Category: Odds and Ends

I was looking for a nice introduction to getting started in open source to share with a young person who is an undergraduate student in Computer Science in India. Unfortunately, while some people know about it, it appears that most universities don’t do a good job of preparing their students for the job interview, or the workplace.

One thing that I’ve always recommended is that people get a github account and showcase some of their work there. A second is to contribute to some open source project.

I found these two write-ups about the subject

https://www.hackerearth.com/getstarted-opensource/

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-contribute-to-open-source-projects-beginners-guide/

If you are a student, or early in your career and looking to differentiate yourself from others, you should seriously look into this.

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I posted this on linkedIn earlier today.

Every decade (or so), I’ve found occasion to go and re-learn Prolog, and it just happened again. If you aren’t familiar with the Prolog programming language, the best description I can give you is this – Prolog is a declarative programming language where you focus on describing the what, and not the how of arriving at a particular result.

Each time I re-learn Prolog, I start with the usual family tree, and three towers problem (Tower of Hanoi|Benares|Bramha|Lucas, …), and get to whatever I’m trying to do. Most of us view the three towers problem as an example of recursion, and there the matter rests.

Simply put, to move N discs from the left tower to the right tower, you first move the top (N-1) discs from the left tower to the middle tower, and then move the Nth disc to the right tower, and then move the (N-1) discs from the middle tower to the right tower. You can prove (a simple proof by induction) that the N disc problem can be solved in (2^n – 1) moves.

In prolog this would look something like this (sample code):

move(1, A, B, _, Ct, Steps) :-
    Steps is Ct + 1,
    write(Steps), write(': '), write('Move one disc from '), 
    write(A), write(' to '), write(B), nl.
move(N, A, B, C, Ct, Steps) :-
    N > 1,
    M is N - 1,
    move(M, A, C, B, Ct, N1),
    move(1, A, B, C, N1, N2),
    move(M, C, B, A, N2, Steps).
towers(N) :-
    move(N, left, right, middle, 0, Steps),
    write('That took a total of '), write(Steps),
    write(' steps.'), nl.

When you run this program, the output looks like this:

$ swipl -g 'towers(3)' -g halt recursive.pl 
1: Move one disc from left to right
2: Move one disc from left to middle
3: Move one disc from right to middle
4: Move one disc from left to right
5: Move one disc from middle to left
6: Move one disc from middle to right
7: Move one disc from left to right
That took a total of 7 steps.
$

But this kind of solution doesn’t really show an important aspect of Prolog, the ability to explore the problem space, and discover the solution. The recursive solution shown above can be implemented just as well in C or python.

In Prolog, you can implement the solution a different way, and only provide the system a set of rules and have it discover a solution. Here’s one way to do that.

Here we define a high level goal (towers/1) just as above.

towers(N) :-
    findall(X, between(1, N, X), L),
    reverse(L, LeftList),
    towers(LeftList, [], [], [], State),
    !,
    showmoves(1, State).

But beyond that, the similarity ends. The implementation of towers/5 is totally different. It consists instead of seven rules.

At any time, there are one of 6 possible moves that one can make. Those 6 moves are to move the top disc from left, center or right, and move them to left, center, or right. That gives us left -> center, left -> right, center -> left, center -> right, right -> center, and right -> left. Each of those is a rule.

There’s the seventh rule to determine whether or not we’ve reached the desired end state.

Here’s an implementation of the check for the desired end state:

towers(Left, Center, Right, StateIn, StateOut) :-
    done(Left, Center, Right),
    StateOut = StateIn.
done([], [], _).

That’s it! The check to see whether, or not we are done is a single line of code. done/3 is called with Left, Center, and Right, and we’re done if Left and Center are empty and Right is something (what it is, we don’t care!).

The move from left to center (for example) looks like this:

towers(Left, Center, Right, StateIn, StateOut) :-
    move(Left, Center, LeftOut, CenterOut),
    State = [LeftOut, CenterOut, Right],
    append(StateIn, [State], X),
    towers(LeftOut, CenterOut, Right, X, StateOut).

