Posts published in “Uncategorized”

Latest Spam WTF

Published November 7, 2009 by centaur

Some time back I received a spam email that was blank. This is understandable, actually; probably just someone trying out a list of email addresses. I also got one containing the cryptic text "podmena traffica test"; this turned out also to be a "spoofing traffic test". Now I've got a bit of comment spam, which also seemed mysterious, until I dug into it a bit. From my email:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Why I Write":

I can not participate now in discussion - it is very occupied. I will be released - I will necessarily express the opinion. [url=DELETED]acheter levitra[/url] This rather good idea is necessary just by the way

Publish this comment.

Reject this comment.

Moderate comments for this blog.

The deleted URL is to a French eBay site, "acheter levitra" is French for "buy Levitra," which is a brand name of Vardenafil, which is, of course, a Viagra clone. So this is essentially random pseudo-English text with a "buy Viagra" link, depending on the 1% of people who click on such links and the 1% of people who buy to pay for the cost of putting this spam on my blog. Charming.

Comment reeejected.

-the Centaur

UPDATE: I got a similar post of with a less obvious spam form, targeting one of the more popular pages on my blog (can you say pooound cake?):

"I found this site using [url=http://google.com]google.com[/url] And i want to thank you for your work. You have done really very good site. Great work, great site! Thank you! Sorry for offtopic"

But the [url=XXX]TEXT[/url] pattern was a dead giveaway. A search on Google for ["[url=http://google.com]google.com[/url]"] - note that's the '[url.../url]' thing in double quotes; the outermost brackets are the syntax you use to indicate a chunk of text is a query, like [centaur] - SO anyway, a search on Google for that nonsense revealed that the exact text of that comment has appeared elsewhere. So this is just more comment spam, trying to see if comments are unmoderated here.

Comment flattering! But reeejected.

My Name is Gabby

Published November 6, 2009 by centaur

Once we were traveling the neighborhood late and found a small and collarless cat alone by the sidewalk. Near him, on the lawn, half crouched another cat lay, who froze then turned tail, disappearing in the cold night. Know that the stray cat well our passions read; it yet survives, became not some lifeless thing, but found hands that pet him and hearts that fed. And upon this doorstep these thoughts we hear:

My name is Gabby, Cat of Cats. Listen to my purrs, ye mighty tall people, and despair of anything but bringing me home and giving me can food and vaccinations!

Nothing else remains of that stray cat, all ribcage and scared, but a full belly and warm and level purrs that stretch far away.

-the Centaur, after Shelley.

Five Days Behind

Published November 6, 2009 by centaur

Between the new cat, work, finishing up Blood Rock, and business with Frost Moon, I've gotten far behind on Nanowrimo this month. But now I'm back on track, have finished a more detailed outline which solves some of my plot problems and gives me some fun crunchy stuff to work with ... and have finally caught up to my first day's target word count, ~1700 words (you need to do at least 1666 words a day to complete Nano). Hopefully things will speed up from this point ... need to do ~1933 words a day to finish successfully.

Data Mining for Satisfying the Finicky

Published November 5, 2009 by centaur

So we have cats. Three, currently - Caesar, a rescue cat, Lenora, a shelter cat and Gabby, a stray cat - out of a lifetime population of five, including Nero, the brother of the rescue cat, who disappeared (probably eaten by coyotes), and Graycat, another stray cat, pictured, who we unfortunately had to have executed by the state (because only I could handle him, using gloves, and we were afraid he was going to come knife us in our sleep).

So the three remaining cats are somewhat finicky. There are foods they will love, foods they will grudgingly eat, food they will eat but puke up, and food they will (quite literally) try to bury as if it is crap. So I've been meaning for a long time to keep up a diary of the food choices and their reactions to find out what we can feed them.

