Daniel Stutzbach

August 13th Movies

Daniel Stutzbach — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 19:16:01 +0000

Michael Cere has a new film coming out in August: "Scott Pilgrim vs. The World". The tagline is "An Epic of Epic Epicness". It comes out the same day as "Eat, Pray, Love" (Julia Roberts) and "The Expendables" (Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jet Li, etc.), so we're going to have a commercial showdown at the box office of girl movie versus guy movie versus geek movie.

Which do you plan to see?

A Scriptable Equity Calculator

Daniel Stutzbach — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 20:09:42 +0000

For all of your programming poker players out there, yesterday I made the Poker Sleuth Equity Calculator scriptable with bindings for C/C++, C#, and Python.

If you have easy_install or pip set up for Python, you can just do “easy_install pokersleuth”. It requires a 32-bit version of Python for Windows.

As an example, to compute the odds of winning when you have a pair of Jacks, your opponent has the Ace and 5 of diamonds, and the board cards are the 3 of diamonds, 5 of clubs, and 9 of diamonds:

>>> import pokersleuth >>> pokersleuth.calculate_equity('3d5c9d', ('JJ', 'Ad5d') [0.48225, 0.51775]

The module can also be used directly from the command line:

C:\>python -m pokersleuth 3d5c9d JJ Ad5d [0.48225, 0.51775]

It supports up to 10 players and a quite extensive syntax for specifying hand ranges. Accuracy is within one percentage point with at least 99.5% probability.

New Dietary Guidelines for Americans from the USDA

Daniel Stutzbach — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 01:41:28 +0000

The USDA released their new nutritional guidelines (updated every 5 years). I thought it was interesting to read directly from the source, rather than filtered through the media.

For those with only a little time, you might just want to read the executive summary.

The full report contains more detailed information, including their methodology and links to the supporting evidence used to formulate the guidelines, as well as information on particular food groups (protein, carbs, etc.).

A few things that I found interesting:

Potassium reduces the effect that salt has on blood pressure. Go bananas!

Moderate alcohol consumption (1 drink/day for women; 1 to 2 drinks per day for men) significantly reduces the risk of developing diabetes, reduces the risk of having a stroke, and reduced the rate of cognitive decline with age. However, all of the obvious qualifiers still apply. Whoa! Who knew that alcohol could be so good for you? The obvious caveats still apply: Heavy alcohol consumption is still very bad. Alcohol should still be avoided if it will conflict with medications or for people with a variety of other medical conditions. Alcohol is high in calories, etc. See the Alcohol section for more details.

Those concerned with gastrointestinal issues might be interested in the Carbohydrates section, particularly Table D5.1, which describes the different types of carbohydrates and how they are (or aren't) digested.

If you find some other interesting tidbit in there, I'd love to hear about it.

A Lament for Palm; Praise for HiveMinder

Daniel Stutzbach — Fri, 07 May 2010 02:42:27 +0000

Many years ago now, I had a Palm IIIxe. It's still the best handheld device I've ever owned. Palm invested countless man-hours in making sure that every operation could be performed with a minimum number of clicks and that the Palm's user interface was always zippy. No wading through layers of menus, and no waiting for an application to load. Palm understood that if a user perceived the device as a slow, they wouldn't bother to pull it out in order to take a quick note.

There were some excellent applications for the Palm III, many of which I have not seen replicated for other systems. For example, Quicken (and Mint) have budget features. It's a big part of why people use financial software. However, they still can't distinguish between budgets that should accumulate money (rainy-day budgets like car repairs) and budgets where any savings should be swept into another account (if I save money on food, I don't need to eat more next month). A dinky little shareware application that ran on a 160x160 display did it a decade ago. Why can't modern companies get with the program?

The only reasonable explanation is Palm's market share was swallowed by a sarlacc pit, preventing Palm's competitors from borrowing the best ideas from the platform. I certainly can't think of a more logical explanation.

Of all the applications, the one I missed the most was the to-do list manager. I had a neat little app that let me create links between items, so that I could prioritize and organize the dependencies between tasks. Over the years, I've tried several other to-do list managers, but they all fell flat. Most often, they simply didn't provide a good way for me to organize my mammoth supply of tasks. When I finally retired my Palm, I felt like I had abruptly lost a cybernetic brain implant. Ow.