That’s it! move/4 tries the move from Left to Center, and if it succeeds, we will record that state, and recurse. We record state so we can print the solution when we are done! You can see that towers/1 calls showmoves/2 which looks like this:

showmoves(_, []) :-
    format('Done.\n').
showmoves(N, [H|T]) :-
    format('State[~d]: ', N),
    format('Left ~w, Center ~w, Right ~w\n', H),
    N1 is N + 1,
    showmoves(N1, T).

showmoves/2 is recursive and prints out the moves in order. The lovely thing about this program is that all it has is the rules to adhere to, that’s it. Here’s a simple invocation.

$ swipl -g 'towers(2)' -g halt rules_based.pl 
State[1]: Left [2], Center [1], Right []
State[2]: Left [], Center [1], Right [2]
State[3]: Left [], Center [], Right [2,1]
Done.

When all the program knows is to follow the rules, it needs some help to prevent ending up in a cycle. Doing that just requires one more line of code in the towers/5 rule.

towers(Left, Center, Right, StateIn, StateOut) :-
    move(Left, Center, LeftOut, CenterOut),
    State = [LeftOut, CenterOut, Right],
    \+ member(State, StateIn),
    append(StateIn, [State], X),
    towers(LeftOut, CenterOut, Right, X, StateOut).

It doesn’t produce the ‘best’ solution, but it does produce valid solutions! The step (highlighted) is an example of one that is legal, but clearly wasted.

$ swipl -g 'towers(4)' -g halt rules_based.pl 
State[1]: Left [4,3,2], Center [1], Right []
State[2]: Left [4,3], Center [1], Right [2]
State[3]: Left [4,3], Center [], Right [2,1]
State[4]: Left [4], Center [3], Right [2,1]
State[5]: Left [4], Center [3,1], Right [2]
State[6]: Left [4,1], Center [3], Right [2]
State[7]: Left [4,1], Center [3,2], Right []
State[8]: Left [4], Center [3,2,1], Right []
State[9]: Left [], Center [3,2,1], Right [4]
State[10]: Left [], Center [3,2], Right [4,1]
State[11]: Left [2], Center [3], Right [4,1]
State[12]: Left [2], Center [3,1], Right [4]
State[13]: Left [], Center [3,1], Right [4,2]
State[14]: Left [], Center [3], Right [4,2,1]
State[15]: Left [3], Center [], Right [4,2,1]
State[16]: Left [3], Center [1], Right [4,2]
State[17]: Left [3,1], Center [], Right [4,2]
State[18]: Left [3,1], Center [2], Right [4]
State[19]: Left [3], Center [2,1], Right [4]
State[20]: Left [], Center [2,1], Right [4,3]
State[21]: Left [], Center [2], Right [4,3,1]
State[22]: Left [2], Center [], Right [4,3,1]
State[23]: Left [2], Center [1], Right [4,3]
State[24]: Left [], Center [1], Right [4,3,2]
State[25]: Left [], Center [], Right [4,3,2,1]
Done.

Recall that the towers(4) problem can be solved in 15 moves (here’s what the recursive solution looks like:

$ swipl -g 'towers(4)' -g halt recursive.pl 
1: Move one disc from left to middle
2: Move one disc from left to right
3: Move one disc from middle to right
4: Move one disc from left to middle
5: Move one disc from right to left
6: Move one disc from right to middle
7: Move one disc from left to middle
8: Move one disc from left to right
9: Move one disc from middle to right
10: Move one disc from middle to left
11: Move one disc from right to left
12: Move one disc from middle to right
13: Move one disc from left to middle
14: Move one disc from left to right
15: Move one disc from middle to right
That took a total of 15 steps.

While not the best solution, it is fascinating how prolog can find a valid solution with just the “what” and nothing about the “how”.

Complete code is here.

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An issue described above is with the code producing sub-optimal results by moving the same disc in consecutive moves. A simple change to keep track of the last disc moved, and prevent it from being moved again. It didn’t have quite the expected results 😦

The first solution it finds is not great, but after a few tries it produces this (to explore alternater results, remove the cut on line 36).

