Cell phone suspect in cell

Quote: "A man accused of robbing a handicapped woman and taking a picture of himself with her cell phone was arrested Monday after Cincinnati police circulated that cell phone photo to the media.

He obviously didn’t realize the power of technology, Cincinnati police said.

Gary Walker, 24, of Bond Hill, was arrested Monday and charged with robbery, a second degree felony. He was held without bond pending arraignment today in Hamilton County Municipal Court.

The picture Walker allegedly took of himself was retrieved through the phone’s network, which contains data about the phone’s use."

Ah, Ohio!

Lightning only

It's pretty boring to watch lightning flash briefly, so I edited out all the boring bits and made a video of just lightning flashes in an isolated storm hovering over the mountains to the north of our house.


For the geeky:

Take a movie with cheap camera.

Split frames into individual jpegs using mplayer

mplayer -nosound -vo jpeg MVI_8542.AVI

Scroll through images and copy illuminated frames into a separate directory.

Make a backup of all the selected images, because you're a doofus and erased them the first time around:

tar zcvf lightning1.tgz *.jpg
mv lightning1.tgz ..

Rename the frames to a sequential sequence using a bash shell script called ren.sh, and make sure it is executable with chmod +x ren.sh > ren2.sh

#!/bin/bash
for i in 00*.jpg;
do
j=`printf "r%0.5d.jpg\n" $x`
echo mv $i $j
x=$((x+1))
done

This generates commands in the ren2.sh file like:

mv 00000422.jpg r00015.jpg
mv 00000423.jpg r00016.jpg
mv 00000804.jpg r00017.jpg
mv 00000805.jpg r00018.jpg

Now actually redo the naming by sh ren2.sh

Generate movie with mencoder.

mencoder "mf://r00*.jpg" -mf fps=25 -o lightning.avi -ovc lavc
mplayer lightning.avi -loop 0

Mounting a disk formatted in FC6 on FC9

This is annoying enough that I have to geek out for a minute and write these instructions down.

I had Fedora Core 6 installed on a hard drive, which I used happily for a couple of years. I then bought a new hard drive, and installed Fedora Core 9 on it. I connected the original drive on as a slave drive so that I could pull over some custom configuration files over. The old hard disk was assigned /dev/hdc, so I tried:


root# mount -t auto /dev/sdc2 /asdf
mount: unknown filesystem type 'lvm2pv'


Well, crap! What is lvm2pv? I'm sure I formatted it as an ext3 filesystem, which is the default for most Linux distributions..... hmm.

A bit of Google searching turned up the answer, but it wasn't obvious how to do it in my case.


root# fdisk -l


Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00027ac4

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 25 200781 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 26 60801 488183220 8e Linux LVM

Disk /dev/sdb: 300.0 GB, 300069052416 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 36481 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 36481 293033601 83 Linux

Disk /dev/sdc: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00051754

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/sdc2 14 60801 488279610 8e Linux LVM

Disk /dev/dm-0: 497.7 GB, 497779998720 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60518 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/dm-0 doesn't contain a valid partition table

Disk /dev/dm-1: 2080 MB, 2080374784 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 252 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x30307800




...but, but, but, there's the hard disk, recognised right there! Hold it, what's a Linux LVM?


# pvdisplay /dev/sdc2
--- Physical volume ---
PV Name /dev/sdc2
VG Name VolGroup00
PV Size 465.66 GB / not usable 3.56 MB
Allocatable yes
PE Size (KByte) 32768
Total PE 14901
Free PE 1
Allocated PE 14900
PV UUID 88qBvg-DSwX-hCr2-X0uU-O1Cq-rlR5-q7fJr9


Oh man, this is a harder problem than I thought.

It seems that both sda1 (my boot disk) and sdc2 (my old disk) have metadata that claim them to bve VolGroup00. Apparently you have to use a Live CD, reboot into that, and rename using LVM tools the second drive to VolGroup01. This should not be so hard, but "it's the wave of the future", damnit.

Whorls

On my last observing run, we winded and clouded out. However, looking at the infrared water vapour pages at NOAA, I saw a beautiful line of vortices spinning out between two fronts of air.


NOAA keep all the imagery public for 30 days, so use a script to pull the images over and stitch them together with mplayer to produce an animated GIF.


