iTunes DJ works with various remotes such as the “Remote” software available for iPhone/iPod Touch. Using the Remote application, any one of my guests can login to my WiFi, connect to my music library, and begin to vote on songs. The universe of songs is defined by me and this can range from a single playlist to my entire music library. Unfortunately, the system doesn’t allow guests to stream their own music into mine so it can be played from their iPod Touch all the way through and out the speakers. That said, I’ve had a lot of fun with this voting feature.

Here is one of the playlists created by myself and friends as we voted. This is not necessarily the order that the songs were played. Enjoy!

American Pie	Don McLean
Peace Train	Cat Stevens
Soul to Squeeze	Red Hot Chili Peppers
Knockin' On Heaven's Door	Guns N' Roses
Vivi O Preferibilmente Morti - Monty and Ted	Gianni Ferrio
Let's Dance	David Bowie
The Heart Of Rock & Roll	Huey Lewis
Aloha 'Oe	Tia Carrere
Freedom	Wham!
No More Words	Berlin
Ezekiel 25-17	Samuel L. Jackson
Just Can't Get Enough	Depeche Mode
With A Little Help From My Friends	Joe Cocker
Time	Hootie & The Blowfish
Send Me ON My Way	Rusted Root
Thunder Road	Bruce Springsteen
Shake a Leg	AC/DC
The Guitar Man	Bread
Tragedy	Bee Gees
Devil Inside	INXS
Shining Star	Earth Wind & Fire
Lola	The Kinks
Welcome to the Jungle	Guns N' Roses
"A Bunch of Muppets"	Dialogue
Stumblin' In	Suzi Quatro & Chris Norman
Fool In The Rain	Led Zeppelin
Edge Of Seventeen	Stevie Nicks
Mercedes Benz	Janis Joplin
You	Candlebox
The Chain	Fleetwood Mac
She Hates Me	Puddle Of Mudd
Werewolves of London	Warren Zevon
More Than A Feeling	Boston
Talk Dirty to Me	Poison
I Just Want To Be Your Everything	Andy Gibb
Dancing In The Moonlight	King Harvest
Sex and Candy	Marcy Playground
Lightning Crashes	Live
September	Earth Wind & Fire
Here I Go Again	Whitesnake
You're My Wicked Life	Kill Bill Soundtrack
Hungry Heart	Bruce Springsteen
Synchronicity II	The Police
Runaway Romeo	Duane Carleton
Sky High	Jigsaw
Brothers Johnson - Stomp	The Brothers Johnson
Eleanor Rigby	The Beatles
Running On Empty	Jackson Browne
Smooth (Feat. Rob Thomas)	Santana
Again	Duane Carleton
Poison	Alice Cooper
Long Distance Runaround	Yes
Ramblin' Man	The Allman Brothers Band
Creep	Radiohead
Disappear	INXS
Cruel to Be Kind	Nick Lowe
Girls Talk	Dave Edmunds
Minnesota Clay - Minnesota Sky	Piero Piccioni
Promises In The Dark	Pat Benatar
Burnin' For You	Blue Öyster Cult
Shakey Ground	Don Henley
Bawitdaba	Kid Rock
Photograph	Def Leppard
Amazing	Aerosmith
Rio	Duran Duran
Don't Stop 'Till You Get Enough	Michael Jackson
Go All the Way	The Raspberries
Amanda	Boston
Under the Bridge	Red Hot Chili Peppers
Daydream Believer	The Monkees
Behind Blue Eyes	The Who
When I'm With You	Sheriff
Unwell	Matchbox Twenty
Champagne Supernova	Oasis
Hanging On The Telephone	Blondie
Home Town	Joe Jackson
Summer Days	The Partridge Family
Radio GA GA	Queen
Misty Mountain Hop	Led Zeppelin
If It's Love	Train
Bastille Day	Rush
Buddy Holly	Weezer

Hawkins argues that traditional approaches to artificial intelligence are wrong. Most or all of traditional thinking about AI has been to think of intelligence as an advanced algorithm. In this way, we build a lot of complicated algorithms that are designed to solve everyday problems and we fail again and again to reproduce what a child would consider mundane. The key argument of the book is to say that traditional approaches think of intelligence as a massively complicated computer system. Hawkins says this is all wrong. We need to understand how out brain works to understand intelligence and the brain is quite plainly a memory system, not a computer system.

