Stephen Skory

Bookmarks for June 28th through July 9th

Stephen Skory — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 20:00:54 +0000

These are my links for June 28th through July 9th:

HG QuickRef v1.0 – Yet another quickref for mercurial, but this one has gaudy colors!
Intrinsic functions in Fortran 90 –
KDTREE – A Fortran & C++ (using Boost) kD tree implementation.
Forthon – Build Fortran code into Python modules, like f2py.
California ISO: System Status – See the current energy demand for California.

2009 Tour de France Pool

Stephen Skory — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 20:11:41 +0000

It’s Tour time again, and I’ve posted the team rankings after today’s prologue in Monaco. You may remember this from last year, when I didn’t do very well. I hope to do better this year. For once I actually put some thought into my choices.

I’ll update the rankings every day after the stage as quickly as I can!

Pareidolia

Stephen Skory — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 16:58:57 +0000

For a few months I have subscribed to Shorpy, a site that posts high-quality scans of historic American photographs. I save the ones I like, and I’ve set my computer to rotate randomly through them as my computer desktop picture. This morning I saw something I couldn’t ignore! Take a look at the photo below of the French Market in New Orleans in 1910:

What do you see just above and to the right of the wagon wheel? You can click on the image for the full view, or look at a zoom-in below:

It’s Che Guevara, of course! You can clearly see an eye, his beard, two nostrils and hat. He even appears to be sticking his tongue out. I am forced to wonder how his image ended up on a horse-drawn cart in New Orleans eighteen years before he was born. But clearly it’s a sign of something profound and mystical. Any ideas?

(Further reading.)

Bookmarks for May 27th through June 17th

Stephen Skory — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:00:30 +0000

These are my links for May 27th through June 17th:

GALAXEV: Bruzual & Charlot (2003) – Bruzual & Charlot SED code page.
Murky – A Mercurial GUI for Mac OS X.
Page Speed Home – Benchmark webpages. Kind of like Yahoo!'s YSlow.
BibDesk – Organize your bibtex references.
North Korean Economy Watch » North Korea Uncovered – (Google Earth) – A Google Earth KMZ file of North Korean points of interest.

Water Drip

Stephen Skory — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 03:57:16 +0000

I found the faucet in my lab at school dripping this morning. I guess some air got in the pipes and a bubble formed. Each new drip was forming on the bottom of the bubble until it fell off. Fun accidental physics!

Play Quicktime version

Bookmarks for April 27th through May 25th

Stephen Skory — Tue, 26 May 2009 04:00:40 +0000

These are my links for April 27th through May 25th:

Skim | Home – Annotate PDFs with text and symbols.
kD-Tree kNN in python ‎(Mike’s Coderama)‎ – A python kd-tree implementation.
YooouuuTuuube – Make any youtube video into trippy art!
Simplify Media – Connect Your Music – Share music across the internet. Interesting, one of several approaches to this problem.
Irradiated Software – SizeUp – Finer control over window sizes in Mac OS X. Donationware.

Inconsistent

Stephen Skory — Sun, 17 May 2009 20:05:01 +0000

Seen this morning in front of the La Jolla Farmers Market, parked in a red zone:

DTV Delivers

Stephen Skory — Fri, 08 May 2009 01:41:08 +0000

Big news.

Universal Sports, which is part of NBC, is going to show the entire Giro d’Italia live! I’m guessing that because Lance is riding the Giro, Universal Sports figures Americans will be interested. Down here in San Diego, the local NBC affiliate broadcasts several digital channels over the airwaves. They have their main channel 39-1, that shows full-1080p high definition TV. They also have 39-2, a weather channel, and 39-3 shows Universal Sports. Neither is HDTV, but I’m not complaining. The Tour de France is always on cable, so I have to go to a friends apartment to watch it. I’ll be glad to watch this on my very own couch.

My mornings suddenly got much earlier for the next month.

Update May 9: The Giro is being streamed live online, not over the air. It is just a commercial-free stream of the Italian coverage (with inconsistent English commentary) on the Universal Sports website. I guess I read what I wanted to read. I’ll take it however I get it.

Bookmarks for April 14th through April 20th

Stephen Skory — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 18:00:07 +0000

These are my links for April 14th through April 20th:

Google Torrent Search – Search for bit torrents using Google.
What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic – Stuff I should know better.
textext – A LaTeX plugin for Inkscape.
Inkscape. Draw Freely. – A free vector-based graphics editor.
ucsd-thesis – Google Code – a UCSD Thesis LaTeX template.

