Just My Imagination

Wish I'd figured this out ages ago. Every now and then a new application I install on my Mac won't open. It bounces on the dock for a bit when I try to open it and then quits suddenly and without explanation. The trick is to open it from the command line so you can see the message about why it quit. You don't have to know what that is. Just open the application Terminal, and then type in:
/Applications/name_of_app.app/Contents/MacOS/name_of_app
...and it should do the dock-bouncing routine and then tell you something extraordinarily clear and helpful like:
Unable to load nib file: Monitor.nib, exiting
(sigh)
and then you type that into your search engine of choice for much more helpful answers than you were getting when all you could search was "Application X is broken, help!"

Tada! Things work again. :)

I'm sure error messages are stored in a log somewhere if you open a program from the GUI, but I couldn't find it, and this worked.

It's Black Friday in the U.S. today, the first day of big holiday sales. I got up early and went shopping. I bought an external hard drive I'd been waiting on for a while and some clothes. It's the first time I'd been shopping specifically for this event, and I was a bit underwhelmed. Best Buy had a few deals on specific electronics and movies, but most items were just their regular prices...yet the store was very busy at 8 in the morning. Old Navy had some one-day deals but if you looked closely they weren't too different from its regular sale prices. I spent a couple hours looking around and then went off to a hockey game (go Ducks!)

Then I got home and found this on the news.

I want to return everything I bought. This makes me ashamed and sick. I'm grateful for handmade holidays growing up and I'm planning on one this year.

I was kind of excited for the economic crisis to lead to less
consumerism this holiday season, but it seems like people are running
scared and desperate.

Does this kind of stuff happen every year? It's the first time I've
paid attention to Black Friday. I went shopping today and now I feel
ashamed.

I just got back from the Big Scary Thing that was taking up most of my semester, leading a team for the previously mentioned Cluster Challenge competition.

Quick summary is: teams of undergraduates from different universities team up with vendor partners (who give them hardware) and build cluster computers, then optimize open source scientific applications to run on them most effectively. During the competition, the teams get about 45 hours to complete as many application data sets as they can on their machines, then answer questions about their preparation and knowledge of high performance computing.

I very much liked the "feel" of Austin (music and...hippies? in Texas?) although we didn't spend too much time outside. The competition itself was interesting. The way things turned out we were the only new team there (all the others had done it last year, although some of the team members were new). A lot of the work we put in throughout the semester turned out not to help us proportionally in the end, and some things we could have spend a little more time on and it would have gotten us far...like really understanding what the scientific applications did. Overall I think we did rather well considering we were working with a brand-new platform that the applications weren't designed for (the new Windows HPC Server). I feel like the whole process was a good application of the "wisdom of no escape" for me, I learned a whole bunch about hardware, compilers, and working with Windows that I would have had a hard time discovering with independent study. It's funny to think that almost exactly two years ago I had no idea what an operating system was, and after all this I honestly think I'm now capable of putting together my own cluster.

I'm really happy about the team who won (Indiana/Dresden) because they came darn prepared and were the friendliest, most helpful team we talked to.

I feel a bit funny now. I've been catching up on sleep since I got back and trying to figure out what to do next. I have a semester to finish and need to try to catch up on my other classes, but I still feel a bit at a loss now that this is over. It was supposed to be the last thing I did in the field of high performance computing, because I decided last semester that I wasn't as passionate about the area as I would like to be. I need to find a summer internship now, hopefully in something (as my boss would say) I'm relatively passionate about. I'd been waiting to be "free" to choose my next direction for a while, but now that I am I feel a bit lost. I think it's time to go find some inspiration and motivation so I can come up with some action items and maybe take on something new.

I'm off to Austin for a week for the Supercomputing 2008 Cluster Challenge.

We're the Cray and Microsoft team (don't ask!)

I'll write more when I get back, scrambling to get ready at the moment. The boys are packing their XBoxes and I'm bringing a bag of crafty stuff. Nothing like some Gears of War or an intense needlefelting session to destress. Man, nervous and excited.

My aunt sent me this cool but too-big shirt:


I used a Sparkfun shirt from Maker Faire and a silk scarf from the thrift store and made it into a dress:


I stitched down the sides of the shirt to make it more triangle-shaped and used the fabric from the sleeves to make it wide enough to be a skirt. I let the extra stick out as a sort of "tail." I traced a shirt that fit me onto the red Sparkfun shirt, cut off the sleeves, stitched down the sides, and attached two pieces of silk scarf to hold it up (they get tied together at the neck). I made a v-neck by wrapping some thread a few times around a few vertical inches at the middle of the neckline. I attached the top and the skirt to make a reasonably functional dress.

