blog.erik.rainey.name :

Back from a Cruise in the Caribbean

Sun, 03 Apr 2011 22:19:00 -0700

We just got back from a great cruise in the Caribbean. Of course since we had Kellan along we got tons of great photos on the ship. This is probably the best one.

OpenCL Environment

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 20:31:00 -0700

I've been working for a few weekends at home on a little project that I've used to help myself learn OpenCL, the Open Computing Language which is a Khronos.org spec (originally released from Apple with Snow Leopard). I've put the code for my project, OpenCL Environment up on GitHub.
The purpose of the OpenCL Environment API is to help simplify the use of OpenCL (even though it already pretty easy to use). There's two main areas I addressed with this first release.

First, I'm an embedded software person by trade and in my environment, there's not much room to have a run-time compiler running perpetually in the background. On a PC/MAC, this is no big deal since Clang/LLVM (the OpenCL kernel compiler for Mac OSX) is really fast (amazingly so in some situations). Even though they have a version of LLVM which will target ARM and will even produce ARMv7 instructions, this is still not the ideal situation. Ideally (as an OEM/Vendor) you'd want to compile your proprietary kernels beforehand so that you don't have to put them on the device in plain text (literally). So this first feature of this OpenCL Environment API is the clCompiler which will take a .cl file and will produce a precompiled header which you can include in your source code and then create your program from that binary data. By also implementing this compiler stage as part of the build process, you can prevent what would otherwise be run-time compile errors and push them back into being build-time errors and make them makefile dependencies.
Second, there's a bit of setup around calling individual kernel calls from C to CL (which is like C99 with some extra keywords). So I simplified this by creating a facility which can take a compile time variably defined structure and execute the CL call with very little fuss. This has the downside (for now) that only a single function call is supported and this results in poor performance for large-scale multiple kernel applications, which any program really grows into after a few iterations on a serious problem. This will hopefully be address and somewhat mitigated in the future by a chaining feature where multiple calls can be made in serial with data going in and out at appropriate times while keeping the CL devices fully utilized.

I've made the code available under the Apache 2.0 License so that just about anyone can use this while still retaining the copyright to myself and being able to modify the license anytime in the future if necessary.
Enjoy!

Recording of Heart Beat from a Home Doppler

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 20:52:00 -0700

Amber and I went and got a home fetal heart monitor to be able to hear the baby's heart beat (which we already have in the doctor's office). After a couple false starts of hearing Amber's heartbeat, we were able to record little beaner's ticker! It's around the 160 bpm mark! Take a listen!. I filtered it a bit to remove some white noise from the device and to amplify the signal a bit.

An announcement!

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 08:43:00 -0700

Great News Everybody! We're pregnant! The due date is October 15th (we are currently in the 14th week)! We're super excited about the prospects of being parents. This has been a long road this last year with all of Amber's surgeries and medical surprises, so we're really grateful to modern science and all the people who made this possible!

Thank You!

The Pulfrich Effect or How to get 3D Movies on the Cheap

Sat, 03 Apr 2010 22:13:00 -0700

The Pulfrich Effect is a pretty neat brain hack which enables you to see 2D content in pseudo-3D in some cases. Basically you delay the reception of visual information in one eye by darkening the input (wearing a sunglasses lens over one eye) and the resulting timing delay in your brain is interpreted as depth information (amazing!). This trick is useful if your significant other is like mine; they can't watch the 3D movies that are out because their brains don't processing depth in the same manner that the rest of us do. This is called "stereo-blindness". Turns out, about 4-10% of the population is like this, depending on where on the internet you get your data.
Using my sunglasses, after I popped the right eye's lens out (it easily pops back in), I was able to recreate the Pulfrich Effect during the movie "How to Train your Dragon". It was really successful in many of the scenes which had high lateral movement. I found that scenes which rotated quickly around the characters or a focus had a really pronounced 3D effect as well. Scenes which had no movement were 2D. Some scenes which had some moderately rapid panning also recreated the effect. I found that the effect was most pronounced when I covered my left eye versus the right eye.
So in the end, I don't think I'll be too put off with having to watch the 2D version of some movies with my wife, since I can always fallback on the Pulfrich Effect to make some eye popping 3D goodness when I need it, with the same content that she's watching!

Updated to Typo-5.3

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:42:00 -0700

I have to say, that was the easiest Typo upgrade I've ever had. Just unziped, relinked, copied the database.yml and migrated. Done!

The Sad Thing is...