State[1]: Left [4,3,2], Center [1], Right []
State[2]: Left [4,3], Center [1], Right [2]
State[3]: Left [4,3], Center [], Right [2,1]
State[4]: Left [4], Center [3], Right [2,1]
State[5]: Left [4], Center [3,1], Right [2]
State[6]: Left [4,2], Center [3,1], Right []
State[7]: Left [4,2], Center [3], Right [1]
State[8]: Left [4], Center [3,2], Right [1]
State[9]: Left [4], Center [3,2,1], Right []
State[10]: Left [], Center [3,2,1], Right [4]
State[11]: Left [], Center [3,2], Right [4,1]
State[12]: Left [2], Center [3], Right [4,1]
State[13]: Left [2,1], Center [3], Right [4]
State[14]: Left [2,1], Center [], Right [4,3]
State[15]: Left [2], Center [1], Right [4,3]
State[16]: Left [], Center [1], Right [4,3,2]
State[17]: Left [], Center [], Right [4,3,2,1]
Done.

It is that time of the year, and I’ve been in touch with a number of people who I’ve not spoken with in months (in some cases since the same time last year). And a few asked me about Geiger counters, and radon detection that I’d written about in the last few posts.

TL;DR

Geiger counters aren’t a good way to measure household radon concentrations. But read on if you want to know more.

Geiger counters detect any form of radiation. The ones I was working with could detect α, β, or γ particles. That’s pretty much it. It tells you nothing about the source of the ionizing particle, its energy, or anything else. That’s it, it is a counter. It counts clicks per minute (CPM), and from that you can compute fancy things like sieverts an hour and such like.

Radon related problems are much more specific. There is exactly one decay of interest and that is the one from Radon to its decay to Polonium. The issue is that this Polonium is charged, and can adhere to dust and get inhaled. The health risk of radon is related to the concentration of Radon in the air, and there is no way to correlate CPM to Radon concentration.

So to get to Radon concentration, I’d have to go look at mechanisms based on alpha spectroscopy, or alpha track detectors, or traditional charcoal canisters.

That’s what I’m following up on now 🙂

In the previous post, I described false starts with off the shelf radon detectors. Radon is radioactive, and anyone who has seen a movie or two knows that the good guys have Geiger counters that make noises when there is radioactivity. So of course, the solution is to get a geiger counter.

The first one I tried was one made by Mighty Ohm. Not knowing any better, I got one that had an SBM-20 tube. This tube detects beta, and gamma particles, but not alpha. Nice geiger counter, great kit, great to put it together and get it working, but let’s skip forward. I need one that’ll measure not just beta, and gamma, but also alpha particles.

Recall that when Radon decays, it releases an alpha particle. See the picture below.

I had two choices, get another kit, or get something that was pre-built. I chose the GMC-600+ from GQ Electronics. It comes pre-assembled, and pre-calibrated, it detects alpha, beta, and gamma particles, and reviews gave it a good battery life. Most importantly, it was available on Amazon with two day delivery. So I ordered one, and waited. After a false start with the first one (had a line of dead pixels), the second one has proved to be really good.

It also has a USB port on which it appears as a simple serial port device, and you can read, and write from it directly. They also give you some software (I didn’t try it, it was Windows only). I wrote some software based on their documented protocol, and it worked quite easily. GQ Electronics makes some interesting hardware, they clearly are not software people. But, I do like their Geiger counter, and I’ll open source the software I’ve written.

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The GMC-600+ uses an LND-7317 tube. As shown on its specification page, it can detect alpha, beta and gamma particles. I found that to convert CPM to uSv/h for this tube, one must divide by 350. I’m not really sure why this is, but for now, I’m using this number and moving forward.

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On two different days, I conducted the following experiment. I placed the geiger counter inside the air-conditioning duct, right next to the filter (inside a ziploc bag).

I then ran the circulating fans for two hours, and then shut them off.

On 9/26 the fans were run between 12:30 and 14:30 (local time). On 10/9 the fans were run between 13:45 and 15:45 (local time). Here are the results from the GMC-600+. Note, I converted CPM to mSv/year.

In the test on 10/09, the counter was placed in the a/c duct many hours before I started to run the fans. The background radiation is about 1 msV/year in both tests. On 9/26 the peak was just over 3 msV/year, on 10/09 it went just over 1.5 msV/year.

