March 29, 2004
Graphical display of Markov Chains
Harvard researchers can describe the combat behaviors of male fruit flies as a markov chain. Strange subject, but what is really neat about their report is their graphical representation of the markov chain...
The legend is incomplete., It does not explain what the box color represents.
March 28, 2004
I keep losing my project to-do lists
Back when I lived in California and owned my own home, I had a giant poster in my basement workshop with a hundred different projects that needed finished. As I'd finish a project, I'd get to fill in the little circle beside the item. The scope of each project varied greatly. One item was "Deck" as in, "tear down rotten deck, replace with a new deck" while others were of the "Tighten bolts that hold on toilet seat" variety.
I moved back to Singapore only a year later. The poster was maybe a third finished. I think it reached an equilibrium where I was adding projects as quickly as I finished others.
Now that I am back in Singapore, I again have a long list of projects. My focus dashes from one thing to the next and now I've got a pile of half-completed items to work on. A half dozen times I've written out these items in a notebook or a on a sheet of paper, only to lose it to time. The only thing that seems to stick around here is my blog. So for the time being, this is where I'll keep my list of projects I am working on.
[in no particular order]
- ( ) fix the talking clock
- ( ) Install and use Zoe
- ( ) Finke Desert Race results analyzed with Tableau
- ( ) Mysql/Perl/Apache GPS waypoint manager
- ( ) Singapore mountain bike trail project
- ( ) Finish the Outback2003 blog
- ( ) News harvester/printer
- ( ) G-Force recorder for Finke Desert Race
- ( ) Tufte-style travel blog generator
- ( ) Lattimore travel blogging software
- ( ) Bike mechanic tool set
- ( ) Finish packing and sending my family their 2003 Christmas presents
- ( ) Gyford-style mailing list system for URLS we all show to each other
- ( ) Scan deteriorating photo of pa and nanny
- ( ) Working backup system for the fieldbox
- ( ) Figuring out the coordinate transformation for the online map
- ( ) Tech license
- ( ) IPOD battery study
Compass mounted on my bike's handlebar?
I've been exploring some new, unlabelled jungle trails lately. I know the general area, and the directions I want to head, but often I come to an intersection and am not confident which way is north. Now I've been using my Garmin Etrex Vista. It (after the first one was replaced) is actually working pretty well now, it even is picking up a half-decent signal under jungle canopy. It's got a built-in compass, so that works great for me. In fact, in general, the compass is all I need, not all the GPS functionality. It led me to think that a simple solution would be a small handlebar mounted compass.
That should be easy to find, right?
Well, reading the USENET reviews (first thread.......second thread) of what is available, it sounds like most everything is junk. the bike's metal upsets the compass. Other devices (cycle computer, headlights) upset the compass. It basically sounds like a waste of time trying to source one.
I guess the easiest solution is to just keep my orienteering compass in my camelback along with my bike tools.
Ayurvedic Soap of the Week(?): Medimix
Couple weeks ago we went to Mohamed Mustafa on a penny buying spree. Among other things I bought a trolley full of their different Indian soap brands. They all cost less than a dollar -- I thought it would be nice for hand washing in the guest bathroom off the hall.
The first one I opened up was "Medimix Ayurvedic Soap." Manufactured in Tamil Nadu , it boasts containing "18 Herbs"
- Yashtimadhu
- Sariba
- Kutaja
- Nimba Twak
- Krishna Jeeraka
- Chitraka
- Bakuchi
- Chopchin
- Vanardraka
Pretty exotic, huh?
So what was it like?
It's Lava soap without the pumice! No kidding... it smells like Lava and has the same hulk green color. Even the same cast look. The only difference is that it has no grit.
March 27, 2004
Wild destinations: Chernobyl and Pennsylvania
There have been some updates to the most interesting online travel blog I've ever seen -- the daughter of a Russian Scientist who drives her 1100cc motorcycle through the radioactive wasteland surrounding Chernobyl. Much as I loathe them, there are a number of good comments explaining the radiation exposure the girl faces.
Think government-sealed wastelands only exist in the former Soviet Union? Not so! In fact, in my home state of Pennsylvania is the eerily mundanely-named town of Centralia. This is a town closed, and largely scraped, by the government after a massive underground coal fire started and continues forty years later. There are several online documentaries about this site. Not as interesting as Chernobyl, but easier to visit.