Bookmarks for March 15th through March 31st

Stephen Skory — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 21:04:00 +0000

These are my links for March 15th through March 31st:

HostMonk – Compare hosting packages – Dedicated hosting, VPS hosting, Shared hosting – Interesting and accurate (from a quick cursory inspection).
GvGen | freshmeat.net – Another python to graphviz class.
yapgvb – Google Code – Yet Another Python Graphviz Binding which helps make graphviz files in python.
mpmath – Google Code – Precision mathematical functions in python
High-Res NASA TV Stream – higher quality than on the nasa.gov site.

March Madness Updates

Stephen Skory — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 23:01:16 +0000

It’s been a while since I posted here.

A month ago Melissa’s parents came down to visit, and on one of the days we went to the USS Midway Museum. Usually I post photos right away, but I forgot this time. Here is a link to the full gallery, and below are some highlights.
Today on an errand I saw this egregious example of bad brodozer behavior. I saw the able-bodied owner and his able-bodied elementary school-aged son get out. I didn’t bother to check if there was a placard in the windshield because I didn’t have my climbing gear nor my binoculars.

I’ve watched more college basketball games in the last four days than I have since, well, last March. I miss watching the games in person at Haas, and I am disappointed by the mens flame-out in the first round of the tournament on Thursday. The women have already done better. C’est la vie of a Bear fan. For those of you who care, here is current my bracket which I put together in about 5 minutes, and it shows.

Bookmarks for February 20th through March 15th

Stephen Skory — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 20:05:53 +0000

These are my links for February 20th through March 15th:

GrandPerspective – A visualization of hard drive usage on the mac.
GeekTool – put various system logs or graphs on the desktop.
FOF – A simple KDtree-based friends-of-friends halo finding code.
peak-o-mat – A python-based curve fitting package.
KeePass Password Safe – An open source encrypted password database program.

Brodozers

Stephen Skory — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 04:46:44 +0000

I spent several hours today standing at the corner of El Norte Parkway and Elm Street in Escondido as a course marshal for the Amgen Tour of California. Today was the final stage of the eight stage (plus prologue) race that started in Sacramento.

While I waited hours for the brief seconds of each pack of cyclists to pass, I decided to amuse myself by taking pictures of all the ‘brodozers’ that drove by. A brodozer is a pick-up truck that has been jacked up on shocks with huge noisy tires. They are a particularly nasty form of transportation. They are a big middle finger to the environment and are driven by young males in a very aggressive manner. One of my scariest moments on a bicycle was due to a brodozer in East County San Diego. This county is infested with brodozers, and Escondido is particularly bad.

Below are 16 of the 17 brodozers I was able to capture. There were many that passed before I had inspiration, and others I missed. It’s interesting that white is the dominant color, and none appear to have been off-road recently. The seventeenth was the only vehicle I saw escorted off the course by the police. That brodozer needed to be told more than once by the police to get off the course. This tells you all you need to know about brodozer drivers.

Bookmarks for February 11th through February 17th

Stephen Skory — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 04:00:09 +0000

These are my links for February 11th through February 17th:

inky’s see() – An upgraded dir() function in python, called see(). Interesting.
instantwatcher.com – Movies and TV to Watch Instantly on Netflix – An external third-party interface to the Netflix streaming library with additional features over the Netflix interface.
Transform an iTunes Library or Playlist into a Web Page – Ugly and heavyweight, but easy and free.
10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know – I'm not a big facebook person, but I do have an account.
Radiology Art – images made of common objects in a CAT scan machine. Cool!

Bookmarks for February 2nd through February 9th

Stephen Skory — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 16:17:53 +0000

These are my links for February 2nd through February 8th:

Media Convert - convert between a wide variety of media formats.
Max from sbooth.org - A high-quality audio CD ripper.
Tuppis - Lingon by Peter Borg - inspect and edit your launchd processes.
TV Fool - Home - highly technical TV transmitter and antenna information.

Bookmarks for January 26th through February 2nd

Stephen Skory — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 21:05:16 +0000

These are my links for January 26th through February 2nd:

A Unix Utility You Should Know About: Pipe Viewer - create progress bars for common unix commands.
Dockland Software - SpaceSuit - Have a different background for each desktop when using spaces in Mac OS X.
M-Lab | Welcome to Measurement Lab - Test to see if your ISP is throttling your connection.
Tapping Your Inner Freeloader: 11 Tried and True Tips to Get Things Free -
YouTube HQ + 720p - A greasemonkey script that automatically chooses the highest quality youtube video version available.