In both cases, the radiation level dropped by 50% (over background) in about 50 minutes.

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If you look at the radioactive decay chart above, from Po₂₁₈ to Pb₂₁₀ takes ~50 minutes. It sure looks like the dust in the filter is radioactive, and has a decay characteristic that could be related to the decay from Po₂₁₈ to Pb₂₁₀! Lots of fun and interesting math to follow in the next blog post.

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WARNING: You can’t just add half life (times) to get effective decay rates, and half life. A half life is an exponential decay curve, and mere addition is meaningless. It has been a while since I studied Bateman’s equations, but in the simplest form, Bateman’s assumes a chain of decay beginning with all particles of the first type in the chain. That’s not what I’m dealing with here – at the time when the fan goes off, there are a collection of particles on the filter, each with its own decay (half life), and fraction. The effective half life is more complex than Bateman.

In the last blog post, I started to describe how radon comes into houses, and the radioactive decay that causes it. During the home inspection process, a radon test would place some canisters in the basement for 12, or 24 hours. These canisters are then sent away to a lab for testing, and you get a result in a day or two. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has some information about Radon as well as specific details about testing.

These tests give you a number representing the Radon level at the time when the test was done. But radon levels change throughout the day, even after the test is done. When I saw a passive radon system in the basement, I looked into getting a digital radon meter. I purchased a couple [you can find them at your local hardware store, I found mine online] and set them up in my basement.

After 24 hours they started showing numbers, and they consistently showed different numbers! I’ve blurred the manufacturer’s name on purpose.

Within reason, I can imagine differences, but when they were consistently different, and sometimes diverging, I wasn’t sure what to do. A few days later, one of them consistently showed a reading in excess of 6 pCi/L (pico-Curies/liter) and the second stayed stubbornly below 1.75 or so. What would you do?

I purchased a third one, and I put all three through a “reset” cycle, and then tossed them into a solid lead box. And I left them there, in that box for 36 hours. When I took them out, and reviewed the readings over the past 12 hours [there’s a 24 hour period when the meters report nothing], and all three of them were different. I wasn’t comfortable with that end result. I wanted higher confidence in the readings.

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The next post will cover what came next, my own radon detector.

If you live in the New England area, and are about to purchase a house, you will likely come face to face with a Radon test. When you get a home inspection the inspector will likely do this for you. [Even if you waive your home inspection contingency, I strongly recommend that you get a home inspection – in the best case it is uneventful, in the worst case, you cap your loss at whatever you put down with your offer to purchase.]

Radon is the number one cause of lung cancer among non-smokers, according to EPA estimates. Overall, radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer. Radon is responsible for about 21,000 lung cancer deaths every year. About 2,900 of these deaths occur among people who have never smoked. On January 13, 2005, Dr. Richard H. Carmona, the U.S. Surgeon General, issued a national health advisory on radon.

Health Risk of Radon

I had a radon inspection, and the result was that the radon level was “acceptable” [1.7 pCi/L]. The EPA suggests the action level of 4 pCi/L so all’s well, right. Nothing to worry about.

When I moved in, I noticed that the basement had a “passive radon mitigation system”. So I started looking into this a bit further, and other than a bunch of companies who are trying to sell me a test. More credible documents from the EPA, and other places are hard to read, and understand. I tried to find something easier to understand. Hopefully this helps someone else looking for comprehensible radon information.

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Here is some high school physics that you’ll need to understand what comes next. Radioactive elements decay over time. When a radioactive element decays, it emits some radiation, and transforms into another element which may, or may not itself be radioactive.

The rate of decay is measured by the element’s half-life. If you start with a gram of a radioactive substance, and this substance has a half-life of 1 day, then at the end of a day, you will have 1/2 a gram, after another day you will have 0.25 g, and so on. Hence the name, half-life.

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Another thing you’ll need to understand is where Radon comes from. I’ve summarized that below. The radioactive decay begins with Uranium (U₂₃₈) and progresses through various elements, till we end up with Lead (Pb₂₀₆). Along the way, each decay has an associated half life, and a radioactive radiation that is either an alpha (α), or beta (β) particle.

