So as I walk to get my morning coffee, my phone keeps hopping onto xfinitywifi ssids leaking out of nearby houses and apartments. And each time, destroys my internet experience. My perfectly happy LTE connection gets bumped aside, it takes 30-60 seconds for the xfinitywifi connection to validate and set up, typically any session i had (for instance downloading a pdf) is destroyed, and by that time I have walked out of range of the connection.

I’m a paying xfinity customer and I don’t get what this is for. Doesn’t help me at home. Doesn’t help me out and about town. Doesn’t help me at friend’s house since they all let me on their wifi. Turning on autoconnect to this SSID actually makes my internet experience worse.

That is the summary: “xfinitywifi SSID makes your internet experience worse”.

• Interrupt by Jeff Carlson. Apparently the publishing business is booming, because somebody thought this was worth horking out there. Poorly written, dumb characters, just ughh. save your brain. no idea why I downloaded this.
• Killed at the Whim of a Hat by Colin Cotterill. This is a very funny mystery set in Thailand. Awesome characters, great atmosphere. The GWB quotes sprinkled throughout are the cherry on the top.
• Pereira Maintains by Antonio Tabucchi. In pre-WWII Portugal, Dr. Pereira awakens to rise of fascism. Starts slow, slowly accelerates, and ends on a bang.
• Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West. A fairly brilliant travelogue/history of the Balkans with deep insight about humanity everywhere. After reading this, I feel pretty shallow, this is a long and deep book.

Yet another small device to figure out how to use, this one a melding of arduino and Bluetooth. Super small form factor, the box is matchbox-sized, and I ordered a bag of them. Crowd funding IOT devices is awesome and disastrous – I get a new bag of toys all the time, but now I have to figure out what to do with them all…

As I get back into coding, I’ve had to jump into some C++ code to do some OpenCV bindings for Node. And wow am I reminded of how glad I am to have basically skipped C++ as a tool. I grew up on C and ASM which always felt natural, an obvious mapping to the machine. Now I use Node and Python, with simple object support and nice type behaviour. C++ just seems like an utter backwater. I don’t even begin to understand what all this really does:

Local<Object> mean = Matrix::constructor->GetFunction()->NewInstance();

Anyway if you are messing with OpenCV, it throws some horribly obtuse error messages:

OpenCV Error: Assertion failed (scn == 3 && (dcn == 3 || dcn == 4) && (depth == CV_8U || depth == CV_32F)) in cvtColor, file /opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_mports_dports_graphics_opencv/opencv/work/opencv-2.4.9/modules/imgproc/src/color.cpp, line 4040
libc++abi.dylib: terminating with uncaught exception of type cv::Exception: /opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_mports_dports_graphics_opencv/opencv/work/opencv-2.4.9/modules/imgproc/src/color.cpp:4040: error: (-215) scn == 3 && (dcn == 3 || dcn == 4) && (depth == CV_8U || depth == CV_32F) in function cvtColor

No idea what all that really means, but I’ve found it is almost always the case that I have a type mismatch. The documentation slings around matrices like they are all the same, but obviously it is important to pay attention to the differences between color images, grayscale, and binarized images, and be very intentional about their use.

Just ran the very first version of an app we are building on multiple RPIs, it lasted for all of 25 minutes and generated good data before melting down. The fact that all the Pis gave up the ghost at the same exact time, and were all using the same power supply, makes me suspect a power glitch. The RPIs are horribly underpowered (and i mean power in the electrical sense) – for instance it is a known issue that with some power supplies, taking a picture will cause the ethernet connection to drop.

But honestly I’d have been happy if they ran for 5 minutes before exploding. So progress.

Been quiet on the blog. Super busy learning about modern software development. In no particular order, I’ve been playing with: webgl, three.js, node.js, shaders, opencv, 0mq, travis ci, ansible, raspberry pi, arduino, resin.io, docker, vagrant, coreos, objective-c, github, hadoop, ubuntu and debian and raspbian and fedora and centos and RHEL, and about 100 more things. Having a blast!

We are looking to hire a few people and if any of the mishmash above appeals, let me know…

One milestone of my new career direction is my first accepted pull request to an open source project (the node.js mappings for opencv). Ok it was a silly little bit of frippery, adding line thickness to some line drawing routines, about 4 lines of code, but it has been a long long time since I contributed any code to any effort so it makes me kind of happy.