My Eddington Number is 48

Stephen Skory — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:26:23 +0000

A couple days ago I was browsing the internet on astrophysical topics, when I came across Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington’s wikipedia page. He’s best known for the Eddington limit, which describes the luminosity limit of a star as a function of its mass. Near the bottom of his page linked above, there is a description of the “Eddington number,” which for any person is the greatest number of bike rides they done which have been that at least that number in miles long. From the wikipedia page:

The Eddington Number in this context is defined as E, the number of days a cyclist has cycled more than E miles. For example an Eddington Number of 70 would imply that a cyclist has cycled more than 70 miles in a day on 70 occasions.

This is very similar to the Erdös number and the h-index, which measure a scientists publishing impact. I don’t have an Erdös number, nor an h-index, but I do have an Eddington number. And since I have a nice GPS database of my rides, I figured I could easily calculate it.

Above shows two Eddington calculations, in miles and in kilometers. The curved blue line is x=y, and it’s curved because the y axis is using a logscale. Where the blue line intersects the Eddington lines is my Eddington number. The downward arrows show my actual integer Eddington numbers (48 for miles, 74 for kilometers), while the upward arrows show that 49 and 75 aren’t above the blue line, and thus aren’t my Eddington numbers. Since the definition is in miles, my true number is 48, but the kilometer calculation shows that the number is also a function of your unit.

Unfortunately, I don’t have records before I got my GPS, so my true Eddington number is surely larger.

Bookmarks for January 21st through January 24th

Stephen Skory — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 05:04:05 +0000

These are my links for January 21st through January 24th:

T3CH XBMC BINARY RELEASES - SVN builds of the XBox Media Center
GigaPan - super high resolution panorama tools and image hosting.
Legal Rights of Photographers (pdf) - Know your rights when you take photos in public places, including private buildings the public enters, like malls.
How I Made a 1,474-Megapixel Photo During President Obama’s Inaugural Address - With a link to a full-screen viewer of the image.
PolitiFact | The Obameter: Tracking Barack Obama's Campaign Promises - See how well Obama's campaign promises turn out.

Failed Socks

Stephen Skory — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:54:49 +0000

The hopes and dreams of these socks unfortunately never came to pass.

Let’s see how the the hopes and dreams of Obama turn out. I’m excited!

Bookmarks for January 8th through January 16th

Stephen Skory — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 22:02:36 +0000

These are my links for January 8th through January 16th:

Vertor – A site that verifies the validity of the content of torrents, looking for passwords, viruses and corruption.
Optimize your Apache VPS for WordPress – I've seen other posts like this, but this is a nice one, too.
Second Act Refurbished HDTV, Closeout HDTV, Overstock HDTV, Refurbished Electronics –
TACC User Portal – Where to submit problem tickets for TACC (Ranger). I am using this with more frequency, these days…
Red Hat Magazine | A guide to GNU Screen – screen is a useful tool that I should use more often.

Bookmarks for December 23rd through January 5th

Stephen Skory — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:58:10 +0000

These are my links for December 23rd through January 5th:

Ascent – Activity Tracking for the Mac – Better but more costly than the free Garmin Training Center I already have.
Maximum Security for Wordpress – A plugin for wordpress that aims to be the best and most comprehensive security plugin. Not out of beta yet as I write this, however…
Pipes: Convert an http authenticated feed into a regular feed you can use with Google Reader –
Tentative NumPy Tutorial –
FAQ – History – WunderWiki – Weather history data sources.

No More Tunnels

Stephen Skory — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 01:25:38 +0000

By far my favorite place to ride my mountain bike (that is reachable without driving) are the single track ‘tunnels’ that are typically reached through Peñasquitos Park (although they aren’t actually inside the park, they are on non-park city land). They are called ‘the tunnels’ because for most of their length they are covered by low bushes and trees just over head height. There are four of them that total a few miles in length and vary in technical difficulty. Until about a month ago, they were somewhat illicit and not patrolled, now they are very expressly illegal. During the rainy season I think it’s perfectly reasonable to close them. Muddy and wet ground is especially susceptible to erosion, and nature doesn’t need human help to erode the ground during the rainy season. The ditch my bike is pictured in above was fairly level ground the last time I was there, less than a month ago (*).