That finally changed a few months ago when I found HiveMinder. The killer feature here is the ability to specify that task B depends on task A. Once that dependency has been set, task B won't show up in my to-do list until task A is done. That lets me focus on the tasks that I can actually work on right now. HiveMinder also lets me sets priorities and deadlines for tasks, and sorts them accordingly. Web, email, Twitter, and IM interfaces make it easy to create and manipulate tasks from any phone that lets you type.

To top it all off, HiveMinder provides a complete API so I can write my own programs to interact with my task list. All the data is sent in YAML (a superset of JSON), which is geek-tastic.

It's nice having an external brain organizer again!

OkCupid

Daniel Stutzbach — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 20:25:13 +0000

Many of you know that I met my wife on OkCupid (and if you didn't know, you do now). I picked OkCupid over other online dating sites for three reasons:

It's free and I was penniless grad student.
Instead of the super-sanitized questions common on other sites, they use user-submitted questions, such as:
- Have you ever played Dungeons and Dragons?
- How man books do you own?
- Do humans and modern primates (apes, chimps, etc) share a common evolutionary ancestor?
- Would you be willing to go shopping for sex toys?
As a Computer Science grad student, I was impressed by their matching algorithm

In a nutshell, here's how their matching algorithm works. Each question is multiple choice. In addition to choosing an answer, you select one or more answers that your ideal partner would make. Also, you rate how important this question is to you. For all of the questions that you've both answered, OkCupid computes the match percentage according to the following formula:

On top of that, they apply confidence intervals so that people who have only answered a few questions cannot have artificially high scores. (Why can't Amazon do this for their product ratings? – a rant for another time.) My wife and I have a 94% match rating.

Anyway!

In the past year, OkCupid has started to generate a lot of buzz by mining their enormous database of quirky questions and writing about the results. For example, they've examined Why the Democrats have a hard time being as focused as the Republicans and Racism in dating.

This month, they decided to pummel their competition with an article titled “Why you should never pay for online dating”. They analyze publicly available data about eHarmony's and Match.com's to compute what fraction of their users are not paying users (96% and 93% at best, respectively). The key problem here is that non-paying users cannot write you back, so you have a 90+% failure rate on top of the already challenging task of finding a good date. Ouch.

I hope OkCupid makes a fortune.

Field Reports from Tatooine for @darthvader

Daniel Stutzbach — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 18:58:50 +0000

I have to wonder how Darth Vader felt upon reading the field reports from the stormtroopers on Tatooine in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Days 5 and 6 must have throw him for a loop.

Day 1: Located droid parts near an escape pod, and two sets of tracks leading away from the pod. The tracks appear to be from an astromech droid and a bipedal droid. Based on the gait, the bipedal droid is likely a protocol droid.

Day 2: The tracks split up. The astromech's tracks lead off into the wilderness, while the bipedal's head roughly for Mos Eisley. A droid specializing in communications is more suited as a spy, so we're following its tracks first. Probably the astromech has a loose wire.

Day 3: The bipedal's tracks intersect with a Jawa sandcrawler, then vanish. It will be easy to catch up with the sandcrawler later, so we're backtracking to pursue the astromech's tracks before they fade beneath the shifting dunes.

Day 4: The astromech's tracks lead into rocky terrain, then vanish in an area covered with Jawa footprints. Returning to pursue the sandcrawler.

Day 5: Located and stopped the sandcrawler. Examination of the Jawas' financial records indicates they recently captured an astromech droid and a protocol droid wandering the desert with numbers R2D2 and C3PO, respectively. The Jawas promptly sold the droids to a moisture farmer named Owen Lars. Slaughtered the Jawa's and framed the indigenous Tusken raiders.

Day 6: Raided the Lars homestead. Under interrogation, Owen and Beru Lars revealed that after purchasing the droids, they learned that R2D2 claimed to be the property of an "Obi-wan Kenobi". Under further interrogation, Owen revealed that "Obi-wan Kenobi" is another name for a local named "Old Ben Kenobi" who he alternately described as a "wizard" and "a crazy old man". They sent their nephew, Luke Skywaker to Anchorhead to have the droids' memories erased. Put Owen and Beru to death for dealing in stolen goods.