I have a more sizeable contribution chunked up and ready to go soon, so hopefully this won’t be the last.

I am just one of the crowd per geekwire

I bought a Lytro back in the day. It spent a week in my bag before it hit the technology graveyard in the corner of my office.

My narrative clip lasted maybe a week. Everyone around me was freaked out. And mostly I just ended up with a lot of pictures of the edge of my desk.

I just got my Pixy. Maybe I am doing it wrong but this thing doesn’t seem to detect squat. Maybe it works great in some super controlled setting but not worth my time.

Of course I had to order a Centr.

I am eternally optimistic. One of these things is going to be useful.

• OpenGL Programming Guide by Shreiner, Sellers, Kessenich, Licea-Kane. Incredibly boring in a good way. Very useful depth walkthru of OpenGL.
• Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson. Boring in a bad way, unreadable. The author attempts to wrap his nonfiction treatise with some thin and dull characters who lead boring lives. Gave up on.
• Riddle-Master by Patricia A McKillip. Fun semi-classic fantasy romp. Nicely wraps up in a modest number of pages unlike the modern commercial 10+ tome series.
• Grammar of the Film Language by Daniel Arijon. Great reference on a topic I was clueless about, hat tip to Paul. A little dated but super useful.
• Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald. Another excellent history of the Beatles, focusing on their songs and what was going on in the culture and the group at the time. MacDonald takes a very critical look at the songs at times, which makes the discussion all that much more compelling.
• Lexicon by Max Barry. Fun adventure with very erudite zombies.
• Mind of Winter by Laura Kasischke. Uber-creepy story of a woman in the grips of a possible breakdown, or is something else going on?
• Missing You by Harlan Coben. Another solid Coben, started out a little slow, but grabbed by the end.
• Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. At first I thought this was going to be yet another post-apocalyptic dystopian series written to sell books, but this is something quite different. An expedition enters a blighted area in the south, and nothing is what it seems – the nature of the blight, the goals of the expedition, the members of the expedition all have hidden natures. I’ve pre-ordered the next book.
• Duke of Deception by Geoffrey Wolff. A man unravels the life of his father – a conman, liar, thief, but still a loving father. Complex relationship.

Just a reminder to self – some of the kits out there come with <1 amp supplies, and most come with 1 amp. The 1 amp supply is barely adequate for the base rpi plus camera. Less than 1 amp and camera use will drop your internet connection.

Now if you add in a USB wifi dongle, 1 amp no longer is sufficient. I am having to use a powered hub.

I’d suggest a 2 amp minimum supply.

I am hosting the webview controller in an OSX app. I have followed the code sample in calljs and i can successfully call javascript functions inside script tags from objective-c. This integration requires that the objective-c program know the name of the javascript function. for instance i have a javascript function called “objective_c_entry()”, and in my objective c wrapper, i can call that entry point using:

NSString *callResult = [[webView windowScriptObject] callWebScriptMethod:@"objective_c_entry" withArguments:args];

Now I want to move all my javascript into require.js modules; i am not clear how to reference a function in a require.js module from within objective-c. if i am moving my “objective_c_entry” function into a require.js module named “integration”, what string do I pass to callWebScriptMethod?

• Tune In by Mark Lewisohn. Fascinating telling of the Beatles’ early years. Massive detail. Uplifting in many many ways, the group overcame great odds, while staying true to themselves. But never let your kids catch you admiring this book, the young Beatles were not exactly role models.
• All The Songs by Jean-Michel Guesdon and Philippe Margotin. Exhaustive notes on the writing and recording of every Beatles’ song, which provides an interesting window onto the arc of the group.

http://noncombatant.org/2014/03/03/downloading-software-safely-is-nearly-impossible/ – and this only scratches the surface. Of all the reasons why I don’t use a Windows machine for development, this is the stupidest, and simplest to fix. Just ship a reasonable ssh client, it is not that hard.

Quite an achievement – Dendritic Inhibition in the Hippocampus Supports Fear Learning – and won’t be his last. I am jealous, I have aspired to go down the research path at many different points in my life but it has never worked out. Huge congrats!