The Hawker Squawker
The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe. -- Gustave Flaubert
Planetary Mnemonics [Permalink]

Quiz time ... how many planets are there? If you said 9 you're living in the past! Don't forget that last year the official definition of a planet was finally announced, and guess what - Pluto didn't make the cut. (Which is something i've said should be case for ages).

Anyway, if you're having trouble remembering the names of the planets (and now "minor planets" such as Pluto), mnemonics to the rescue! "A fourth-grader at Riverview Elementary School [GREAT FALLS, Montana] has won the National Geographic planetary mnemonic contest, developing a handy way to remember the newly assigned 11 planets [11 includes the three dwarfs]".

My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Palace Elephants

Congratulations Maryn Smith! You can read the AP article here

Posted by shawker on Thursday, 28 February 2008
Tags:
 Comments (5)
The homogeneous sci-fi universe [Permalink]

I was watching an episode of Babylon 5 last night titled "The Parliament of Dreams". The premise of this particular episode is that aliens from all over the known galaxy are meeting on the Babylon 5 station to have a festival of religious ceremonies. The Centauri throw a big feast with small statues of all their deities on the table watching over them. The Mimbari have a solemn ceremony with bells and chants and little red fruits (which, oddly enough, also doubles as a marriage ceremony). When it comes time for Earth to showcase its major religion, JMS (the shows creator) did something really cool. He had a long line of people representing all of the faiths of earth (including an atheist), showing just how diverse our world is when it comes to religion.


The point I want to make is that it seems most science fiction shows and books depict alien cultures as homogeneous. There's usually a single world-wide government and one religion (if any). Oh, and everyone dresses the same. The diversity comes from the fact that there are many worlds instead of many different types of people from each world. I think that science fiction writers could take some constructive criticism here and make each of their worlds as diverse culturally, politically, and religiously as is earth today. Combine that with multiple worlds and you really get a dizzying array of interesting material to work with.

I realize there's a lot of room for argument in here. Anyone have any differing opinions?

Posted by shawker on Tuesday, 26 February 2008
Tags:
 Comments (1)
VR for the rest of us [Permalink]
Movies and television shows have been doing it for years. But only now is there a commercially available non-invasive electroencephalography VR headset for the masses ($299) called the "Epoc headset". According to an article on the BBC news website, "A neuro-headset which interprets the interaction of neurons in the brain will go on sale later this year. ... It picks up electrical activity from the brain and sends wireless signals to a computer."

The headset can detect more than 30 different expressions, emotions and actions.

They include excitement, meditation, tension and frustration; facial expressions such as smile, laugh, wink, shock (eyebrows raised), anger (eyebrows furrowed); and cognitive actions such as push, pull, lift, drop and rotate (on six different axis).

Gamers are able to move objects in the world just by thinking of the action.

Original article here
Posted by shawker on Friday, 22 February 2008
Tags:
 Comments (2)
cool things update [Permalink]
Just a quick note of some cool things from the last week or so.
  • Electronic Arts has finally set a release date for Spore (Sep 7, 2008)
  • Lucas Arts has announced a Clone Wars animated movie coming to the big screen
  • The first official Indiana Jones 4 trailer has been released
Posted by shawker on Friday, 15 February 2008
Tags:
 Comments (3)
The artform known as "Software Engineering" [Permalink]
I recently read a very eloquent article written by a software engineer (programmer) who did a wonderful job in capturing just what it is that we (we being software engineers) do. Much of my article will be based on his, so don't think i'm quite so brilliant as i might appear (well ... ok, if you really want to think i'm brilliant, i won't complain too loudly).

"What do you do"? All my neighbors think i fix computers. Whenever they have a problem, who do they call? Actually they don't call me - they call my wife who then informs me that so and so's printer isn't working, or that neighbor X can't check their email, or perhaps the world is about to end because someone's hard drive just crashed and they lost all of their Quicken data. Does this describe what I do at work all day? Not even close. It's like asking a car salesman to fix your car (not the best analogy, but you get the idea).

Well then, "what do you do"?

A software developer must be part writer and poet, part salesperson and public speaker, part artist and designer, and always equal parts logic and empathy.
I don't just sit around in front of the computer all day writing code. I'm thinking up approaches to solve problems. I have to balance various constraints (how much memory, how fast is the hardware, who is the user, what is the end goal, fault tolerances, screen real estate, network connectivity, etc..etc..), deciding which approach is best, which tools to use, how long i have to work on it, and (most importantly), how interesting is it to me and how much do i care about making it a great product.

A very important point that 90% of all software engineers seem to miss is the user experience. "Software that can’t be understood can’t be used, so no matter how brilliant your design, if your interface isn’t elegant and beautiful and intuitive, your project is a failure." Design, elegance, ease of use.

Now for the good stuff: the code itself. Code isn't just a bunch of cryptic ones and zeros that somehow float around inside of a computer and make it do things. A well written program is a piece of art!