# grab all the data for this night with the whorls in them
for i in q -w 0 23 do wget http://www.goes-arch.noaa.gov/WCWV08145${i}00.GIF;done
for i in q -w 0 23 do wget http://www.goes-arch.noaa.gov/WCWV08145${i}30.GIF;done
for i in *.GIF; do c=`echo $i | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`; mv $i $c; done

for f in *gif ; do convert -quality 100 $f `basename $f gif`jpg; done

mencoder "mf://wcwv*.jpg" -mf fps=10 -o test.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2:vbitrate=800


Big Ideas (using a ZX Spectrum)

This video actually made me tear up a little bit. The nostalgia! The genius! He even used a "WH Smiths" computer cassette tape, which all parents were conned into buying for their Speccy laden kids at Christmas!

Kudos to Tim P. for finding the link.


Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

Arseilles and Airports

Well, that was a bad experience.

I went to a work conference in Marseilles for a week, and I am glad to be back in the country. To be fair, these particular conferences are week long affairs that result in burnout in three or four days, but this one was compounded by the, um, facilities that were laid on. To add insult to injury, we had paid 600 Euros with the punitive exchange rate of about $1.6 to 1 Euro for this conference, and what do we get?

One the first day, we got:

No air conditioning. In Marseilles sweaty summer heat.

Half the number of chairs for the number of people that attended.

Four of the talk rooms were in fact one single space divided by chipboard dividers. Yes, we got the triple whammy of hearing someone else's talk, not being able to see the slides because there was a wall of glass windows with daylight streaming in, and no microphones for fear of drowning out the other conversation.

Standing at the back of the rooms reminded me of a Merchant Ivory film set in the deep south - half the people were fanning themselves with their programs and the men generated minature armpit lakes of sweat in their buttondown shirts.

Oh! And they didn't have any supplies of water - no fountains, no jugs of tap water, nothing at all. I think I made five new friends when I looked under a cloth covered table, stole a bottle of Perrier water (that was scheduled for us in the afternoon, remember) and poured out five glasses of cold water. There was a minor stampede as people raced over and drank thirstily, and then I was told off by a French waiter for drinking unallocated water. They would have made a mint if they had had a stall selling bottles...

So - Charles de Gaulle airport. Essentially, don't go there. At all. If you can help it. For although it is pretty to be in, they have only two toilets in the E side of the building - apparently beautiful people don't need the toilet at all. And also, you cannot move the artfully designed chairs from their appointed spots, as THAT'S WHERE THEY HAVE BEEN BOLTED TO THE FLOOR. Do Not Disturb The Sexy, People.

Technical Support

The creator of the Pringles can gets buried in a Pringles can.

Don't worry, he was dead at the time....

Saturday Night, and Sunday Night

I went observing at the MMTO for four nights last week, just in time for an unusual low system to come down and give SNOW on the mountain in May. In Arizona.

To add annoyance to irritation, we were clear on saturday and sunday night, but of course.... the wind was too high. The chart from the automated weather station is shown above.

The Zamboniscope

It's a bad sign when you can make Roger Angel laugh out loud at your idea.

In a conversation with James Lloyd from Cornell at the Spirit of Lyot conference in 2007, he'd mentioned a novel way of making a space-based telescope using an old idea called a "luneberg lens". The lens is a sphere of matter, with a certain monotonic gradient of refractive index that varies only with radius, i.e. n=n(r). If you place a camera on the surface of the sphere and look back through the center of the bubble, you form an image that is free of spherical aberration and many other low order terms.

Lloyd's idea was with trying with a gaseous diffuser - initially, the gas flies off at the speed of sound determined by the temperature of the gas, but if you constantly replenish it from a compact source, maybe you could attain a steady state and have a large, very long focal length lens floating in space. Thinking further though, there is a simple case which shows that this doesn't work - when we look at distant stars passing behind the atmosphere of nearby planets, very little refraction of the the star is observed. So, even with approximately 1 STP of atmosphere, the focal length of such a system is ludicrously large.

Okay, so that doesn't work.

But.... what about a liquid or a solid?

I vaguely recalled that there is an under ice experiment in Antarctica that uses strings of photomultipliers, melted and subsequently refrozen into place in the antarctic ice many hundred of meters far below. Surely there was some measurement of the transmission coefficient of this ice?