He spends a lot of time describing how the brain, specifically the neocortex, is what drives intelligence. He explains how uniform it is in structure and how t here are no special areas of the neocortex for processing vision, or sound, or any of our other senses. There are other parts of the brain that are dedicated to these things and what these other parts do is adapt sensory signals from one sense (that is sight or hearing) and send it to the cortex in a uniform fashion. Essentially, the neocortex has an advanced structure but it has very simple algorithms and these algorithms are applied to all of our senses in the same exact way.

He also talks about how the brain has a hierarchical structure. The neocortex has six layers, about as thick as a credit card.Where lower regions of the hierarchy deal with lower-level information coming right from  the senses and higher regions deal with more general information. Everything the brain stores is also stored in something called invariant representations, which is how you can remember what a person looks like even though your senses see them in many different ways (angles, lighting, ages, etc.)

Hawkins also says that sensory signals flood up into the neocortex and the neocortex floods even more information back to the lower regions. This feedback system is a major element of Hawkins theories. He says that  the feedback system is the way the brain predicts what its sense will experience next. The brain predicts the future, whether it be a few milliseconds in the future or 10 years. Prediction is the basis of all intelligence. You can read all about the memory prediction framework here.

So, rather than inventing a complicated Calculus algorithm to design a baseball-player robot, where the robot analyzes frames from its video camera and calculates a balls trajectory and physical movements it needs to make in order to catch a ball. Instead,  you stick a memory system in the robot and have it learn what it sees as an incoming ball and record what it needs to do in order to catch that ball. It will fail at first, but if the memory system is designed like the one in our human brain, it will slowly learn what works and what won’t over time and eventually master the task. Practice makes perfect.

All of  this was new to me and made perfect sense. Then Hawkins spends the last parts of the book explaining how traditional visions of AI are all wrong. This is where I was pissed that I hadn’t thought of all this before. It’s all just common sense. We are not going to build human-like robots at first. There is no use. Why pay 20 million bucks for a robot butler when a human butler will do a better job and for far less cost. Why build a human-like robot at all? It would need to have exactly our senses, exactly our vulnerabilities, and exactly our life experiences in order to come close to being human-like.

Why not instead take advantage of the fact that we can build intelligent machines and equip them with senses beyond what a human could ever have? In this way, if we ever figure out how to create a workable hierarchical memory system which yields an intelligent machine, then we’ll set this AI off to do things that a human robot might be just as ill-equipped to handle as a real human.

Some examples:

• Create a feed from global weather stations and make this the vision sense for the AI. It will learn things about global weather patterns that humans cannot since we don’t have these senses.
• Equip the AI with traffic monitors and it will learn things about traffic patterns on a grand scale.
• Create a computer where CPU, memory, IO, and process thread information flows into the AI and it will learn about how to optimize a system in ways a human could never understand.
• Have a computer live in a 10 dimensional world and experience it like we experience our 3D/4D world. The AI will be able to unlock an understanding of these worlds that a human simply cannot.
• and more

All in all, it was an easy read and had lots of new ideas. Go pick it up and we can discuss it!

This coming weekend is camping, yay! Can’t wait to hang out with the Szinger family and friends. Should be a great weekend. I need to dig up that camping checklist. One of the items I know I have plenty of is propane tanks. I have no less than a dozen of these at various stages of use. Should be plenty for a few weekends.

This weekend’s camping trip kicks off a week off work, which is something I’m looking forward to. I’m hoping to go to the beach a few times, go to our local waterpark out in Riverhead, maybe go to New Jersey and play Magi Quest, possibly a Zoo, etc. The kids are excited and we hope to be in the car a lot and out and about. While I love our pool and the serenity of our backayrd, we all need to get out and have some fun.

Thanks @briangerhardt

Me running my first leg of the race.

Last weekend, 12 of my co-workers and I ran in the Ragnar Relay New York 2010. This was a 180-mile relay race from Woodstock to New York City. The race was a fantastic experience and posed a good challenge. The hardest part is dealing with very little sleep as you never have more than 3-4 hours to relax and although we did rent a hotel room, it was mainly to clean up our outsides (and insides) before our final legs. The race was a fantastic team-building experience as you got to interact with your team a lot more than any single-day experience would let you.