My room is terrifically messy.

Woohoo! Pipe cleaners are conductive, sez my lovely multimeter.
Edit: Gasp! It looks like not only are they conductive, but it appears the manufacturing process that wraps the wires around the fiber is precise enough that the two wires that traverse the pipe cleaner are actually electronically insulated from each other.
"Stress tests" (ie. me bending, twisting, and untwisting one for a while) indicate the wires break sooner than the fibers come out enough to cause the two wires to touch.

I guess I don't have to make my own, but I decided to try anyway.

How to Make Pipe Cleaners

Fold a piece of wire in half. Wrap felt roving (fuzzy bits of wool right before the spinning-into-yarn phase) around half of the wire. Twist the two halves of the wire (the fuzz-covered one and the other one) together until you feel they will hold the fibers on. Use scissors to cut the edges so bits of fiber can stick out. You can vary the thickness across the pipe cleaner for different effects.

My first attempt looks a bit like a shrimp.


Second came out more pipe-cleaner-like.

It's so teeny I had to set up the external monitor so that the cursor switches to the other screen when I drag it up rather than to the side. Awww.

Brilliant little user interface thing on Google's new browser (this may not be a new idea):

Woooooooo!! Victory! :)
I finally got wireless working on my new computer (which, that reminds me, I haven't even reviewed on here yet). I had to replace the wireless card so I could put Linux/Mac OS X on it, and Windows was being silly and not recognizing any of the drivers I downloaded or even the one on the CD that came with the wireless card.
Anyway I'm very happy. I'm not really used to messing with computer hardware, I've only owned Macs and they haven't needed tinkering. Fortunately I waited a while to get this computer and all of the tricky bits I've run into so far have been documented. This is a good thing because these little green chips that keep coming in the mail and need to be plugged in in particular ways are still a total mystery.
(I wonder if English is the only language that makes you repeat words like that "in in" in the sentence above. Ha, there we go again.)

Pictures soon but it's one of those itty-bitty inexpensive computers ("ultra mobile pcs") all these companies have been coming out with lately. It's called the MSI Wind and it's pretty darn cute. They are really hard to get in the U. S., I suppose because the dollar is low and companies aren't really targeting the U. S. market anymore? The one I finally found was what they called the "Love Edition," so my laptop is shimmery white with little hearts on the back, hehe. I feel out of place in my computer science classes. :) Seriously it's the perfect computer, and if I can succeed at making it a Hackintosh I'll be even happier.

Ran into another clever media art installation. It's called Nuage Vert ("Green Cloud") again from We Make Money Not Art. A waste incineration cloud emits colored vapor that changes based on the amount of waste being incinerated, making residents aware of their collective impact.



I recently figured out my apartment complex bills us for water/trash/sewer usage by dividing the total amount per building by the number of residents in that building. There's quite a bit of turnover in the complex, and in general not a very communal feel or many neighbors seen socializing. This makes the incentive to reduce consumption rather low: since we're going to be penalized if our neighbors use a lot of water even if we try to conserve, might as well get our money's worth. I wonder if there's a way to get access to water use data sooner than the total at the end of the month. I wonder if I'd get in trouble for trying to build one of these. :) Only for water it would have to be a fountain, maybe with one of those LED faucets from Thinkgeek.

I had an insight today about different argument styles a friend and I have (actually know a few people like this, so it applies to all of them), and found yet another reason why I can never seem to make a decision.

My friend looks at the general flow and the big picture. He makes careful observations and collects data about the world, and then bases his conclusions on where the evidence points.
He's the court lawyer, looking to establish a viewpoint with overwhelming evidence in his favor.

I look at the logical structure of things. I can't make a final decision on what I think because the nature of logic is that if I have a million pieces of information that seem to say one thing, a new one could change that conclusion completely.
I'm the detective, looking for the tiny piece of evidence that will flip the case on its head.

He gets frustrated with me (all in good fun) for nitpicking at logical inconsistencies and for refusing to be certain about anything. I get frustrated with him for being so obnoxiously sure he is right!

