Avian’s Blog

(Shamelessly stolen from xkcd)

Zemanta's department of lies, damn lies and statistics presents: a histogram of lengths of articles on English Wikipedia and lengths of blog posts and news articles on the rest of the internet:

English Wikipedia says this about Slovenian writer Ivan Cankar:

The son of a village tailor, he studied electrical engineering in Vienna, and lived there for some time as a freelance writer.

Is it possible that in four years of Slovenian literature courses in high school nobody cared to mention that? I'm sure I would remember that one interesting fact from lectures that were otherwise filled with (to me at least) uninteresting interpretations of his works.

Slovenian and German Wikipedias seem to disagree though. They say that he studied architecture for a while before switching to literature.

... one speedy delete at a time.

I noticed some weird aliases today that seemed to be polluting Zemanta's semantic database. After making sure these terms actually exist on Wikipedia, Jure and I got on #wikipedia IRC channel and started bugging people. A few minutes later the world became a better place and the following redirects linking to Apple's iPhone were speedy deleted:

• Jesus Phone
• Jesus-Phone
• Uphone
• Ophone
• Eye phone

Now the only questionable alias for iPhone remains the God Machine, which actually has a citation behind it.

Remember Advanced Lawnmower Simulator? It was a simple and boring game for the Sinclair Spectrum where you had to push your lawnmower over a field. It was also an elaborate hoax performed by the editors of the Your Spectrum magazine.

This is what it used to look like in the 80s.

Now it seems that some people did have some fun with it after all. There appears to be a remake built into a £30 50-games-in-one hand-held console called Gamespower 50. They also enhanced the graphics a bit:

However it still appears to be as simple and boring as the original. There's a review you can see at YouTube (Dr. Ashen talks about the Grass Cutter around 4:00 into the video).

Two days ago, Apple users at Zemanta got a shiny box with the new version of Mac OS X inside. Since I was still running OS X 10.3 on my PowerBook I made a backup and upgraded without hesitation.

On the first glance Leopard looked much too shiny for my taste. The second look revealed just how much of a resource hog it is. My 60 GB disk is now 30% occupied just with the operating system itself (upgrade took approximately 11 GB of additional disk space). 768 MB of RAM seems to be just enough to keep the system ticking.

The default system also looks much to shiny for my taste. One of the first things I did is to turn the dock back to it's previous, non-3D non-shiny look (so much for not having to use command line on a Mac). Fortunately I was somehow spared the transparent menu bar (it seems that is much harder to disable). Perhaps it's the old hardware I'm using. On the other hand I still get blurred background behind menus. It's really a minimal visual change, but I'm sure they did that only to show that a Mac can do that just as easily as Vista.

Since I never used 10.4 this is also the first time I've seen Spotlight and Dashboard. The first one is great - starting applications for example. Not so much for finding documents in my experience because I always get a ton of search results from various C and Python source files I have on the disk (the same problem I had with Beagle on Linux). For the dashboard on the other hand I can't see any good use. I currently only have iStat Pro there. I still use sticky notes and calculator as standalone applications.

For some new features I have the feeling that they are there just so that Apple's marketing department could say that they added more than 300 new features. Quick look is one such example - isn't it easier to double click a file and open it than Control-clicking it and selecting Quick look (which takes about as long to load up as Preview anyway)? Or that flip-through-the-album mode that finder has now. Just more shiny things with no useful value.

Spaces is nice. I missed virtual desktops on Macs. It still has bugs though. If I have for example terminal windows on two desktops and switch to Terminal from some other application with Ctrl-Tab the system will take me to some random desktop with a terminal on it. Ctrl-` will also just cycle between windows on the current desktop, not all desktops.

Regarding application compatibility: Leopard's X11 is terribly broken. I installed Tiger's X11 but problems remain. Gimp isn't working for example and OpenOffice sometimes gives me "Command timed out" error and sometimes crashes after I type in a couple of words. Also Vi for OS X works worse on Leopard (for example Ctrl-6 shortcut stopped working). MacVim works perfectly (and has a nicer icon). Other things appear to be working, although Jure says that upgrade broke his MacPorts and MySql installations.

A big surprise was that the ssh client they ship with Leopard now pops-up a graphical window asking for a password / passphrase (probably through ssh-agent). I'm not sure I like this - command line utilities should stay in the command line.