March 24, 2004
Cave Phones
Interesting article in CNN today
Turns out they're trapped in a section of cave, but have lots of supplies to wait out the flood water to recede. What caught my eye was the remark:
The six left last Tuesday on what was supposed to be a two-day trip, but heavy rains triggered flash-flooding, cutting off the exit.
When they realized what had happened, the six went to an underground camp stocked with food, sleeping bags, a first aid kit and a cave radio.
Expedition leader Whitlock said he was in touch with the group once a day using a two-way radio. He said there is no immediate threat to their safety because they have enough food to get them through the weekend.
What the hell is a 'cave radio'?
Turns out they have all sorts of techniques to communicate into deep underground caves. Many of them utilize cabling to the surface, but there are at least a few antenna systems that can manage to send low frequency single side band transmissions through several thousand meters of rock.
March 22, 2004
Israeli Gunships Rocket Hamas 'Spiritual Leader'
Israeli forces have killed the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, in a missile attack in Gaza today.
Israeli helicopters fired three missiles at the wheelchair-bound Hamas leader as he left a mosque near his house at daybreak, residents said. Hamas' military wing, the Ezzedin al-Qassam Brigades, vowed to avenge Yassin's killing with immediate reprisals.
"We, the Ezzedin al-Qassam leaders, have decided to take immediate reprisals, like an earthquake that will hit everywhere to destroy the Zionist presence,'' a statement said.
"Words cannot describe the emotion of anger and hate inside our hearts,'' said Hamas official Ismail Haniyeh.
Wizard of the Week: Saruman
Most often called Saruman the White, Saruman was the first of the five Wizards to arrive in Middle-earth, at the end of the first millennium of the Third Age. He was said to be the eldest of the order, and Gandalf acknowledged him as the chief of the Istari.
For a thousand years, and maybe more, he journeyed in the East of Middle-earth, and was little heard of in the West. He had returned, though, by III 2463, for he was present at the foundation of the Council of the Wise, and was made their chief (though both Elrond and Galadriel would have preferred Gandalf to take this position).
It was at about this time that Saruman began to study the Rings of Power, their history and the means of their making.
In III 2759, he was given the keys of Orthanc by Steward Beren of Minas Tirith, and took up his abode there. He continued his researches into ring-lore, and the making of devices, and was accustomed to watch the stars from the pinnacle of the Tower. He visited Minas Tirith to research the history of the Rings, and found among the ancient books and scrolls the story of the death of Isildur and the loss of the Ruling Ring.
In III 2851, the Council discovered proof that the Necromancer of Dol Guldur was indeed Sauron returned. Many of the Wise wished to attack the fortress and drive Sauron out, but Saruman spoke against this, and dissuaded the Council from mounting an assault. It was only after ninety years had passed that he relented and aided the Council in assailing Dol Guldur, driving Sauron back into Mordor. Saruman's knowledge was vital in this victory, as Gandalf said - 'it was by the devices of Saruman that we drove him from Dol Guldur'.
When the Council debated the Rings of Power, Saruman claimed that his researches showed that the One Ring had been lost forever. It was later shown that he did not believe this, however, and was searching for it himself, having secretly rebelled against the Council.
He built an army of Wolves and Orcs of his own within the ring of Isengard to challenge both Sauron and the Wise, and took control of the only nearby power, the country of Rohan, through his agent Gr?ma Wormtongue.
In July III 3018, when he was ready to reveal himself, Saruman set a trap for Gandalf, using the Wizard Radagast to lure him to Orthanc. When Gandalf came, Saruman revealed that he had made a Ring of his own, and that he was no longer Saruman the White, but claimed the title Saruman of Many Colours. When Gandalf refused to join him, he was imprisoned on the pinnacle of the Tower of Orthanc - Saruman hoped to gain the secret of the One Ring from him, or at least prevent Gandalf from using it himself.
March 21, 2004
Dancing Terror Banana
Current color-coded threat-level, as specified by US Department of Homeland Security.
Some new stories from our trip to Australia last year
I thought the challenge in documenting a trip was capturing the telemetry -- the photos, waypoints, narratives, and ephemera.
