faster, more modern techniques (like those used for other vaccines) would require lengthy and expensive FDA approval.
The government buys about 20% of the vaccine supply for military and other uses, but it refuses to pay market prices

In fact, the solution proposed at the end of the article includes a significant move towards a freer market (the government would pay market prices for its 20%). The free market can break down in a variety of ways when it comes to health care (the New Yorker has a good analysis of market forces and prescription drugs), but this year's flu vaccine doesn't look like one of them.