Day 7: Encountered a protocol droid and an astromech droid traveling with two men, one young and one old, but we're sure they were not the droids we're looking for. Later, a bounty hunter spotted R2D2 and C3PO boarding a YT-1300 light freighter named the Millennium Falcon. Dispatched a squad to seize the ship, but encountered heavy return fire and the ship was able to take off.

Review: Buffalo NAS

Daniel Stutzbach — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:43:22 +0000

I've been meaning to blog about the Buffalo NAS that I purchased and have finally been spurred into action by a post from Leaf:

I'm thinking of buying an external drive for backups for my home pc. Reviews online don't even suggest clear leaders, let alone a winner.

For a few years, I've been using external hard drives as a way of backing up main computer's data. I create a fresh backup once a month and incremental backups for the rest of the month. Since my main computer is a laptop, it's been pretty easy to get an external drive with much more capacity than the computer. The extra space allows me to store a few months worth of backups. I use an ancient version of Norton Ghost to perform the actual backups. It works pretty well and I've configured it to send me an email every morning letting me know if the backup was successful or not.

I've gone through two Western Digital MyBook USB drives. Each worked great for around a year and a half, then died. Having all of your backups die simultaneously isn't really ideal in a backup solution, so I decided to search for a better option.

Based on the advice of my cousin Paul, I investigated—then invested in—a Buffalo LinkStation Pro Duo, which is a Network-Attached Storage (NAS) device. It contains two hard drives and I configured the device to mirror them, so if one drive fails the other one still has all of my data.

I'm pretty pleased with the Buffalo. The web-based configuration is quite flexible. It's even possible to make some or all of my data accessible from elsewhere on the Internet, so I can access it while I'm traveling. Very handy. I also configured it to email me every morning to let me know the status of the drives and how much capacity remains. That way, I have some warning when I'm running out of space and I'll know right away when one of the drives fail.

Under the hood, the Buffalo runs Linux and there's an active Buffalo NAS hacking community. Using their instructions, I was able to unlock ssh access into my Buffalo device.

Wikipedia on Cats

Daniel Stutzbach — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:53:42 +0000

Yesterday I stumbled across the Wikipedia entry on cats. I'm convinced that a cat wrote most of the article. Below are some choice excerpts, emphasis mine. I'm going to taunt my cats now by showing off my opposable thumbs.

The cat (Felis catus) … is currently the most popular pet in the world. A skilled predator, the cat is known to hunt over 1,000 species for food.

[The] female is called a "molly" or "queen".

… their small size, social nature, obvious body language, love of play and relatively high intelligence.

Unlike human arms, cat forelimbs are attached to the shoulder by free-floating clavicle bones, which allows them to pass their body through any space into which they can fit their heads.

A cat delivers a lethal neck bite with its two long canine teeth that insert between two of the prey's vertebrae and sever its spinal cord, causing irreversible paralysis and death.

Cats have excellent night vision and can function at only one-sixth the light level required for human vision.

They can hear higher-pitched sounds than either dogs or humans … Cats' hearing is also extremely sensitive and is among the best of any mammal

Cats have an acute sense of smell, which is due … to a large surface of olfactory mucosa … about twice that of humans and only 1.7-fold less than the average dog.

Humans start to feel uncomfortable when their skin temperature passes about 44.5 °C (112 °F), in contrast cats show no discomfort until their skin reaches around 52 °C (126 °F) ... Indeed, their kidneys are so efficient that cats … can even rehydrate by drinking seawater.

Anthropologist and animal scientist Desmond Morris … suggests that when cats bring home mice or birds, they are teaching their human to hunt, or helping their human as if feeding "an elderly cat, or an inept kitten".

Star Wars Uncut

Daniel Stutzbach — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 22:45:16 +0000

The people over at Star Wars: Uncut have cut up the original Star Wars film into 15 second clips and setup a web site where fans can re-film each clip in the manner of their choosing. Once all of 15 second increments have been re-filmed and uploaded, they will stitch them all together into one zany, geek-tastic movie. They have 50% of the film done already and have a trailer (below).

I wonder if this will turn into the newest Internet craze, with many movies being remade by fans (at least until the MPAA throws a hissy fit).