I have learned from him that I get lazy about doing my research because it's impossible to have ALL the data. It's like refusing to sit down because the object to sit on doesn't fit the Platonic Ideal of a Chair. :)

I read about many conceptual technology/media arts installations, and I'm not impressed by a lot of them. This one I liked. It's a little desktop application that plays videos of computer mice being destroyed in rather cruel ways (water, a power drill...). While the video plays, the application takes over your cursor and replicates the cursor movements made by the dying mouse. The movement across the screen becomes the ghost of the mouse, a small preserved final scream. At one point I accidentally clicked on another window while one of the videos was playing, causing it to block my view of the video. Since I didn't have control of the cursor I couldn't get the application screen back, so I was stuck watching the cursor flail wildly while hearing buzzing and crunching sounds coming from the hidden video. Honestly think it added to the effect. If my trackpad ever goes bad, rather than seeming like a mechanical failure it's going to feel like ghostly possession. Perhaps by a mouse I used to own? If it weren't for serious invasiveness issues they should have their application automatically trigger another cursor hijacking a little time after it's first downloaded and played. It would also be interesting to see what it would be like to run the application without forewarning of what it was going to do.

Edit: Oh, right, source. Came across that on "We Make Money Not Art".

My bike got stolen on the first day of school.

Grrrrr!

I guess it balances in the end, I've gotten some new and exciting back to school stuff recently.

Like this! New bag that fits in my bike basket (ok ok irony) so I don't have to carry a heavy backpack. I love it and I even got to pick the fabric, hooray for Etsy (a site for people to sell their own crafts and crafty materials, very worth checking out). Yay for places to buy creative, beautiful, unique things that help people make a living rather than manufactured, chemical-coated, sweatshop-producted crap. Not that I feel strongly about this or anything. :) I don't really understand the appeal of designer clothes/accessories and so forth when (if you're not inclined to make your own) it's possible and even more affordable to customize your own like this.

After a few mishaps in which I discover:

1. Always order spare breakout boards
2. Despite being ROHS-compliant, lead-free solder is a pain
3. I am not very good at soldering

...my RFID board works. Reader and breakout from Sparkfun, cute little tags (sticky black dot on yellow backing in image) from Trossen Robotics, instructions mostly from here.

Yeah my wire color conventions suck, I only had non-stranded wire in yellow and the other stuff turns out to be hard to use in breadboards.

It's still nifty! The LED flashes as long as it's reading a tag. Honestly this is a useless post as I haven't done anything interesting with it yet, but it still feels like magic when something works at all. More soon.

Doodle messaging!

(Sent from phone)

Placeholder for an idea I was playing with today (pics when I actually do it).

I disassembled my Wacom Bamboo today and broke the touch-sensitive scroll button. Woops. Being me, had I known I still would have done it (maybe more carefully). I discovered the panel inside is a decent amount smaller and thinner than the protective case (6.5" by 7 5/8"). In other words, it could be made more portable for taking to school...as well as camouflaged. The plan is to put it inside a composition book.

The other "hack" (hehe) is coming in the mail (who would have thought you couldn't buy these in stores anymore?) Remember those "magic slate" drawing tablets for kids? They're made of a tinted plastic sheet over a sheet of black plastic/wax, you write with a plastic stylus, and you lift the plastic sheet to clear the screen... Well, combine that idea with the lack of direct feedback you get from a drawing tablet (drawing on a pad while looking at the screen is hard to get used to!). They sell Wacom pens that draw in ink too but they're kind of expensive. I made a prototype drawing pad (had to order the magic slate online, so while I'm waiting on a proper one) from a sheet of colored (for candle-decorating) wax and some translucent fabric. I used it with Inkwell (Apple's handwriting-recognition technology) and to insert little doodles into my notes, and it works awesome. Yay!

Frick, this is cute.

It's a BlinkM, from here. For reference, that coin cell battery is about the size of a quarter.

The almost unnecessarily adorable breadboards are from Sparkfun.

It's not quite bright enough to illuminate the Fluff Thing. I may need a Fluff Thing 2.0 in a lighter color.

Man, no wonder I never get anything done...back to the point. I've ordered a bunch of interesting electronic bits and pieces to teach myself how it all works and work on my research project. I'm planning on documenting the learning process for mine and others' reference and/or amusement.

The setup is already incredibly well-documented and took me about 10 minutes to get working. High level overview: It's a "smart LED" that can light up in programmed sequences of colors and make it so you don't have to use up all your controller's resources on pretty LEDs. You upload the provided "communicator code" to an Arduino development board, then plug the BlinkM directly into the Arduino and connect it to your computer. This will then allow the BlinkM sequencer program to upload little color sequences to the BlinkM. It can then replay them by itself (like the pictures above). You can also use the BlinkM libraries to include color commands in Arduino sketches.

My favorite thing I brought back from a conference last year was this little plastic "ice cube" that lit up in sequences of colors. It was beautiful and rather soothing, it just fit in my hand and glowed softly. This is even better, you can make the sequences yourself. It would be a fun intro to electronics project. I'd love to incorporate it into a piece of jewelery.