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 09:40:00 -0700

... that this is still true! I just had a nightmare like this!

The Cost of Health Insurance and Salesmanship

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 07:38:00 -0800

This last weekend Amber and I decided to get the legal aspects of our forthcomming marriage dealt with. You might notice she's changing her name, if you are connected to my Linkin profile or any other of my social networking sites. She's starting a new job as a contractor and as such has no health coverage. We investigated private insurance and found that it was doable but nearly 5x more expensive than just putting her on my insurance (a couple hundred vesus a couple thousand) as a dependant, which required that she be my spouse, since my company will allow same-sex "life partners" but not different sex ones to be covered. So when we went down to First Monday (www.firstmondaycanton.com/) in Canton, we decided to get Amber's step-father (who is an ordained minister) to officiate and sign the certificate so that we could get Amber on my insurance before her's runs out. Our legal date is now 10/31 (easy to remember) but our vows and ceremony will still be in April (25th) of next year. We are still having the ceremony (since we've already paid quite a bit for it) and it's going to be nearly unchanged. I'm still really excited about the ceremony and the honeymoon thereafter. I know they are going to be great! I'm not quite sure how we'll change the officiant's speech, if we will at all but that's only a minor detail at this point.

We know that this is not quite how many people would expected this to have happened but with the economy as it is and the steep cost of health care, this seemed the only prudent measure. To all who didn't hear about it as soon as you might have expected to, I deeply apologize if you have been offended. We thought at first it would just be between us, but as we started to complete the legal aspects, it became obvious (too late unfortunately) that it was not something that we could keep under our hats. I didn't expect the internet to out-race our announcement, but after re-reading this sentence it's obvious that I'm a complete ninny to think otherwise.

In other news we've been extremely busy with our Gift basket business (www.lonestargiftbaskets.com). Friday at First Monday was terrible, as we sold nothing. Saturday was better, as we made back our cost in purchasing our plot in the event. Sunday helped add some nice icing on the cake. Considering the number of hours we sat in that tent over the long weekend, I don't think our hourly wage was good at all, but we did make a profit. We've already signed up December's First Monday in the same slot, (look for us by the East Gate in T540!) and we expect that we'll do great with pre-Christmas sales. When we got back to the house we found 3 orders on the web site and then the next day we had an order for 8 baskets! However the odd thing is that those were not releated to First Monday shoppers (based on their locations).

I found that one of the hardest things to do at First Monday was to not be too pushy with people strolling by who were clearly casual shoppers. I know that in the past I've alway gotten really uncomfortable with people hawking their wares at me when I was not at all interested. As a vendor you want to attract them to the both so you can show them what you've got, but at the same time you don't want to sour their preconception of you to be a pushy salesman and thus turn them off your business. It's a fine line that I've never considered much before, but one I'm starting to appreciate more when I find it represented well in other sales-people.

Update: Turns out I can't spell. Fixed.

Successful Kitten Rescue

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 19:41:00 -0700

Well we've successfully found homes for the 3 kittens we had over the weekend. Remy ended up going to live by himself, which seems to suite him fine, since he was more reserved and tended to stay by himself. Rosemary and Clyde went home together which also suited them since they played together a lot. It was tough to let them go but we're confident that they'll do fine.

Over the Weekend

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 20:27:00 -0700

Over the weekend we picked up 3 kittens. They and their mother were living at Amber's Mom's house in a crate outside, but their mother got run over by a car. Being only 8 weeks old, they aren't quite yet ready to fend for themselves even though they were outside cats. Amber and I picked up 3 of the 5 (2 are staying with Robbie to become mousers) and posted them on Craigslist to find good homes for them (no we're not keeping them, having 7 would be crazy). We've got some responses so far, so we think it'll be a fairly short stay at our house. We are keeping them in the spare bathroom for the moment away from the other cats and to help keep them safe from everything else in the house. When we brought them in we had to de-flea them and give them some de-worming medication since they were outside cats. We both thought they would shiver to death from prolonged baths we had to give them to de-flea. After warming them in some dryer-warmed towels their shivering stopped and we managed to get them fed, and setup their sleeping area and litter box.

It'll probably be very hard to part with them, since they are so cute and playful, but we have to. Having 7 cats is just far too many.

Here's some photos taken with the iPhone (which is why it's so dang blurry). We named them but don't plan on tell the people who get them in case they want to name them something else. Rosemary is the gray, Clyde is the black and white with the black nose, and Remy is the black and white with the white nose.

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They're going for the low low price of free! Get them while they last!