Health and Fitness

Daniel Stutzbach — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 12:13:16 +0000

Around New Year's, when other people were posting their goals for the year, I meant to post some health and fitness goals for myself. And by "New Year's", I actually mean "New Year's 2008". I think it's a little late for me to post fitness my goals for 2008, or even for 2009, so instead I'm going to grade some of the tools that have and haven't worked out.

Omron Body Fat Monitor and Scale: B-. In addition to measuring weight, this scale also includes electrical sensors to estimate what percentage of the body are composed of muscle, fat, and other tissues. While somewhat interesting, my experience has been that the percentages change at such an excruciatingly slow rate that they're hardly worth measuring. Furthermore, although the scale measures the values down to one-tenth of a percentage point, the values fluctuate within a one percentage point range from day to day depending on the contents of my stomach, the humidity in the air, etc. The scale also calculates several other values such as resting metabolic rate and body-mass index, but these are just simple arithmetic computations based on the other values. The primary function of measuring weight works great, naturally, but the Omron Body Fat Monitor and Scale is overkill for my purposes.

The Gym: C-. All the gadgets are neat for a little while, but I realized pretty quickly that anything that requires me to leave the house to exercise isn't going to last. Not when it's 100+ degrees outside.

Omron HR-100C Heart Rate Monitor: A+. Ever wish that you had an infallible personal couch who would tell you when you were exercising too hard or not enough? This is it. I had no idea how useful a heart rate monitor could be. As long as I stay within my target heart rate, I find that I can keep exercising more or less indefinitely. When I exceed my target heart rate, I start to get tired quickly (physiologically, I'm exhausting the supply of oxygen in my muscles). Without a heart rate monitor, it was very easy for me to push myself to work harder, leading to exhaustion and frustration. The heart rate monitor is like a little angel that whispers "No, it's okay. You don't need to work any harder than that". For my target heart rate range, I use 50% to 85% of the way between my resting heart rate and maximum heart rate. To find my resting heart rate, I measure my heart rate when I wake up in the morning (52 beats/minute). To find my maximum heart rate, I exercise as hard as I can for around two minutes (185 beats/minute). That gives me a target heart rate range of 118 to 165 beats per minute.

Creative Fitness Door Gym: A. The Door Gym pull-up bar attaches to any standard door frame, without needing to be permanently installed. I love this thing. I hung mine in the door frame between the main hallway and the kitchen, and once a day or so I'll do some pull-ups when I'm walking by. I'm not sure why, but they're fun! There's just something exhilarating about pulling yourself off the ground. When I first go the Door Gym, I could perform a grand total of zero pull-ups and had to build up my upper-body strength with push-ups (which are not nearly as much fun). I'm also impressed by the engineering of the Door Gym. It transfers the force of my weight into a lateral force on the door frame. Takes all of 5 seconds to insert or remove from the door frame. Most of the time, I just leave it installed.

Yourself! Fitness: C+ (B with Heart Rate Monitor) I got this PC software for Alisa two Christmases ago. There are also versions available for the XBox, Playstation, and Wii (the Wii version is sold under the name "My Fitness Coach"). In a nutshell, Yourself Fitness provides a virtual fitness instructor, "Maya", who guides you through a dynamically generated exercising routine. You choose a length for the workout, as well as a one of six focuses for the routine: weight loss, cardio, upper body strength, core strength, lower body strength, or flexibility. If you have an exercise ball, step bench, hand weights, or heart rate monitor, Maya will incorporate those into the exercise routine. After each group of exercises, Maya asks how well you feel you were able to perform the exercises. If you found it too easy, she'll make them harder next time, and vice versa. Overall, the workouts are pretty good and Maya provides a wide enough variety of exercises that they don't get stale quickly. I did encounter one problem with the software, though. After using a few times a week for several months, I was working my way into more vigorous routines. Unfortunately, I was advancing partially by being more fit and partially by pushing myself harder. Eventually, I was utterly exhausted after every workout and became less inclined to exercise. When I eventually got a heart rate monitor, I gave Yourself Fitness another go and realized what had happened: I could perform the workout, but my heart rate was beyond the target range. Once I scaled back the difficulty several notches, the workouts left me feeling energized instead of miserable (while remaining vigorous enough to make my muscles sore a few days later).