It's also going to be a good prototyping tool for remotely-connected devices. My first goal once I get the network-connection bits and pieces is to be able to change the color from a web page, and then from another electronic object.

Sorry about the weird spacing, this template is pretty but kind of annoying that way. I may change it soon.
EDIT: Changed.

Camera battery charged long enough to get some pics off.
The new iPhoto is pretty nice! I'm not sure what version, the latest Leopard update as of today. It gave me a nice photo preview even before I had them off my camera, and was super speedy at uploading them.

Made this about a month ago. Now that it's been safely handed over to its recipient I can post it without ruining the surprise.




The sock is made of stretchy conductive fabric. When you place it over the sockless foot it closes a circuit located inside the guitar and the little character starts jamming to "Born to be Wild" (salvaged from a musical greeting card). I wanted to put in a little vibrating motor so it would really rock out but decided not to push my electronics luck this time.

I decided to make some Zip Flops yesterday:


25-cent zippers from a surplus fabric store + Target flip flops + duct tape.

I've been messing around with camera settings/lighting to try and get better project shots. Here's another attempt at the previously posted Merbie, I think it shows the texture a bit better. Any tips for further improvement would be appreciated.



I should get some better pictures of this little guy but I wanted to show him off:



There are magnets on his feet so he can climb fridges (presumably to get to the honey nut cheerios stored on top).

This book is wonderful, I used her template and lots of super useful tips.

Well, cluster challenge application submitted. Exciting! Lots of silly top secret-ness but I'll post more when I can.

Let's see what's on my camera.

Unless its battery is dead. Darn, more in a bit.

My ooh-crap-need-to-not-spend-money bit of the summer having reasonably passed, I'm off to order electronics for my year research project. I might or might not have posted about that already. Basically it's about creating remote communication interfaces for children and play rather than businesses, adults, and work. Googling my original title ("Tangible Interfaces for Remote Communication") of course (because they seem to do everything there) came up with an MIT project which is one of very few I've found that addresses this idea (please tell me if you know of another!). They don't seem to have actually implemented it in hardware, and that's definitely an important component of my project. I have a couple ideas right now (distributed dollhouses and shared shadows), I think I'll try prototyping both and see what comes out.

How cute is this?

Okay, terrible picture taken with the laptop upside down over my desk, but I would have eaten them all in the time it would have taken to find my camera cable. :)

Conclusion: I messed up the rice but this little press worked perfectly anyway. It would be even better with proper sushi rice, in tiny little homemade bento boxes for school. Thanks much to my sister for the gift.

This is kind of meta, or something:
Using an online translator to find the french word for thesaurus so I could then go find synonyms for a french word.
I got a bit distracted by the "visualize semantic space" button on the results page.

Clicking it was not particularly enlightening:



In other news my room is finally organized and I have a kickass little basket for the front of my bike. Oh the things I get done when I'm procrastinating. :)

I went to see the movie again and have to amend my previous statements a little bit. I caught a lot more, including Joker bits that I kept my eyes open for this time around. There's still some level on which he's not quite believable to me. I'm not quite sure how to explain it but I think it's that I couldn't quite make sense of his madness. Where I realized he was brilliant was that his character in a bizarre way inspires sympathy at some moments. He describes himself as reasonable even though it's all insanity and cruelty. It's like the cat sweetly telling the mouse he's doing him a favor even as he eats him. Something about his sheepish "hi" to Harvey Dent in the hospital...he's play-acting but he means it.

The scene in the building with the SWAT team had gone totally over my head the first time...what happens is that the Joker succeeds in turning everything upside down. The captives are the bad guys, the shooters are the good guys, Batman has to fight the cops to keep them from killing who they're trying to save. Brilliant.

I started crying at the /exact/ same moment after seeing it the second time (as soon as Gordon's wife starts screaming...and then harder when I find out what Batman has to become). I think filmmakers have magical buttons, someone may have to enlighten me.

P. S. I was seriously pretty sad about the Rachel thing, fictional character though she may be. Know what made me feel much better? Youtube videos setting a sequence of dramatic shots of Bruce/Harvey/Rachel to very heart-wrenching music. Seriously, people. Reminds me of this (essentially the same thing for the movie version of The Fountainhead), which I'm still laughing about. Be sure not to miss the very end of the video!