The important thing to notice is that Radon (Rn) is the only element that is a gas, all others are solid. The gas leaks into the house through cracks in the basement floor, and within a few days decays into Polonium (Po₂₁₈). The solid particles tend to stick to dust particles (due to electrical charge) and end up getting inhaled. If the contaminated dust sticks to the airways, further decay occurs within the body, and can cause the sensitive cells that they are close to. This is what leads to cancer.

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The next post continues with a description of my adventures with household radon meters.

Tom’s Hardware: How to Install Ubuntu on Your Raspberry Pi.

https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/install-ubuntu-raspberry-pi

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/07/the-unsexy-threat-to-election-security/

I worked for many years with, and for Stratus Technologies, a company that made fault tolerant computers – computers that just didn’t go down. One of the important things that we did at Stratus was longevity testing.

All software errors are not detectable quickly – some take time. Sometimes, just leaving a system to idle for a long time can cause problems. And we used to test for all of those things.

Which is why, when I see stuff like this, it makes me wonder what knowledge we are losing in this mad race towards ‘agile’ and ‘CI/CD’.

Airbus A350 software bug forces airlines to turn planes off and on every 149 hours

The AWD reads, in part

Prompted by in-service events where a loss of communication occurred between some avionics systems and avionics network, analysis has shown that this may occur after 149 hours of continuous aeroplane power-up. Depending on the affected aeroplane systems or equipment, different consequences have been observed and reported by operators, from redundancy loss to complete loss on a specific function hosted on common remote data concentrator and core processing input/output modules.

and this:

Required Action(s) and Compliance Time(s):

Repetitive Power Cycle (Reset):

(1) Within 30 days after 01 August 2017 [the effective date of the original issue of this AD], and, thereafter, at intervals not to exceed 149 hours of continuous power-up (as defined in the AOT), accomplish an on ground power cycle in accordance with the instructions of the AOT .

What is ridiculous about this particular issue is that it comes on the heals of Boeing 787 software bug can shut down planes’ generators IN FLIGHT, a bug where the generators would shutdown after 250 days of continuous operation, a problem that prompted this AWD!

Come on Airbus, my Windows PC has been up longer than your dreamliner!

I have heard of this trick of using welders glass as a cheap ND filter. But from my childhood experience of arc welding, I was not sure how one would deal with the reality that welders glasses are not really precision optics.

This article addresses at least the issue of coloration and offers some nice tips for adjusting color balance in general.

https://digital-photography-school.com/diy-neutral-density-filter/

Before and After: Students Becoming Better Photographers After 31 Days Course

https://digital-photography-school.com/students-becoming-better-photographers-after-31-days-course/

In Part 1 of this blog post, I described a problem I’ve been facing with my internet service, and the desired solution – a gizmo that would reboot my cable modem when the internet connection was down.

The first thing I got was a PiRelay from SB Components. This nifty HAT has four relays that will happily turn on and off a 110v or 250v load. The site claims 7A @ 240V, more than enough for all of my network gear. See image below, left.

Next I needed some way to put this in a power source. Initially I thought I’d get a simple power strip with individual switches on the outlets. I thought I could just connect the relays up in place of the switches and I’d be all set! So I bought one of these (above right).

Finally I just made a little junction box with four power outlets, and wired them up to the relays.

The software to control this is very straightforward.

1. It turns out that the way Microsoft checks for internet connectivity is to do a get on “http://www.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt”, and that returns the text “Microsoft NCSI”. OK, so I do that.
2. I also made a list of a dozen or so web sites that I visit often, and I make a conn.request() to them to fetch the HEAD.

If internet connectivity appear to be not working, power cycle “relay 0”, which is where my cable modem is running. And this is a simple cron job, runs every 10 minutes.

Works like a champ. Another simple Raspberry Pi project!

If you are interested, ping me and I’ll post more details. I intend to share the code for the project soon – once I shake out any remaining little gremlins!

This is just freaking awesome. 50,000 images produced this masterpiece in 81 megapixel resolution.

https://petapixel.com/2019/02/19/this-guy-shot-50000-pics-to-make-an-81mp-photo-of-the-moon/

4 Ways To Make Better Street Portraits While Traveling

https://digital-photography-school.com/4-ways-better-street-portraits-while-traveling/

A nice article, particularly tip 4.