A couple of new features also strongly reminded me of Vista. For example the new Mac OS X is constantly asking me to allow or cancel some actions. I don't know how Apple can make fun of the Microsoft in their commercials about this when they aren't any better. For example, in the first day of using Leopard I had to allow application to run for the first time, application downloaded from the Internet to run, application to access the Internet and application to accept connections from the Internet ...

Both Jure and I also noticed a strange side-effect of the upgrade: we both seem to be making more typing mistakes than before. I'm guessing that Leopard has some new system of filtering keystrokes and that it no longer registers very short key presses or something. Also I have the feeling that the keyboard repeat rate is lower that before. I have no benchmarks to prove it though.

How long is the average title of an article on the web? Jure needed this information yesterday when he was designing some part of Zemanta's web interface.

The nice thing when you have half of the web¹ cleaned-up and stored in your database is that you can get answers to questions like this with a simple SQL query. A gnuplot one-liner later, we came up with this:

It's interesting how the histogram has a sharp spike at around 30 characters in an otherwise smooth bell-like curve.

¹ Ok, maybe half of the web that's not porn.

Yesterday Boštjan and I went to see Dorkbot London. The place (called "01" in Soho) reminded us of Kiberpipa and the event was surprisingly like a couple of POT talks in a row. There were somewhere around 50 or 60 people in the audience, more than there were chairs available.

The event consisted of three talks: first was James Larsson who presented a scary modification of the original Pong video game: he replaced two joystick controllers with a pair of pressure sensitive leather boots on a table. The players controlled their pads by squeezing the boots and a motorized whip hit the unfortunate looser.

The part of his contraption I found the most interesting was how he controlled the whip. The AY 3 8500 chip on which the Pong game runs doesn't have any digital outputs that would indicate which player lost. So in order for his machine to know which player to punish he made a circuit that figured out the last position of the ball from the analogue video signal produced by the chip. This seemed very impressive to me at first (especially since only a couple of simple logic chips seemed to be enough - see picture above). However if you read the description of the chip you see that the chip produces separate video signals for each object - ball, pads, background, etc. This makes this feat much more credible.

The second talk was by Matthew Garrett about the OLPC project. Nothing new here, I only got the impression that maybe they set the goals of the project a bit too optimistically. It's been 2 years since the announcement of the project and according to the presentation they still have a lot of problems with software.

The final talk was by Tim Hunkin, creator of some very interesting arcade machines. Judging by video presentations of his machines he has shown us his creations are incredibly low tech (he said they are controlled by nothing more complicated than some industrial PLCs) and incredibly funny / interesting. For example Mobility Masterclass game uses a camera moving on a robotic arm through a model of a street to produce the video that the player sees on her screen. There's also Rent-a-dog where he recorded the video on a scale replica of the nearby street he constructed out of photographs, glued to cardboard.

His machines are great examples how games can immersive even if the technical background is simple and display isn't pixel-perfect. I would love to go see his arcade (most machines are on display in a pier pavillion over the sea), but as far as I know it's not very easy to get there with public transportation.

There's an interesting article with some pictures about facilities at nVidia headquarters at FiringSquad.

It's surprising what extensive equipment they have even though they do not manufacture chips themselves. Granted they are one of the leading specialized integrated circuit design companies but I didn't know that companies that outsource their chip fabrication do chip testing at the level that is claimed by this article - chemical composition analysis, checking transistor level failures, etc.

They also say they are doing some things that I didn't even know are possible. Like changing on chip connections with gallium ion beam to diagnose a chip failure. Considering that a completely manufactured chip is probably impossible to get undamaged from its package I guess they are only doing this for diagnosing and fixing problems with prototypes they get on a bare die from the fab. However even this is impressive. Does this mean that transistor level simulation tools aren't accurate enough to model some failures on their chips?

I also wonder where they get their failed chips from to analyze. I doubt they do this kind of in-depth checking on every failed card they get in their mail. My guess would be only from trusted sources like other graphic card manufactures that use their chips.

I bought a couple of coasters like this yesterday at Science Museum. They claim that they are made from recycled printed circuit boards.

From a close look they appear to be made out of a double-sided 6-layer PCB. I doubt that it is recycled though. You can see the gold colored metallization on SMD pads that would be covered if the pads ever had any solder on them. It is more likely that the material came from some stock of obsolete boards that were never assembled.