The purpose of code is to express a solution. A project consists of small stanzas, called “Methods” or “Functions” depending on what language you use. Each of these verses must be constructed in such a way that it is efficient, tightly-crafted, and effective. And like a poem, there are rules that dictate how it should be shaped. There is beauty in a clever Function. ... when the pieces are added up, each in itself a little work of art, they make, if programmed properly, a whole that is much more than a sum. Its is an intertwined, and constantly moving piece of art.
Another good point made by the author of the article cited below is that just as anyone can walk into an art gallery and appreciate a beautiful work of art by Davinci, it takes another artist or earnest student to really appreciate the intricacies of the brush strokes, the color choices, the arrangement of the subject, etc... A software program is no different. Anyone can use it and realize it's a good program, but only another programmer can truly appreciate just how wonderful it is under the covers.

And yet, no matter how good your program is, users are never satisfied. It always doesn't do something they want (even if they never asked for it when you were designing the program). Not to worry. What it does now, it does well, and version 2.0 is always around the corner :)

"What do you do"?

I ... produce art. Functional, useful, but still beautiful, art. We are code poets, and it is our prose that builds the tools people use every day.

Original article here

Posted by shawker on Wednesday, 6 February 2008
Tags:
 Comments (3)
Google Chart API [Permalink]
For those less technically inclined, this is probably a boring entry. Not nearly exciting as planting a garden or something...

Google, in their never ending bid to take over the world, has created a chart API, which allows anyone to embed pretty graphics into their web pages without having to do all the nasty work of actually generating the graphic. You just feed them the data and it spits back an image.

Here are a few example charts, generated by Google on the fly:
   Sample chart      

Lots of possibilities here ...!

Google Chart API

Posted by shawker on Tuesday, 5 February 2008
Tags:
 Comments (1)
Google alerts [Permalink]

If you've got a Google account -- and if you don't ... why the #@&$ don't you ... i mean, come on - they're taking over the world; get on the bandwagon already -- you should check out the "Google Alerts". They're pretty freaking cool. Basically you enter a search term and then every time a new page is indexed by Google that matches your search, it will send you an alert (ala email). I have been using this for the last month or so to track the following search: "Hirst Arts" (yes, the quotes are included because otherwise i kept getting lots of pages by someone named Damien Hirst who does a lot of Art shows in New York or something). It's a great way to stay on top of specific topics that might interest you. Give it a try and see what you think.
Posted by shawker on Thursday, 31 January 2008
Tags:
 Comments (1)
Five Year Anniversary [Permalink]
Wow, five years of blogging today. Who would have thought i'd have stuck with it this long? I was going to write something witty and clever about the reasons people blog and how it has changed the world, etc..etc.., but i'm sure you can all figure that out for yourselves. So i thought it would be fun to quote someone much more interesting than myself: Stephen Hawking. Here are 10 famous quotes by him:
  • "Einstein was wrong when he said "God does not play dice". Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen."
  • "I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road."
  • "My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all."
  • "I find that American & Scandinavian accents work better with women." In response to a question about the American accent of his synthesiser.
  • "Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales. In the end, however, I did put in one equation, Einstein's famous equation, E = mc2. I hope that this will not scare off half of my potential readers."
  • "My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus."
  • "To show this diagram properly, I would really need a four dimensional screen. However, because of government cuts, we could manage to provide only a two dimensional screen."
  • "Life would be tragic if it weren't funny."
  • "The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired."
  • "Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end."
Source: thelandsalmon.com
Posted by shawker on Wednesday, 23 January 2008
Tags:
 Comments (3)
New Theme [Permalink]
I've just got done creating a new blojsom 3.x theme for my wife based loosely on the wordpress twillo theme.

Head over to her blog and check it out.

Posted by shawker on Sunday, 20 January 2008
Tags:
 Comments (0)
Dragonlance - the movie [Permalink]
Yesterday, the Dragonlance movie was released. I went to my local redbox and picked up a copy. For those who have never read the Dragonlance novels, you really should. It's one of the cornerstone series of fantasy literature. I even got my wife to read the books and quite surprising to her, she loved them.

How does the movie stack up? Let's start with the good points. The soundtrack was very well done and added quite a bit to the show. The voice talents include Lucy Lawless and Kiefer Sutherland. It's an hour and a half and does tell all the major plot points of the original story.

BUT. . . It gave me a headache to watch. Literally. The movie is animated, not live action, and the animation was "blurry". You could see double-lines and digital artifacts everywhere - as if whoever rendered the video had put it on a medium quality setting for some reason (my guess is to save space; the entire movie just fits on a single layer DVD, which would mean production costs would be cheaper). Even if the animation had been sharp, the quality of the animation compares to that of your average saturday morning cartoon. Again, i could live with that if the storyline were good enough. But that brings up the final point. All of the depth that made the books so good was completely lacking in the show. It was as if someone had written some cliffs notes on the book and then written the screenplay from that. It basically was like watching a book report. "The characters did this, then went here, this happened, etc ... etc..". The movie didn't draw you in, you didn't feel for the characters, the dialog was flat, and you really didn't get a sense of the epic scope that comes across in the books.

I really wanted to like this movie, but i'm afraid i can't recommend it to anyone. Thumbs DOWN. Fortunately i only paid a dollar to rent it instead of $18 to actually buy it.

Posted by shawker on Wednesday, 16 January 2008
Tags:
 Comments (3)