Well, it's seven months after we returned from our two-week trip through the Outback and 98% of the photos are still sitting in my slide albums, less than a third of the daily journals are posted online, and none of the support material, like GPS data, maps, and followup essays is posted. I guess publishing is the chokepoint, not gathering
Next time hopefully I'll have a more streamlined publishing system, but in the meantime I've still got this problem of a giant backlog of information. The only solution to that is to chew through it as I can. The results aren't ideal, but it's something.
Recently I published two more days' logs from the trip:
- Two days replenishing in Alice Springs
- A day exploring in the East McDonnell Mountains
Liquid 20 Technical Problems
I've had two Trek Liquid 20's for hmm... eighteen months? In that time, I've accumulated a fairly long list of technical issues with them.
Psylo XC Front Shock
There is a small key at the bottom of one arm of the fork that allows you to adjust the shock's rebound. That's nice, except that the key, a hex key with a plastic dial handle, doesn't fit very tightly. It doesn't take much to yank it out. In fact, on one of my two bikes, it's simply fallen away, lost, over time. So now I am missing this part.
I guess since it's a hex key, it really doesn't matter, I carry a bike tool with me. However, it makes yet another hole for mud and water to enter my bike. I ride in the jungle (literally) and so am always up to my eyeballs in mud and water, so this is a severely non-trivial issue.
The u-turn compression lever feels sort of fragile too. On one of the bikes I managed to grind a good portion of it off.
Bearing Decay
As I said, I live in Singapore, which is a jungle-city on the equator. It's nothing but rain and mud, with a generous helping of vile clay. It's looking like my bearings aren't taking things very well. I've already had to have my headset rebuilt, and I noticed tonight that the rear hub sounds very gnarly. I'm not sure if there is any solution to this other than frequent bearing rebuilds with a heavy grease.
Paint Job
I don't care about it, but others might -- the paint job is incredibly soft. I don't think I had the bike three weeks before my feet had worn the paint down to the metal where they hit during pedalling. Perhaps it's tough to get paint to bond strongly to the weird alloys this frame is made of?
Hayes Hydraulic Brakes
When they're properly aligned, they're great. When they get out of alignment (if you mess with the wheel) you're guaranteed a headache getting them re-aligned. As well, I suffered brake line leaks in both Liquid 20's. I had it fixed, and no more problem. Perhaps the shop didn't assemble it well the first time?
Brake Handles
Others have complained about this. I noticed it, but don't really care. The brake handles flap around and make a bit of a racket if they're not under pressure.
The thing that bugs me more is that I cannot establish a very strong grip over both the handlebars and brake levers during fast, hard descents. I always feel like I must give up one for the other. There must be some better arrangements.
Fox Float Talas R Rear Shock
I'm having some potentially serious problems with these shocks.
Fox Talas Float R Shock Problem
My 2003 Trek Liquid 20 is equipped with Fox Talas Float R rear shock. I have two Liquid 20's, one used heavily, one used only a fifth as much. I was trying to tune my bike for harder conditions tonight when I realized the shock isn't working properly, or at least not working according to how I think it should work.
The shock looks like a a typical shock, with a shaft that slides inside a cylinder. However, the cylinder itself is topped by another, short, squat cylinder that also gives a bit of play.
There are three inputs to the shock:
1) A schraeder valve to add/reduce pressure between 0 and 300psi
2) A three-setting compression/ride height switch (full extension, 1/4 extension, 1/2 extension)
3) A rebound control dial with 12(?) clicks.
The idea is if you set to the switch to 1/2 or 1/4 extension, and then compress the shock a bit, it doesn't return to the full distance. 1/4 returning the least, 1/2 return second least, and full extension, opening up the shock the full length again.
Rebound control controls how quickly the shock returns to full position after being unloaded.
I found that neither bike seemed to work like this.
Heavily Used Bike
Today I increased the pressure to 183psi. With a fine, steel metric ruler I could detect no lasting compression of the shock length after jumping up and down on the bike for a while. I weigh 160 pounds. I thought perhaps the stiff pressure was causing problems, so I reduced the pressure to 132psi. Exactly the same results. No effect on the shaft length. Adjusting the rebound control dial (as expected) had no response, though I did note it was really hard to turn the dial at first. Once I broke it free from whatever bound it, it turned like the other bike.