The way this works is the 12 runners are divided into two sub-teams. These are generally labeled “van1″ and “van2″ since that accurately describes how we got around. The relay is broken up into 36 legs, each runner runs 3 separate legs. Distances range from 12-16 miles. Typical  legs are from 3.5 to 8.5 miles. My legs were 4.0, 3.6, and 6.0 miles. Elevation gains range from 100 ft. to 700 ft. across that distance. Your team runs non-stop, physically handing off a bracelet at each exchange. Van 1 runs 6 legs, one for each runner, and then hands off to van2 who runs the next 6 legs. This gives each van a quiet period to go along with a busy period. The whole event went from 19 hours for the fastest teams to about 36 hours.

My midnight run was probably the most miserable. It was about 4 miles, in the dark, and I had to contend with this monster hill and the bugs. At one point I thought I was lost. There were no cars, no support, and no other runners. These were country roads, so there were no lights. I was lit up like a firefly, though, as all night racers have to have reflective gear, a flashing but-lamp, and either a flashlight or a headlamp.

I was looking forward to a nice beer at the finish line, but all they had was Heineken and Miller Light. Prices were reasonable ($4 and $3 respectively) but the line was long and I was pretty damn tired. Before my last leg I think I started to hallucinate. I had to volunteer a shift at one of the exchanges and I could barely speak.

Picture of the Liquor Nuts team!

We had one of the best names, IMHO, but the team who won Nom de Plume (Best Team Name) was Team #157, I’m Woodstocking Your Girlfriend. Lame. Here are the race results, which you might find interesting.

Fastest team:

1      Team, # 183      North American Distance Squad      19:28:05

Our team:

133      Team, # 10      Liquor Nuts      29:06:03

Slowest team:

199      Team, # 170      Ragnar It’s so easy a Caveman can do it.      34:16:21

Note: Some teams are called “Ultra” and they only sport 6 runners, so the runners on those teams run twice as long.

Everyone is pretty jazzed about doing this next year.I hope I can finally break the mythical 10 minute mile mark; I’m still running 12-13 minute miles depending on elevation. Just recently I started to show I can run 11:30 minute miles so there has been some progress on that end.

Here is a quick snapshot of my training in the last three months. Certainly more than I trained last year. Blue is running, red is cycling. I still haven’t started swimming and I have my first triathlon of the season in 5 weeks!

March

April

May

See you next time!

Gravité from Renaud Hallée on Vimeo.

Airspace Rebooted from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

via haha.nu

via haha.nu

Firefox Woes

Ever since I upgraded to Snow Leopard, Firefox would not start under my user account. It starts fine for Lisa on the same machine, but not for me. Very strange. The failure is very early and there is very little system debug info (via Console, logs, etc). After much wrangling, I was able to start it as root, but the standard launch mechanism simply would die. So, I created a new user account and migrated all of my personal folders to the new user. Permissions were the trickiest part of  this. for each directory, such as ~/Documents, I deleted it on the new user, sudo mv /User/nic/Documents /User/nick/Documents, and I had to chown nick *, and chgrp staff Nick. Things are working fine now and I re-setup all of my programs.

Time Machine to the Rescue

My laptop started to die on start-up. I use boot camp between Windows 7 and Snow Leopard. Starting Snow Leopard started to shutdown the laptop immediately. What the?! So, I re-installed the laptop completely via a Time Machine backup. 2 hours later, I’m as good as new. Apple’s Time Capsule/Time machine really does work very, very well. I just wish the backup parameters were more configurable without resorting to hacks.Are you still reading this? Still? Seriously, you probably have better things to do with your time.