Data mining researchers claim that getting high-quality input data is the hardest part of a machine learning problem, so I started off with some exploratory data collection in Excel. After letting (thoroughly washed!) cans pile up for a week in two bins, I entered these into a spreadsheet and started to figure out how the data should be represented. I ended up with these columns:

Brand: Fancy Feast, Nutro, etc.
Type: Regular, Max Cat Gourmet Classics, etc.
Flavor: Savory Salmon Feast, White Meat Chicken Florentine with Garden Greens, etc.
Consistency: Flaked, Pate, Grilled, etc.
Target: Adult or Kitten
Package: Can, Tray or Packet
Ratings: +1 or -1

This may seem overkill, but the goal would be to learn which brands, flavors and consistencies the cats like (hint: they do not like anything Grilled or Chunked) so I didn't want to leave anything out.

After collecting this data, I started to analyze it. First I sorted the data. Then I eliminated duplicates and added a Servings, AggregateRating and Average column, summing up the Ratings into the Aggregate so that if something got two +1 and one -1 rating it would get 3 Servings and a AggregateRating of 2. This I used to compute an Average, which I used to resort the table to see which brands worked best.

The problem is, this Average wasn't that meaningful. One vote for a flavor isn't as meaningful as three, because the cats aren't consistent. This is the inverse of the Law of Large Numbers: you need many ratings to generate a meaningful result in the presence of noise.

I decided to set the number of ratings I cared about at 3, based on anecdotal comments by Roger Schank, my thesis advisor's thesis advisor - who reportedly said you need to visit a restaurant three times to give it a fair rating, because a restaurant could have one off day or great day and you needed at least 3 ratings to get an idea of their consistency.

At first I decided to track this using a smoothed average, AggregateRatings / (Servings + 3), but this depressed the all-positive and all-negative scores more than I liked - that kind of smoothing function works only well if you have very large ranges of values. So I chose a simpler max-based approach of AggregateRatings / Max(Servings, 3), so that one serving would get a 33% positive or negative rating but three or more could max it out to 100% if they were consistent.

That enabled me to make some findings, but then I realized I'm an idiot. I'd picked up the smoothed average idea from Empirical Methods for Artificial Intelligence, a book any serious computer scientist should read. And I'd edited my data in the spreadsheet so I could compute that average. But what I should have been thinking about was The Pragmatic Programmer, specifically the tips Keep Knowledge In Plain Text and Use Source Control.

Why Keep Knowledge In Plain Text? The cats aren't just finicky; their tastes change, especially if you overfeed them one thing. So the date at which a cat turns on food is important. By entering it into Excel, I first had to have a computer on hand, which encouraged to let the cans pile up; so I lost both the date information and some of the rating information - a coarse grained +1/-1 rather than "Ate Instantly"/"Ate Completely"/"Left Unfinished"/"Refused or Puked Up"/"Tried to Bury". A superior strategy would have been a pen-and-paper notebook where I recorded the cans a few hours after they were eaten. This could be entered into a text file a few days later, and if it is tab or comma separated Excel could easily import it. Then, with that data, I could even have applied other techniques from Empirical Methods for Artificial Intelligence, like using a sliding time-series window to ensure I'm analyzing the cat's current tastes.

And why Use Source Control? Because I edited my Excel file, dummy, not even versioned with v1 v2 v3 like I do with documents. So I actually entered this data in two phases and some of the temporal information I could have recovered has been lost.

So I'm going to improve my procedures going forward. Nevertheless, I did get some nice preliminary data, which jibes well with the observations Sandi and I had made informally. I'm going to hold judgment until I have more data, but so far Fancy Feast is the best brand, and Cod, Sole and Shrimp Feast and Savory Salmon Feast are the winningest flavors. Newman's Own Organics and Halo Spot's Stew were the worst brands - the cats refused to even touch them - which is odd, because Newman's Own makes great human food (try Newman O's) and Halo makes great dry food the cats love.

More results as the votes continue to trickle in...
-the Centaur

Let’s Give This Thing a Shot

Published November 3, 2009 by centaur

The only way to make something happen for certain is to prioritize it. Normally when Nanowrimo rolls around I become a submarine and don't blog so much, but if the inhuman writing machine that is Warren Ellis can blog multiple times per day in between writing comic book epics, then so can I, dag nab it.