Lightly Used Bike
At 132 psi, the shaft only decresed in length 5mm from full extension when I turned the ride-height control to either 1/4 or 1/2. To be clear, there was no difference in the ride height after choosing either 1/4 or 1/2. They had identical results.
Seems like this is broken, right?
I recall playing with it when I first bought them, and it worked more like I expected, 1/4 was shorter than 1/2 was shorter than full extension. I never bothered to accurately measure the difference, but I am pretty sure there was a difference.
Can anyone confirm that something is broken, what it might be, and possible solutions?
UPDATE: Wednesday, March 24
Got my bike back from Treknology. They rebuilt the shock for me in a day. Steven, the suspension guy at Treknology, didn't specifically say what the failure was, just that seals had leaked and the shock changed its equilibrium (my description). Dirt, of course, is the culprit.
I do love that dirt and water damage a mountain bike. Steven's suggestion was to put a 'Lizard Skin' protective wrapping around the shock. It should reduce the dirt and mud eating the seals. I guess if this is happening to the rear shock, the same will occur to the fork, as well. Oh me...
I re-did the ride-height measurements tonight. At 150psi, 1/4 setting reduced height my 4mm and 1/2 reduced a further 7.25mm.
The manual describes the TALAS functionality as:
The TALAS shock has three (3) settings - EXTEND, -1/4 and - 1/2. The -1/4 and -1/2 settings shorten the eye-to-eye length of the shock which will change the geometry of the bicycle. Rotate the lever to EXTEND for full extension. Rotate the lever one(1) click to the -1/4 position. The next time there is input into the shock, it will shorten 1/4?. Rotate the lever one(1) more click to -1/2. The overall eye-to-eye length of the shock will be 1/2? shorter. To fully extend the shock, rotate the lever to EXTEND, stand up and unweight the back of the bicycle. This will allow the shock to return to full extension.
So this is not quite the behavior I get.
Shortening (mm)
MANUAL REALITY LESS THAN EXPECTED
-1/4" 6.35 4 2.35mm 37%
-1/2" 12.7 11.25 1.45mm 11%
It's not that big of a deal, at full adjustment (-1/2") I'm getting 89% of the expected shortening. As well, although my measurements are accurate, it may be that the compression psi also plays a secondary role in this shortening. For this test the shock was pressurized to 150psi, which is pretty average. I'm not feeling anal enough to do this test through a broad range of shock pressures. The results would be too late for PJAS.
March 20, 2004
Mossad!
There are few things I find less funny than 'political cartoonists' and few things I enjoy more than a good spy story. Leave it to Debka to give us one of each...
March 19, 2004
Ebay comes to Singapore
Ebay finally comes to Singapore. I had a telling conversation with Dragon Lady at dinner tonight:
-
Me: So there is now an ebay.com.sg site! It's great news!
Dragon: Why? So we can sell all the extra junk around the house?
Me: No... So we can buy more.
After dinner I browsed their site for a while. It's actually not very interesting for the same reason this country is not very interesting -- everyone's a wimpy, lazy, blob.
There's a bit of computers and electronic junk, emphasis on junk. But no one does anything interesting here, consequently you won't find bizarre equipment or even good deals. Even the book section reflects Singapore -- mostly lots of lame test preparation material.
I don't know when the site launched, and maybe it takes some time to build a critical mass of goods, but then again perhaps four million people live in Singapore, so how much stuff is ever going to be posted there? I suppose the smartest thing Ebay could do is provide RSS feeds for different categories I'm interested in. I'm just never going to regularly browse the site. It strikes me as much more "picking through the remainders bin at a liquidation sale" than Antique Roadshow.
March 12, 2004
More Typical Worker Safety in Singapore
As part of our irregular series on worker safety in Singapore, today's topic is window cleaning.
Our condominium's (Season's View) Management Committee scheduled our semi-annual window cleaning for this week. In anticipation, Ling closed up all the windows so they could do their job.
She was confused when workers rang our doorbell today to get access to the windows. Why do they need to get in from behind the windows when they already have the window-cleaners' dolly that cranes up and down the side of the building?
Well the answer is: they don't have the windows-cleaners' dolly that cranes up and down the side of the building?
"Huh? Then what do they have?"