No offense meant to any of the video creators, it looks like a daunting amount of work compiling those clips and making it all match the music. They mostly prompted me to laugh at myself for taking it a bit too seriously. :) ...although I still say Ayn Rand would be spinning in her grave at the music chosen for the Domenique one (Roark thinking a woman out of his league??)

I need a category for tiny electronic gadgets.
This is a micro-SD card reader. It is freaking cute and I want one.

It will go perfectly with my future tiny laptop.

Edit: Darn it! My future tiny laptop already has a card reader. I suppose that's a good thing. :)

Should I do the cluster challenge this year?

Dunno.

Gah.

Halloo. Haven't posted in a while but it seemed like a good idea tonight. I tried to start another blog on crafty stuff but I can't stay on topic to save my life so I'm lumping it all back together.

First: The Dark Knight, a review for the faint of heart.

Note: SPOILER ALERT and so forth. There is crafty stuff further down, skip to that if you don't want the movie ruined.

I did some review-reading and it seems as though everyone's favorite part was how amazing the Joker was. Sucks for me because I missed most of the scenes with him in it. :) See, I don't handle jump-out-at-you or gory bits in movies well at all. And by don't handle I mean I cover my eyes and sometimes ears when I think there might be one (but of course I love plot details so when it's safe to come out I bug whoever is watching next to me to explain what happened, fair warning not to watch movies with me). So that pencil thing...I did not find out nor do I want to know where it ended up, thank you kindly. And I wish I'd missed the part about his dad but it turns out to be quite difficult to block your ears properly when sitting in the front row at an imax movie (we got there a bit late). However, it was worth it to hear Heath Ledger's freaking amazing and classic "why so serious??"...amazing and indelible.
I'm still a little torn up about the whole Rachel/Harvey/Bruce subplot. I didn't lose hope until right at the end that they'd find her in some other warehouse, slightly peeved and hungry but otherwise unharmed. I was reminded gently that we did actually see the explosion and her in the same shot. Sniff.
I thought this over for a while and I decided it wasn't that she thought less of Bruce because he didn't stand up and take the fall rather than having Harvey do it. She realized she could never really have him, whereas Harvey was genuinely hers...to the point where he broke when he lost her. Poor Batman's pretty good at loving and taking care of people without asking anything in return ("you don't have to thank me") or being loved back (letting them chase him at the end). Though in the end Rachel showed she was human when she went back on her promise to him, and I'm not so sure he could be there for someone real, he'd internalized too much of his own legend.

Completely different topic: I found an awesome yarn store in Tempe! It's called Tempe Yarn and Fiber and it's super close to where I used to live. I was excited because I'm always looking for cool non-chain crafty stores here, I miss that like crazy about the Bay Area. I don't really knit, but I like looking at pretty yarn so I went and checked it out. They have a very nice selection (from a non-expert's point of view) and the ladies who worked there were super friendly. This made me feel rather bad that I hadn't planned on buying anything until I noticed their fleece section in the back. Omigoodness they have the most beautiful colors, and having been used to working with regular wool roving I was not prepared for how amazingly soft merino is. Soooooooooooooooft oh. <3 Plus...it's not that expensive! Most of it was $2.00 an ounce, and an ounce is a lot for someone who likes making teeny things. I picked out six colors and got a half-ounce each (got a lesson when I watched the lady pull off the right amount for me: tearing off bits is much much better than cutting them). I should post the colors but I'll post something I made with them for now. The hair is this incredible purple multicolor mixture with silk in it, it absolutely needed to be mermaid hair.

Behold a sea girl and her Merbie.














ALSO someone left cran-grape juice in my fridge and he is wonderful.

This is pretty nifty--you can upload photos to flickr by sending them as email attachments, and then put them directly into a blog post without multiple upload steps. Email-centered online data management works well for me, I always have a gmail window open.

Actually about the photo: You can make neat bags from food wrappers. This instructable had the nice idea of using a clear vinyl cover. I couldn't find that, so I cut up a shower curtain and it worked pretty well. Vinyl is a bit "sticky" and it wasn't working in my sewing machine at first, so I put a piece of wax paper on top and tore it off the stitches when I was done. I haven't found the ideal lining material yet--cotton cloth isn't really thick enough, and I don't like the feel of synthetic felt.

A silly hat in progress.


A silly hat completed.


Lots of pizza, with help from the Boy and lessons from the amazing Raven.





Wall decorations with Raven (better pictures on her blog).


A case for my nice new phone (yay Sprint for replacing it).


The beaded thing is a scavenged earring I made a long time ago. The wire to hold the beads was stolen from the spiral notebook I used in high school physics.



And ginger cookies, or what was left.