Sure enough, there was! And the numbers in the paper blew me away - the mean free path for visible/blue light is about 200 meters - yes, that's right, the ice is so free of scattering microbubbles that you can see for two football pitch lengths.

Adding to this, it turns out that this is several times clearer than any ice made in a laboratory. The purest ice in the world appears to be about 1000m below the surface of Antarctica.

So, if you can manufacture a sphere of pure ice, which is then doped with a chemical that provides the index of refraction change in accordance with the Luneburg formula, you're good to go.

How big a lens can you build? Well, since we are in the realm of fantasy here, I thought I'd be conservative and go for 500m in diameter. After a quick bit of algebra demonstrated to me that the optimal size for an Ice lens is on the order of the absorption length (the exponent in the absorption quickly clobbers the effective surface area of the lens with increasing diameter), I also came up with a way to do the metrology. Get your sphere to within 1cm of the ideal sphere, and then use a reflective ball bearing in the center to act as a reference mirror, and then have machines that trundle along on the surface of the lens, peering down through a liquefied section of the ice that is melted by a surrounding hot plate.

Hmm, a machine that melts rough ice into a smooth surface. Where have I seen those before? Ah, at the ice hockey games!

Yes, I've invented the Zamboniscope.

No wonder Roger laughed at me.

The London Underground

The London Underground map is one of the most elegant pieces of design in the world, and is a great demonstration of topology too. Geographical distances between stations are sacrificed for clarity in showing the relationship between the different train lines and their stations.

But what does the tube map look like when placed on a geographical map? Simon Clarke in 2000 produced the map below. Simon's original pages seem to have disappeared, so I've taken the original image I saved years ago and put it here.


I'm not alone in admiring the quirks of the London Underground, so Geoff at geofftech.co.uk has produced a wide array of different versions of the well known maps.Owen Massey has a very thorough collection of tube map links that have distracted me no end.

"No astronomy please, we're British!"

In one of the most spectacular own goals in science, politicians have decided that pulling out of Gemini is a sensible cost cutting measure for British science. Of course, cutting all British astronomers out of a northern hemisphere large aperture telescope might have caused some heated debate - so it was done without consultation with any of the astronomers.

The fiasco is being followed in close detail over here.

By terminating our support contract several years early, Britain demonstrated that they weren't to be trusted in large international collaborations - in addition to making trivial cost savings, the STFC had the steel cojones to ask to be kept in Gemini but at a reduced level. Gemini (quite rightly) told Britain to go take a long walk off a short pier.

OnStarrrgh

Back in March 2006, a friend took me auto-cross racing. There's a drag racing strip south of town, and the car park for spectators is turned into a quarter mile set of sharp corners and narrow chicanes with some judiciously placed orange cones. Over the course of six hours, there are four groups of racers. If you race in one group, you have to carry out a marshaling/support job in one of the other groups - in this way, they can have a full set of people watching for run-over cones and violations of racing protocol.

In each group there are about 30 cars, and each car starts off every 30 seconds around the course which takes about 40 seconds to travel around, and when you finish, you can go to the back of the line-up grid for three more runs in your group. In this way, almost 500 timed races are carried out with great efficiency.

Unfortunately, it means about 6 hours waiting for at most 8 races around the track - sitting in my friend's tricked out Subaru, though, it was excellent fun and I could clearly see the draw for those with the passion for it.

In the last group though, one car looked distinctly out of place. Amongst the street race cars and turbos, there was a large tank of a town car. It was coloured pale brown, and would not look out of place in a retirement community with some blue haired old woman peering over the wheel. The car ponderously pulled up to the starting gate, and did its best to screech off around the course. The crowd watched as this slow tank of a car pitched over like a drunken soccer mom around the curves and attempted to burn rubber on the sharper of the corners. Halfway around, however, the car slowed down suddenly, and completed the course at almost half the speed it started with. The crowd murmured amongst themselves - what had happened?

The answer came soon enough - the auto-cross drivers had rented the car from a local agency to take it auto-crossing, and halfway around the track, the OnStar emergency service intercom crackled to life, with a service person enquiring if they had been in an accident, and were they alright?

Apparently their driving was extreme enough to set off the acceleration sensors dotted around the frame of the car.

Memo to self: do not buy rental cars.