So, for the month of November, when I'm supposed to be writing 50,000 words of Liquid Fire ... I will blog once a day. So far, so good ... 3 days, 3 posts. Here's to committment - meh.

-the Centaur

National Novel Writing Month 2009 Entry: Liquid Fire

Published November 3, 2009 by centaur

Well, it is that time of year again: November, and National Novel Writing Month. This year I'm working on Book 3 of the Dakota Frost series, Liquid Fire, which features Dakota, firespinning, and dragons:

What is life? No scientist can tell you. Oh, the pocket-protector variety will say that living things move, eat and grow, wrapped up in ten-dollar words like ‘locomotion’ and ‘intake’ and ‘self-organization’. But these by themselves are not life: a waterfall moves more vibrantly than any animal, a fire eats more efficiently, a crystal is more organized.

A worldly scientist, aware of the dance of the sexes, will mention the heat of metabolism, the fire of reproduction. But a fire eats to live just like we do, but faster: and where we breed in a slow dance of desire, a fire lives in a hot orgy of giving, casting off its own substance, flying sparks, glowing seeds, drifting through the air to start the cycle again. If metabolizing and reproducing were all there were to life, would not fire be alive?

But life is not any one of these things: life is all of them together. It is the combination of moving and eating and organizing, of metabolism and reproduction, of a thousand things more. Put them all together, and you get more than you started with: a holistic — holy — combination that is more than the sum of its parts. Life is magic.

Or more precisely, magic is life.

As usual, I have a theme, plot, and know almost exactly how it will end. But more than the previous two books in the series, I feel like I'm stepping off into a great void, even though the magic of this book - firespinning - is an art I myself perform, unlike the tattoos featured in Frost Moon (of which I have none) and the graffiti featured in Blood Rock (of which I have done none). All I have to go on this one are love, fire ... and the nightmares from the Hadean.

Wish me luck.
-the Centaur

Best. Dongle. Evah.

Published November 3, 2009 by centaur

Recently, work was getting more hectic and family matters required more travel, and I was getting frustrated going out to coffeehouses and delis just to get wireless Internet. So, signed up for an AT&T; wireless data plan, complete with a little dongle by Sierra Wireless that actually does the job of connecting to the Internet.

I refused to get the two year contract just so I could get the dongle for free, because I was burned this time last year getting a two year contract just so I could get a cheap smartphone ... right before the Search Engine That Starts With A G bought all of its employees Android smartphones.

SO I opted to instead to pay month to month, and as a consequence I had to pony up two hundred dollars for that little dongle. Because of the monthly fee, and how the math worked out, I stupidly did not spend the extra $5 bucks a month insuring the damn thing.

I say stupidly, because I left it in my pocket and put my pants in the wash.

My heart fell when I saw the cap of the dongle tumble out as I was emptying the clotheswasher. Sure enough, I found the dongle in the pocket of a pair of pants. Sadly, I took it to my Mac and plugged it in. The lights flickered for a moment, but did not come on. Just to be sure, since the Mac's two USB ports are not equivalent, I switched it to the other side.

The lights flickered ... and then the power light turned blue, while the connection light turned red. Hoping against hope, I hit "Connect" on the Sierra Wireless Watcher control panel. The connection light began flashing ... and a minute later, it connected.

Since I knew that liquid in electronic devices can sometimes cause problems down the road, I disconnected it, unplugged it, and put it front of a spaceheater to dry out more thoroughly, then a fan to cool it off. One day later, I'm writing this blog entry using this same dongle, and it's doing fine.

Go Sierra, and go AT&T; for picking a quality parts supplier.

-the Centaur

Randomness, my friends…

Published October 28, 2009 by centaur

...it happens.