How to Improve Low-Light Performance by Increasing Your ISO

I have got to try this out.

https://digital-photography-school.com/improve-low-light-performance/

OK, this is a rant.

It annoys me to no end when people present graphs like this one. Yes, the numbers do in fact add up to 100% but does it make any sense to have so many digits after the decimal when in reality this is based on a sample size of 6? Wouldn’t 1/2, 1/3, 1/6 have sufficed? What about 0.5, 0.33 and 0.67. Do you really really have to go to all those decimal places?

Excel has made it easy for people to make meaningless graphs like this, where merely clicking a little button gives you more decimal places. I’m firmly convinced that just having more digits after the decimal point doesn’t really make a difference in a lot of situations.

Let’s start first with some definitions

accuracy is a “degree of conformity of a measure to a standard or a true value“.

precision is the “the degree of refinement with which an operation is performed or a measurement stated“.

One can be precise, and accurate. For example, when I say that the sun rises in the east 100% every single day, I am both precise, and accurate. (I am just as precise and accurate if I said that the sun rises in the east 100.000% of the time).

One can be precise, and inaccurate. For example, when I say that the sun rises in the east 90.00% of the time, I am being precise but inaccurate.

So, as you can see, it is important to be accurate; the question now is how precise does one have to be. Assume that I conduct an experiment and tabulate the results, I find that 1/2 the time I have outcome A, 1/3 of the time I have outcome B, and 1/3 of the time I have outcome C. It would be both precise, and accurate to state the results are (as shown in the pie chart above) 50.0000%, 16.66667%, and 33.33333% for the various possible outcomes.

But does that really matter? I believe that it does. Consider the following two pictures, these are real pictures, of real street signs.

This sign is on the outskirts of Mysore, in India.

This sign is in Lancaster, MA.

In the first picture (the one from Mysore, India), we have distances to various places, accurate to 0.01km (apparently). Mysore Palace is 4.00 km away, the zoo is 4.00 km away, Mangalore is 270.00 km away. What’s 0.01km? That’s about 10m (about 33 feet). It is conceivable that this is accurate (possible, not probably). So I’d say this is precise and may be accurate.

The second picture (the one from Lancaster, MA) is most definitely precise, to 4 places of the decimal point no less. The bridge is 3.3528 meters (the sign claims). It also indicates that it is 11 feet. A foot is 12 inches, an inch is 2.54 centimeters, and therefore a meter (100cm is 39.3701″) is exactly 3.2808 feet. Therefore 11 feet is 3.3528 meters exactly. So this is both precise, and accurate (assuming that the bridge does in fact have a 11′ clearance).

The question is this, is the precision (4.00km, or 3.3528m) really relevant? We’re talking about street signs, measuring things with a fair amount of error. In the case of the bridge, the clearance could change by as much as 2″ between summer and winter because of expansion and contraction of the road surface (frost heaves). So wouldn’t it make more sense to just stick with 11′, or 3.5 meters?

So back to our graph with the 50.0000%, 16.66667% and 33.33333%. Does it really matter to the person looking at the graph that these numbers are presented to a precision of 0.000001%? For the most part, given the fact that the experiment had a sample size of 6, absolutely not.

So please, when presenting facts (and numbers) please do think about accuracy; that’s important. But please make the precision consistent with the relevance. When driving a car to the zoo, is the last 33′ going to really kill me? or am I really interested in the clearance of the bridge accurate to the thickness of a human hair, or a sheet of paper?

 

How to run a Kubernetes cluster in OpenStack

http://superuser.openstack.org/articles/how-to-run-a-kubernetes-cluster-in-openstack/

The Boston Harbor hotel … http://ow.ly/i/GPnEp

It was the perfect fishing evening!

4 of the Most Common Composition Mistakes In Photography

As usual, articles in DPS are well written, and excellent things to learn from.

https://digital-photography-school.com/four-common-composition-mistakes-photography/

How to Make Fake Shallow Depth of Field Using Photoshop

https://digital-photography-school.com/make-fake-shallow-depth-of-field-using-photoshop/

I have long suspected that this was the case, especially when no one could give a simple explanation why we did this.