"Today is Pirate Day on N.P. Arrrrrr!"

National Public Radio (NPR for short) is the closest equivalent to the BBC in America. Partially funded through donations from the public, the style and tone is very similar to Radio 2 or Radio 4.

The stereotype says that the announcers and programmes are very dry, upper middle class, and very liberal in their approach. But that doesn't stop some brilliant little touches shining through if you listen long enough.

During the evening news, there is usually some background music playing between the news pieces, to help form a continuity to the programming. A couple of nights ago, there was a news piece on how the Sony Playstation 3 was outsold by the Nintendo Wii Gaming console by a factor of over 3 to 1. In the background was an exultant pop song by the British group Queen. It took me a few seconds to work out what tune it was, and I started singing along:

"...there's NO time for LOSERS, 'cause WE are the CHAM-PIONS...."

It took me another second to realise that Wii are, indeed, the champions....

Austin Powers

I was about eleven or twelve years old when the dentist sat back in her chair and looked thoughtfully at me.

"Well, it looks as if your mouth is too small for all your teeth to come through," she began, "so one of two things are going to happen."

I raised an eyebrow and asked, "Um, what?"

"Either the teeth that are in place will block the others from developing, which would be the ideal case, or the teeth will come through in a big disorganised lump all over the place."

I rinsed and spat out the awful tasting mouthwash that the assistant had given me, thinking about what this meant. "So you'll pull out the disorganised teeth then?"

"Yes...." she paused for a second, "... and then we'll need to put your teeth in braces for a little while."

There was another pause, whilst I considered what the future would hold for me amongst my peer group at school. Even the most charitable person would at least label me a 'portly' kid, and what with the current pair of spectacles I was wearing from the "these will be hip in fifteen year's time" end of the public health service's range, this was a flash of lightning from the oncoming storm of teenagedom.

"How long?" I asked, a little bit more quietly than before.

"Weeeeeeelllll.... if everything works out, then it'll be about three months," she smiled a perfect, albeit toothy, smile.

I wasn't that daft. I heard the conditional in both language and tone: "..and if it doesn't work out?"

The smile disappeared. Yes, that was a rumble of thunder - definitely closer now.

"It could take a little bit longer."


Ha. Ha ha. Hah hah haaaah. Seven fabulous words that do not cover the next SEVEN YEARS of my life in night-time head braces, twin tramlines permanently fixed across both rows of teeth, and a slightly dented self confidence coupled with a relieved feeling that things couldn't get much worse.

Needless to say when the braces came off, I had a small bonfire in the back garden. I burnt all the vile equipment in a foul cloud of oily black smoke, whilst I stood watching it with a perfect, albeit toothy, grin.

Nine into 6.5 does not go

So I've started homebrewing beer, and my first attempt (a rather cheeky stout) did very well. Encouraged by the success (well, I liked the taste at least) I decided to go for an English Ale, as a nod to my general Englishness. Off I went, and on New Year's Day, I boiled up the grains and then added the three packets of malt extract.

"Hold on," I thought, "...three packets? That makes it.... 9 pounds of sugar into three boiling gallons of water! More sugar equals more alcohol, so let's read the label here.... oh man, that's 7.9% beer!"

Half in joy and half in horror at the calorific load this represented, I went ahead and poured it into the fermenter. When it had cooled off to the point where living things could happily live in the nutrient broth, in went the yeast culture.

Fast forward to last night.

There's a strange high pitched whistling noise coming from the spare room - looking in, I readily identify the cause. My fermenting beer is trying to climb out of the airlock on top of the barrel. The normally clear water in the airlock is dark brown with sugar water and lots of very very happy yeast cells.

Mental note: buy a bigger fermenting barrel next time I'm in the store.

"Ooooh, a funnel! That'll be great for funneling!"

Saturday Night Live is an American comedy show that many claim had its heyday in the seventies. But just before Christmas, both J. and I watched a sketch that had us laughing out loud. The comediennes carried out a parody of National Public Radio programming to perfection - as their characters were discussing Christmas gifts, one of them asked for:
"...a wooden bowl, some oversized index cards, and a funnel."

Well, we had wooden bowls around the house, so it was a simple matter for me to present J. her first trio of `gifts' for the holidays....

...I think she's actually using the cards at work!