Aptera on Jay Leno’s Garage

Published October 20, 2009 by centaur

Readers of this blog know that I want an Aptera, a new superaerodynamic electric car scheduled to come out sometime Real Soon Now. One of my friends who's a real car freak pointed the Aptera out to me, and also more recently pointed out that Jay Leno, also a real car freak, has test driven the Aptera in a segment on Jay Leno's Garage:

http://widgets.nbc.com/o/47f1317f105123ad/4acd7cc7e156d655/4a12be5cd515d142/a947b45b

As we watched Jay made a crack about his century-old Baker Electric, and when I expressed shock my buddy said, "What? All the early cars were electric." Maybe not entirely true, but the Baker had an 100 mile range, better than some modern electric cars. I think a quote Sergey Brin dug up put it the best:

“THE fundamental reasons why the electric car has not attained the popularity it deserves are (1) The failure of the manufacturers to properly educate the general public regarding the wonderful utility of the electric; (2) The failure of [power companies] to make it easy to own and operate the electric by an adequate distribution of charging and boosting stations. The early electrics of limited speed, range and utility produced popular impressions which still exist.”

This is from the 1916 issue of Electrical World. Oh, my:

Well, the Aptera has been delayed in the past, and even I can only wait so long. Here's hoping the Aptera will not follow in the footsteps of its predecessors, and will instead usher in an age of new electric cars.

Writers in Their Creative Spaces

Published October 18, 2009 by centaur

the centaur in his native habitat: a forest of books

Recently a few friends (most recently Jim Davies) have sent me pointers to the Where I Write project, which shows off the creative spaces where many science fiction and fantasy artists do their writing. Some of the writing setups are amazingly spare; others are simply amazing. Check it out!

-the Centaur
Pictured above is one of my "creative spaces", though a fully accurate picture would probably show me at my local Barnes and Noble writing group or at Borders with the laptop and a Javakula from Seattle's Best Coffee.

What Do I Actually Know How To Cook?

Published October 18, 2009 by centaur

As I was reorganizing the Library I decided to add a section for "Cooking" and found I had posted only pound cake recipes. That raises the question ... what do I actually know how to cook? I came up with the following list of things that I can cook sufficiently well worth recording:

B'learweh - Lebanese Baklava, a flaky pastry
Tabbouleh - Lebanese parsley salad
Kibbey Nayye - Lebanese steak tartare
Lebanese Red Wine Vinegar Scrambled Eggs with Lavash
French Toast
Olive Oil and Garlic Marinated Buffalo New York Strips
Kafta - Lebanese Meatballs
Lahem Mishwa - Lebanese Shish Kebabs
and of course, Pound Cake

There's a subtle theme there. There are a few other things that get made in our house that I make to other people's recipes - Hummus, Cleveland Burgers, "California Dreaming Style" Grilled Chicken Salad - and a few other things that we eat that my wife or friends typically prepare. I'll try to go through these recipes and post as many as I can.

-the Centaur

Fast Push That Emergency Fix

Published October 14, 2009 by centaur

Fortunately, the problem had a quick fix.

The problem, for those of you who browse the site in standards-compliant browsers, was that the last column of the Library's three-column layout was not showing up in Internet Explorer - and only Internet Exporer, one of the world's most popular and, unfortunately, least standards compliant browsers.

The solution: make the layout wider, so the max image width used in the blog does not cause the first column to widen.

In the top half of the picture, you see Firefox 3.0.14 on the Macintosh running the (corrected) version of the Library of Dresan home page. In the bottom half, you see Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista, running in a VMWare partition on my Mac, from approximately the same position on the same page. From a graphical and typographical perspective they're both doing a fairly creditable job of rendering the layout. Everything looks roughly OK.

However, they're not doing the same job interpreting the width of the layout. I haven't debugged the precise problem in detail - this is a voodoo quick fix - but essentially Internet Explorer interprets the widths of the columns and their spacing and padding different than Firefox. The result: images, which on Library of Dresan blogposts are always a maximum of 600 pixels wide, roll over the end of the column, also 600 pixels wide, making it jog out. You can see that in the stairstep on the second half of the image.