• For the farmers
• For the farm animals
• To save energy

Those are just some of the explanations I have heard.

But I get it, in countries that are wide (west to east) you need more time zones. That is the real solution.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/02/daylight-saving-time-isnt-worth-it-european-parliament-ministers-say/?amp=1

The developer’s dilemma

A nice, thought provoking article by @nayafia

https://medium.com/@nayafia/the-developers-dilemma-eda85a8dc663

This article appeared almost a month ago, and I just got to reading it. It almost looks like it was written looking in the rear view mirror! Are there any of these seven trends that isn’t already a hot topic?

7 #Cloud Computing Trends to Watch in 2018

http://ow.ly/dcG830ihigd

Some very good introductory material about TensorFlow

Codementor: Simple TensorFlow Examples

Source: Tips for Photographing Your First Hot Air Balloon Festival

The article also provides a useful link to hot air balloon festivals near you, that link is: http://www.hotairballoon.com/

 

Excellent article about some research at Northeastern University.

https://theconversation.com/your-mobile-phone-can-give-away-your-location-even-if-you-tell-it-not-to-65443

Similar location leaks also reported in a number of recent articles related to fitness trackers.

Now, that’s easy to say.

But, blockchain today is what docker was 18 months ago. 

Startups got funded for doing “Docker for sandwiches”, or “Docker for underpants” (not really, but bloody close).

Talks were accepted at conferences because of the title “Docker, Docker, Docker, Docker, Docker” (really).

And today it is blockchain.

https://www.coindesk.com/dont-use-blockchain-unless-really-need-one/

I happened to be at the Mysore School of Architecture, in Mysore, India and had a chance to walk around. And click some photographs 🙂 The building is bright and airy, and the pictures below show some views of this. There was a lot of art all around the campus, all of it created by the students. Some modern art under the stairs. Modern art in the courtyard. A nice painting which shows two views, depending on where you stand. A nice mural on the wall. Some lovely photos; the sun and the wind weathered the display, but the display and the captions are lovely. Many of the class rooms have nice caricatures of famous architects. And finally, some lovely origami under the stairs! I loved my short trip to the college and will surely be back when there are some students there.

Ten quick tips for photographing northern lights.

I would love to do this sometime.

 https://www.diyphotography.net/ten-quick-tips-photographing-northern-lights/

A great article on the subject of hyperfocal distance.

https://www.nikonians.org/reviews/dof-and-hyperfocal-distance-tables-and-calculator/p/all

The basic idea is that if you focus your camera at the hyperfocal distance (H), the depth of field is from H/2 to infinity.

After the eclipse, I’m sure that everyone will have a welding glass to try this with! 

http://www.diyphotography.net/use-welding-glass-as-10-stops-nd-filter/

I purchased an Acurite 10 sensor indoor humidity and temperature monitoring system and am surprisingly happy with it. I was expecting a generally crappy experience but I have to say I was wrong, and it wasn’t that I’d set my expectations so low; the system is truly quite good.

The system I purchased is this one.

You get a smartHub and 10 sensors. Pictured below is the hub and a sensor.

The setup: smartHub

The smartHub comes with a little power adapter and an ethernet cable. Stick it into a wall outlet and connect the ethernet cable to your router and DHCP does its thing and the smartHub gets online.

It initiates a series of accesses to some locations and downloads firmware and the like. (I’ve captured network traces, if I find anything interesting, I’ll blog about that). In a couple of minutes the lights stabilize and you have to press a button that says “Activate”.

The setup: online

Then you create an online account at the Acruite site and once you are logged in, you associate your account with the device. You identify it by the number on the bottom (spoiler alert, the number is the MAC address of the device).

Within about a minute, the device shows up and you are good to go for the next step.

The setup: sensors

Each sensor takes two AAA batteries, pop them in and within a minute the web portal shows a new device which you can rename and mount wherever you want it. Very slick and easy.

Within about 15 minutes I had 10 sensors online and reporting.