They have a bunch of poor Bangladeshi foreign workers come inside each apartment unit, and simply crawl out of the window, onto the five inch ledge outside, and wipe the windows that way. Yes, to be clear, no safety equipment at all. Yes, a death fall from our fifth story apartment and from each of the twenty stories above that.
Singapore is a money-faced, shameful country run by money-faced, shameful people. They truly don't care one whit about workers' safety here. Ling was so appalled by the whole affair that she asked the guy to stop, come inside, and not jeapordize himself for our windows. In the grand Karmic cycle, Singaporeans deserve to wind up as sore-ridden pack-animals
March 10, 2004
Travel Blogging Handphone
Japan, home of all the best handphones, now has a cellphone that takes pictures (old news) and tags them with GPS coordinates (cool news!). This is great -- you'll be able to moblog + take a photo + have auto-mapping functionality in one simple action of your handphone.
Would be nice to know what models of phone have GPS support -- I'll be getting my annual $500 SingTel voucher, and would love to have one. (I highly doubt it will be available in Singapore anytime soon, though.)
The author had some problem stripping out EXIF metadata. My solution was (crude) to call the application exiftags from perl and simply parse the results. I think there are probably some libraries that could do the same thing from within perl. Whatever...
March 05, 2004
Haunted Singapore
Someone sent me an email full of photos of supposedly haunted sites in Singapore. I don't share the Chinese custom of being scared of ghosts and haunted locations, but I do enjoy Geographical Information Systems and web technology. So I threw together a little section, "Haunted Singapore," with all these locations. Hopefully over time people can contribute information about each of these sites.
If I can get GPS fixes, then I can auto-generated maps, then people can find these places, and contribute comments on what the places are like, or their background stories, or even photos. Everything eventually gets torn down in Singapore; Black Coffee may well outlast many of them.
UPDATE: I found the Singapore Paranormal Investigators site. Most of the photos in the email I received look to have come from there, so I should give them some credit. The site is goofy, but perhaps it's tongue-in-cheek. At any rate, it has good production value, so I'll give it a point....
March 04, 2004
March 03, 2004
So what tricks like this did the Soviets pull on the west? It couldn't have been a one way street.
From the Mercury News:
At the time, the United States was attempting to block Western Europe from importing Soviet natural gas. There also were signs that the Soviets were trying to steal a wide variety of Western technology. Then, a KGB insider revealed the specific shopping list and the CIA slipped the flawed software to the Soviets in a way they would not detect it.
``In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard currency earnings from the West, and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines, and valves was programmed to go haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds,'' Reed writes.
``The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space,'' he said, adding that U.S. satellites picked up the explosion. Reed said in an interview that the blast occurred in the summer of 1982.
``While there were no physical casualties from the pipeline explosion, there was significant damage to the Soviet economy,'' he writes. ``Its ultimate bankruptcy, not a bloody battle or nuclear exchange, is what brought the Cold War to an end. In time, the Soviets came to understand that they had been stealing bogus technology, but now what were they to do? By implication, every cell of the Soviet leviathan might be infected. They had no way of knowing which equipment was sound, which was bogus.
Cool story, though maybe not so true.
March 01, 2004
Bugmaster's busy lens
In the last several months, Bugmaster has been building an enormous portfolio of stunning flower photography.
Jackson bags this year's big prize
New Zealander Peter Jackson won the Oscar for best director on Sunday for "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," the third chapter in the Rings film trilogy.
The Oscars are the U.S. film industry's highest honors and are given out each year by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles.
Making Excellent Charts
I've visualized a very rich Edward Tufte-style chart of the results of the 2003 Finke Desert Race. First things first, I've been ripping the results apart with Perl into a queryable MySql relational database. That was the easy part. Even though MySQL 4.0n (amazingly) doesn't support subselects, it's still reasonably easy to generate SQL reports. But now the hard problems start.
The crux problem is how to process and graph the results of my SQL queries.
As an experiment, I used Excel to display the average finishing times of the various race classes. Oh goodness... I beat it with hammer and tongs for forty-minutes and still got a contemptible result from a trivial data set.
- Diameter = f(engine displacement)
- Color = f(vehicle make)
- Shape = f(vehicle type)
- Superimposed Legend = f(vehicle's id)