Part of this is my error; prior to my quick fix all browsers were showing at least slight stairstepping. But all browsers I tried - Firefox on the Mac, on Windows, and on Linux; Chrome on the Mac, on Windows, and on Linux; and even Safari on Mac and Windows - handled this correctly except IE, which widened the whole column. This made the three columns wider than the whole width of the container, and the third column had to jog halfway down the page so that it could fit, effectively becoming invisible to people just entering the site, unless they were willing to scroll a lot in the hope hidden features would leap up at them.

Now, I could have dug into CSS manuals and tried to fix this the "right" way, and indeed I plan to. However, there was a quicker, better, way: experimentation. Before I even knew for sure what was the problem I browsed to the front page of the Library on a Windows machine, downloaded the page to a local HTML file, and started hacking out parts of the file until something changed. I was very quickly able to show that there was nothing wrong with the right column itself; even reduced to a few lines and an image it wasn't showing up.

So I then went to my test file, research, which I had gotten to work in IE before I launched the style change to the whole library. One difference between that page and the broken page I immediately noted was the fact that the images were smaller; then I started to suspect the stairstepping phenomenon. That needed a fix on all browsers, so I simply made the content column slightly wider - from 600 to 610 pixels, fixing a gaffe I shouldn't have made in the first place - and widened the overall page from 1000 to 1024 pixels.

The result: it worked, in all browsers I have available to me right now. And, because my buddy Nathan had impressed upon me the importance of using CSS stylesheets, I was able to push the fix by simply uploading the revised stylesheet to the Library and reloading the page.

Shouldn't have happened - I shouldn't have made the column too narrow, Internet Explorer shouldn't be misinterpreting the white space, I shouldn't have pushed the template without testing it on Internet Explorer, and Blogger should have a better preview function so I could have tested it successfully offline without pushing it to the entire blog. But a quick fix was possible, because I used reasonably good site design practices, the scientific method, and a healthy supply of beans and vinegar.

-the Centaur

Curse you, Internet Explorer…

Published October 14, 2009 by centaur

...the template looks fine in Firefox!

Grrr...

UPDATE: The template looks as intended in Firefox AND Chrome for Mac AND for Windows AND for Linux, and for Safari for Windows and Mac as well. Grrr...

Launch early, launch often

Published October 14, 2009 by centaur

Please pardon the dust, but I am doing that long-threatened major overhaul of the Library's templates.

I realized that I was waiting until the overhaul was "perfect" and that was putting the overhaul on hold. I've read too many things recently - about the telegraph, the transcontinental railroad, even about creation of Google - in which immense success came from plucky people who didn't wait until things were perfect, or even necessarily known to be possible, before they threw their ideas up on the wall to see if they stuck.

So, I know my new template is not done, but it looks better than what I had before, and more importantly is more navigable. More work to do ... but for now, complain, and I'll fix it.

-the Centaur

More Computer Hugs

Published October 13, 2009 by centaur

My colleague Ashwin Ram (pictured to the left, not above :-) has blogged about the "Emotional Memory and Adaptive Personalities" paper that he, Manish Mehta and I wrote. Go check it out on his research blog on interactive digital entertainment. It highlights the work his Cognitive Computing lab is doing to lay the underpinnings for a new generation of computer games based on intelligent computer interaction - both simulated intelligence and increased understanding of the player and his relationship with the environment.

They're putting out a surprising amount of work in this area; you should go check it out...

-the Centaur
P.S. The title of the post comes from my external blogpost on the paper, "Maybe your computer just needs a hug."

Frost Moon Back In the Hands of the Editor

Published October 13, 2009 by centaur

Frost Moon, the first novel I wrote that ever got serious interest from a publisher, is now back in the hands of the editor. Things are looking good, we're on the same page for the first twelve chapters ... though, sadly, their 2009 schedule has filled and there's no way the book is going to come out before the beginning of 2010.

Now it's the race to finish the edits of Blood Rock by the end of October, so I can send it to my beta readers and start work on "Liquid Fire" for National Novel Writing Month...

Wish me luck!
-the Centaur

Real Estate Opportunities for the Far-Seeing Investor

Published October 10, 2009 by centaur

I don't know why this strikes me as so funny, but it does:

Exoplanets, also known as "extrasolar planets", are planets outside our solar system, orbiting distant stars. To keep track of this fast-changing field, the Planetary Society presents this list of exoplanets. Here you will find a complete and up-to-date registry of known exoplanets and what is known about them.