Firefox Tweaks

So, I have Firefox tricked out in a very particular way… same way I have it working on all of my computers. Lots of my configuration I got from a co-worker, but I have added individual elements that work well for me. Here is a summary of the add-ons and look and feel I use:

• I use a chrome look and feel based on the Chromifox Basic theme
• I use autoHideStatusbar add-on to hide the status bar automatically. Gives me more browsing real-estate. The status bar comes up during page loads and when you move the cursor to the bottom of your screen.
• On Windows, I auto hide the menu bar as well with the Hide Menubar add-on. This is not necessary on the Mac, however.
• I install the CyberSearch add-on and ditch the search bar. This makes the address bar behave like Chrome’s one-stop address/search bar.
• I use the Download Statusbar add-on, which is more integrated than the default separate download window Firefox uses. Also, more like Chrome’s UI.
• I installed Locationbar2 add-on, which componentizes each part of the url you’re at. Helpful for navigating some websites where you want to return to a specific point in the url hierarchy.
• I use speed dial, which is less sexy but more functional than Chrome’s most recent pages home screen thingy. Having a 3×3 or 4×4 grid of pages with large thumbnails allows me to get rid of by bookmark toolbar, also yielding more real-estate for actual browsing.
• For development, Firebug and Web Developer are essential plugins for HTML, JavaScript, and CSS development. Get them and learn to use them well.
• The Cooliris add-on is the most awesome way to browse images on the web. Brilliant butter-smooth 3D wall that hooks up to google search results, flickr, and a host  of other image sources. A definite must-have plugin.

Creator: I love the power of Unix/AJAX/C#/whatever.
Customer: I want to finish my work and go play outside.
– Scott Belkun

via 7 Reasons to Hate Your Code

New Iphone Stun Gun App from 4siteVideo on Vimeo.

I ran 3 miles on Friday, 4 on Saturday, and 5.3 on Easter Sunday. While my pace is still slow (the hills can explain part of that), I think I did pretty well. Here is a table describing each run:

Date	Distance	Pace	Elevation Gain	Average HR
4/2	3.04	255 ft.	13:48 min/mi	163 bpm
4/3	4.08	271 ft.	14:29 min/mi	157 bpm
4/4	5.36	528 ft.	14.22 min/mi	154 bpm

Today, I’m going to rest my running legs and try and get on the bike for a few hours. I still haven’t started to train on the bike or in the pool so I better have at it soon.

via haha.nu

via haha.nu

RT @jseiden: Am I the only one who finds this kind of CG creepy? http://bit.ly/doHXeC

http://soydeaire.labuat.com/

And enjoy. I stuck it out for the whole song, sooo cool. Thanks RobG!

This year, I have some difficult races that I simply do not feel I can do at 195lbs. So, there is my motivation. In June, I have a Ragnar Relay. This is a race where 12 people get into a van and run from u pstate New York to the Bronx. Each runner doing three legs. I have the easiest assignment: 3.9 miles, 3.5 miles, and 3 miles with very easy elevation gains. In July, I have the NYC Triathlon. This is a 1 miles swim in the swift Hudson, 40k bike, 10k run. Last year I did it in about 3 hours, 30 minutes. This year, I want to do under 3 hours. At the very end of the season, I have a Toughman half-Ironman. This is the mack-daddy race that I’m simply not ready for. 1.2 miles swim (in still water), 56 mile bike, and a half-marathon.

Yesterday, I ran a little over 6 miles. Last week I did a little over 4. For the 6, I averaged 14 minute miles, which is like I was fast-walking. Still, I stuck it out and felt pretty strong. I’m controlling what I eat, too, hoping to keep my metabolism and enzyme levels in fat-burning mode all of the time. I’ll be swimming once a week and doing bike once a week. I also took a Yoga class which was taught by a Triathlete Yoga instructor and she told us how to use Yoga to recover and strengthen your core. So, I’ll work on that too.

When it warms up, I’ll do 2 runs, 2 bikes, and probably keep swimming as a once a week activity just because it’s such a pain to get to the pool. Last year I stopped going to Tae Kwon Do the entire time I was training, over 4 months. This year I’m going at least once a week to make sure I continue to advance that. I’m trying to get my son Marco into sparring too, so hopefully that will get me back into training for a tournament in the fall.

As usual, I can’t do any of this without the support of my family and friends. I appreciate any words of encouragement you can offer!

(defn fib [n]
   (if  (or (zero? n) (= n 1))
       1
      (+  (fib (dec n) )  (fib (- n 2)))))

Here is some Java:

    	ServerSocket serverSocket;
    	try {
    		serverSocket = new ServerSocket(this.listenPort);
    	} catch (IOException e) {
    	    System.out.printf("Could not listen on port: %d\n", this.listenPort);
    	    status = -1;
    	    return;
    	}

I had this working on my old blog, but just got around to getting it to work on the new one.

via TwLing