I took a break today from natural language processing and visited London's Science Museum.

I visited Science Museum several years ago and one thing I remember the most from that visit is the big running steam engine you see right beyond the entrance. Well, there are still some steam engines in the first hall (right after you go through mandatory backpack search), but I got the feeling that they're there simply because they're too large to move away. The focus of the museum seems now to be more recent technology.

Right after the first hall you go through the space flight exhibition.

That's a full size replica of the Apollo LEM and the authentic Apollo 10 command module (that was the last lunar orbit mission before the first landing). What amazed me was the size of this thing. From the pictures I never got the impression just how much larger the landing module is compared to a human. The complete Saturn V stack must really have looked incredible.

On to the computing and electronics section. I didn't know that Ferranti was a known name in electronics well before integrated circuits. Judging from Google results you get today I had the feeling that they were mostly known by their innovative ASIC technology that made Sinclair Spectrum's ULA possible.

This is a mechanical analogue computer that was used to research and predict economic changes. It uses water as an analogue for monetary value.

One of the first experiments with artificial intelligence. According to the looks and age of this device it probably uses some analogue electronic circuit to model human reactions.

The replica of Babbage's Difference engine is one of the highlights of Science museum's collection. They are building another replica for display in an American museum.

There were also some art installations on display. This particular one caught everybody's eye because of the big "DO NOT TOUCH" sign. Of course, who can resist touching a shiny unusual object, especially if there are no obvious obstacles? In the end it turns out that it will only give you a slight electric shock and emit a loud "Bzzzt" sound.

Ok, according to some screams maybe it's not so slight.

The English have some weird priorities regarding household safety.

On one side they seem absolutely paranoid about everything dealing with electricity. I've seen this last year in Lancaster as well as now in London. Every wall plug has a dedicated switch. Larger electrical appliances, like our electric oven for example, have an additional big switch on the wall with a red warning light. Everything, from extension cords to simple continental-to-UK plug adapters has its own fuse. At Lancaster University everything that had even a remote connection with electricity, from computers, toasters to extension cords and cables, had to be periodically checked, sealed and signed by an authorized electrician.

On the other side gas stove in our house in London doesn't have safety valves that turn off automatically if the flame goes off to prevent gas building up in the room. I also don't see anywhere a clearly marked gas shut-off valve (the kind you usually see in Slovenia where houses are connected to city gas lines). Quite unbelievable. You definitely don't want to get electrocuted, but a gas explosion can take down the house.

I have this feeling that electricity is still regarded as something new, unknown and dangerous while domestic gas has been used for centuries and is a well known, tamed beast.

Guess what I got today...

I visited the Future of web applications conference today. Zemanta has a little booth there right behind the registration desk. It's funny to think that it's in as exposed place as Adobe booth next door, which is one of the main sponsors of the conference.

After listening to talks about such and such planned social networking sites I have mixed feelings. I myself would just not be comfortable with giving away that much personal information (or even ability to track my location at any moment!) to some business.

It's interesting that people get really angry when some government wants to introduce some technology that would in theory enable tracking of people, but on the other hand they happily volunteer to be tracked by some commercial web site.

One notable project that caught my eye was wakoopa.com. It's a site that tracks what software you use and what software people you know use and then recommends you what software may be useful to you. Again you're sending scary personal information somewhere on the net but seeing how many useful little applications I found in these 3 days working with other guys from Zemanta I see why it could be useful.

For the next three months I'll be working for Zemanta on some advanced natural language processing algorithms. Not exactly my profession, but it's always interesting to try something new.

These are Zemanta's famous secret London headquarters where I'm staying. It's a typical English house with two floors and four little bedrooms like this:

Internet access is unfortunately quite problematic here. Currently we have a Vodafone UMTS modem connection that is shared with all our computers through wireless LAN. Certainly not an ideal solution, but it works (sometimes). On the other hand it's nice to know just how much better Slovenian ISPs are compared to this one. This is the first time I see an ISP transparently replacing JPEG images with lower quality ones, inserting Javascript into HTML pages and even blocking some domains completely.

Yesterday I successfully defended my diploma thesis about designing and building a replica of Galaksija microcomputer. I'm now officially an electrical engineer.

Now I can actually break those "no user serviceable parts inside" and "only to be opened by qualified personnel" stickers on electronic devices without the feeling that I'm doing something against the rules. Where's any fun in that?