I was so happy with this that I’ve purchased another smartHub and 10 more indoor/outdoor sensors; they don’t have the LCD display.

Enough of the happy talk

OK, so what did I not like?

1. It has been years (literally, years and years) since I’ve purchased a gadget that requires batteries, and the batteries are not included. It’s a good thing that I purchase AAA’s in packs of 50. Like every other commodity piece of electronics these days, these sensors are made in China, so just stick two AAA’s in the box please.
2. Once you power up a sensor, it takes under a minute to initialize and register with the smartHub. But, if you stick batteries in two of them in quick succession, there’s no way to tell (on the Web UI) which is which. There’s no number on the sensor, nothing which you can associate with what you see on the screen; just “Temperature and Humidity Sensor – NN” where NN is a number incrementing from 1 to 10.
3. Once you get sensors on the Web UI, there is no way to re-order them. The will forever remain in the same order. So if you decide to move a device from one location to another, and you want to group your devices based on location, you are not able to do that.
4. Wired ethernet, really? I’m sure the stupid cable they have to give you will cost about as much as it would to get wireless setup. But it would make the setup just a bit harder.
5. The web app is just about OK. Fine, it sucks. It allows you to add alerts for each device. By default, low battery and loss of signal rules are added for each device. But, I want to add temperature rules for different devices. Yes, you can do that but you get to do it one device at a time. No copy/paste available.
6. They claim to have an android application but it won’t work on a tablet; instead they expect you to use a full blown web app for the tablet. The android app won’t install on my android phone; lots of others seem to be complaining about this as well.

Closing thoughts

Acurite strikes me as a company that makes fine hardware and they appear to have done an absolutely bang up job on the initial setup and “getting started” part of the experience.

They are not a software company. The software part of the “after setup” experience is kind of horrible.

They offer no easy API based mechanism to retrieve your sensor data. Yes, on the web app, you can click a couple of buttons and play with date controls and get a link to some AWS S3 bucket mailed to you with your data as a CSV but really, advertise an API, get someone to write an IFTTT channel, then you’ll be cooking with gas.

Next post will be a deconstruction of the protocol, what you get when you point your web browser at the smartHub’s IP address, and those kinds of fun things.

One more thing

The people at Acurite Support are wonderful. I have (in the past three days) spoken with two of them, and interacted with one via email. The people I spoke with were knowledgeable, and very helpful.

The wait times on hold are quite bad. I waited 25 minutes and 15 minutes respectively on hold. There is the usual boring elevator music while you stay in line with an announcement every minute that you are “XX in line”. No indication of how long your wait will be but you are offered the option of getting a callback.

An odd thing though is that while I was in line and I heard the message “you are second in line” a couple of times, I suddenly ended up being “third in line”. How someone got ahead of me in line, I know not.

But, their support is great. 5 stars for that!

Amazon’s demented plans for its warehouse blimp with drone fleet http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/12/amazons-demented-plans-for-its-warehouse-blimp-with-drone-fleet/?amp=1

Shit like this is what gives patents a bad name!

President Signs Law Protecting Your Right to Review https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/12/president-signs-law-protecting-right-review

I did not know that companies could (and had been) doing this. 

In March 2012 (that’s a while ago) I wrote this article about a new service I’d discovered called IF-This-Then-That.

Now, almost five years on, IFTTT has come a long way. Just looking at the channels (they now call them services) it is amazing how far they’ve come. Quite amazing.

Time to go revisit IFTTT. It still amazes me that they are a free service.

Interesting article in MIT Technology review at https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603198/facebook-at-a-crossroads/.

More than half of the 3.4 billion people with Internet access log on to Facebook each month. Revenue in the first nine months of 2016 jumped 36 percent to $19 billion; profit nearly tripled, to $6 billion. Yet the company’s founder has spent the year talking up his plans to become something much larger and more meaningful.

With the election now over, the coming crackdown on fake news, and getting mired in the censorship controversy after blocking the video stream of Philando Castile after he was shot in Minnesota surely didn’t help.

I wonder how much all these things will affect Facebook, and how much that is driving the urge to do unnatural things.

Drones, Virtual Reality, get a grip …