Perhaps it's because when I see "find out more", "explore our catalogue" and "go directly to listings" related to land masses I expect them to have a list of foreclosures or beachfront properties. Nevertheless, the search for extrasolar planets is hot, and is only going to get hotter:

Remember, "a new life awaits you in the Off-World colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!"

-the Centaur

Initial image and text from the linked pages on the Planetary Society web site (not to be confused with the Planetary Organization). Fomalhaut B image courtesy of NASA and Wikipedia. Full disclosure: I have been a member of the Planetary Society since, like, forever.

Three Things You Should Be Reading If You’re Not

Published September 30, 2009 by centaur

Note I said "you should be reading", not "you should read". That's because "you should be reading" means something special to me: I'm talking comics. A great novel or story is like a meteor: it flares too briefly to watch its passing. Even when there are ongoing series worth reading, like Harry Potter or the Inheritance Cycle, each book is still a flare. The primary written medium in which you can watch a work of fiction blaze a trail of excellence as it goes by is comics.

SO. Here are three things you should be reading if you're not:

Batwoman in Detective Comics. For essentially first time in 70 years, Detective Comics is being headlined by someone other than Batman - and by a female lesbian of Jewish descent to boot! But you should be reading the book for more than its stunt value. Greg Rucka's interesting choices are highlighted by JH Williams III's solid art and spectacular layouts: for example, when Batwoman's alter ego, Kate Kane, attends a dance in a tuxedo and is asked to dance by Maggie Sawyer, a lesbian on Gotham's Major Crimes Unit, Williams draws them dancing through a sea of musical notes, and in those notes inserts tiny mini-panels showing details of the scene that let us know they're dancing comfortably close, but not yet too close for comfort. Sometimes the panels are overwhelming and on the currently running "Elegy" arc there are a few threads left loose, but the quality of the work is so high I find myself carried along.

John Byrne's Star Trek: Crew and its sequels. Featuring Number One, Captain Pike's first officer from Star Trek's original pilot the Cage, Star Trek: Crew is what a reboot of Star Trek could have and should have been (and I'm saying that even after I warmed up to The Future Begins). Using only the original series designs, Byrne nonetheless manages to make them exciting by taking them completely seriously. The writing is great, the art is solid and the fan service is enough to stoke a fanboy's wet dreams. John Byrne has a whole set of forums on his work in Star Trek and I encourage you to check it out.

Usagi Yojimbo by Stan Sakai ... it speaks for itself.

So go check them out.
-the Centaur

The Killer Cookbook of Marie Curie

Published September 28, 2009 by centaur

Link roundup - file under creepy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie:
Due to their levels of radioactivity, her papers from the 1890s (and even her cookbook) are considered too dangerous to handle. They are kept in lead-lined boxes; those who wish to consult them must wear protective clothing.

"Verified" at http://www.hypatiamaze.org/m_curie/curie_walk.html.

A Still More Glorious Dawn Awaits

Published September 27, 2009 by centaur

My buddy Gordon tipped me to the song Glorious Dawn by Colorpulse featuring Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc]

After so many years since his amazing television show Cosmos, it strikes me how much I like the way he thinks - how he imagines vistas of space and time:

An still more glorious dawn awaits: not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise - a morning filled with four hundred billion suns: the rising of the Milky Way.

How he synthesizes facts about the world:

But the brain does more than just recollect: it intercompares, it synthesizes, it analyzes, it generates abstractions ... the brain has its own language for testing the structure and consistency of the world.

How he combines prediction and caution:

The sky calls to us; if we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.

And most of all, how beautifully he writes:

The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. Recently, we've waded a little way out ... and the water seems inviting.

When I grow up, I want to be like Carl. So check the video out on Youtube, go to Colorpulse's site for more videos, or to Amazon for a copy of Cosmos.

-The Centaur