Unfortunately, there is strong evidence that the City of San Diego is planning on closing them permanently, or at least severely curtailing how many can be used. Since the tunnels are fairly far from any road, it’s only cyclists that use them with regularity, but the city feels it needs to consider all the other potential users. Cyclists are the lowest on the public land user totem pole, so you can see how this can do nothing but hurt our interests. I suspect that if they’re kept open, they’ll have to be upgraded so hikers and equestrians can use them, which will remove much of what is attractive about them (which is the lack of those two groups for a large part). If they’re closed for environmental reasons, only cyclists will miss them. It’s kind of a lose-lose situation for us.

The City of San Diego isn’t full of complete idiots, there is a series of legal drag race events that take place in the Qualcomm parking lot. This alleviates the pressure of what many people want to do and would resort to doing illegally without other options. There is a similar pressure from cyclists who want quality single track trails. If trails are available, legal and fun, cyclists won’t have to resort to cutting trails and breaking laws. We’ll see if the city has enough foresight to recognize this.

(*) For those my friends to are familiar with Peñasquitos, if you’re heading east, this is just past the big deep sandy patch where you used to have to ride on the extreme right, and just before the really rocky climb. I think it’s in the center of here. The second photo above is the top of the third tunnel, the farthest north of the three linked tunnels. The riding I did do today (I didn’t go into the tunnels) showed that many of the lines we rode in the summer are now completely different.

The New Academy of Sciences

Stephen Skory — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:33:16 +0000

A few days ago while I was still in the Bay Area, I visited the new Academy of Sciences museum with my family. They just re-opened a few months ago after replacing their old earthquake-damaged buildings with a new, very unique building. You can follow those links to learn all about the ‘living roof’ and the various exhibits.

I have some mixed feelings about the new museum. The old museum (you can see some pictures of it at their time line page) was a funky amalgamation of several buildings built over many decades. You could see the history of modern American natural museums in one place. The old section had dioramas of stuffed animals in pseudo-natural scenes. Exhibits like lions hunting antelopes with Serengeti sounds playing on speakers. The newer sections had live animals and fish and a greater focus on education. The whole place was labyrinthine and dusty, and a well-used kind of ancient. It was never too full of people. I liked the old museum and I’m sad that a piece of my childhood is gone.

The new place is very shiny, flashy and popular. We waited for one hour and forty minutes to get inside. It might be bigger in cubic meters due to the higher ceilings, but I don’t think it’s bigger in square meters of floorspace. The main exhibition areas are limited to the two ends of the building, past the planetarium and tropical sphere, and the aquarium has been moved to the basement. The aquarium is quite a bit nicer than it was, with a few tanks that rival the Monterey Bay Aquarium in quality and cool curving Plexiglas, but not in size. Like the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the museum pushes education on choices the individual can make to positively change their effect on the ecosphere. They have a ‘carbon balance’, but it mostly ends up being played with by children who generally don’t decide whether to buy a SUV or a hybrid car.

I found a couple things I really liked; click on the thumbnails above. Read the tag on the human skull, and take a look at a whole wall of very carefully pinned ladybugs. I took three pictures a various zooms. That may have been a PhD thesis, right there.

There are more pictures here.

Mini-Vacation – Monterey Bay Aquarium

Stephen Skory — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 02:00:29 +0000

Yesterday, Melissa and I visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium. We were met there by my brother Adam and his lady friend Shinji, who not coincidentally decided to also see the aquarium on the same day. The aquarium has expanded since my last visit. There is now a northern wing that has fresh water otters, an “outer bay” tank and a seahorse exhibit (that was under construction, sadly). More than the last time I was there (or maybe I was too young to pay attention to things not cute), the aquarium really pushes conservation and ethical seafood consumption. They have a set of cards you can carry to help guide seafood and sushi purchases in stores and restaurants.

But what about the cute animals? (These links go to movies.) Fresh water otters gamboling! Feeding the penguins! A huge wolf eel in the kelp forest tank!

There are lots more photos here.

Mini-Vacation – Hearst Castle

Stephen Skory — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 03:53:42 +0000

The Hearst Castle is ridiculous. The architecture and the history of the people who visited it are quite a spectacle. And of course I think it would have been grand fun to have visited it when William Randolph Hearst was alive and the place was hip and hopping. I was wondering with Melissa over dinner if I became silly rich could I invite movie stars and political leaders over to my remote ranch? Probably not. We did both agree that if we were to build on that site we would have had more of the buildings and common areas facing the grand view. As it is, many of the rooms, like the dining room, have no view.

Before we went to the castle we looked at some tide pools. Melissa even found a hermit crab wandering in between the rocks.

Tomorrow we will see the Monterey Bay Aquarium.