arcs and tangents

Shopping Helper Updated

2010-01-31T11:37:00.001-08:00

My Firefox add-on, Shopping Helper, has been updated and improved. It's a great tool for helping people shop on-line. You can keep shopping lists and favorite stores and it automatically keeps track of the prices, allowing you to view products in a comparison grid, and alerting you when there is a significant price change. You can get it here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7942

And visit the home page for overview webcasts, screenshots and help:

http://labs.pronto.com/public/shopping-helper/index.html

Google Wave Thoughts

2009-05-31T18:54:00.000-07:00

I've read a bunch of hype about the Google Wave presentation and then actually watched the hour+ long presentation that the Google Wave team gave. Here's some thoughts on the matter.

Is this truly the revolutionary architecture they are hyping? It could be, but only if people buy into it and it does not wind up being too complicated to understand. Thus, its success depends on how well it is hyped, how well they can manage the early-adopted/tech crowd and if they can have enough stuff built on top of it for the average person to get some uptake. Given that, the early developer preview demo and release makes a lot of sense.

The basic fact is that they have the right idea: email is archaic, IM is archaic, and there are all these emerging new interaction patterns: Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc. Can't we put all these things under one roof? My answer is: maybe. If you design something too general, it fails for being too complex/abstract to comprehend. I wonder if the generality of Google Wave may suffer from trying to be too general.

In some sense, you could give a demo of the TCP/IP stack today and woo the crowd with all the things you could do with it: email, IM, blogs, facebook, twitter, etc. Wow, this thing is amazing!

So is it something the user cares about or something only developers care about? I think it is too complex/abstract for the end-user to consider or care about. But maybe we sit in a time where something as general as TCP/IP is needed, only one level up, and maybe this fits the bill. There's no question that building apps today is a royal pain in the butt, especially handling concurrent events and all that makes up implementing the more collaborative things. If Google Wave winds up being the API that makes all this easier for the developer, maybe it will get uptake and be the "next big thing".

Technorati Confirmation

2008-07-16T21:01:00.000-07:00

Technorati Profile

Followup 2: Shopping Helper

2008-07-16T20:08:00.000-07:00

There's now an on-line video demonstration/tutorial for the Shopping Helper Firefox add-on:

Watch on YouTube

Followup: Shopping Helper

2008-07-02T21:56:00.000-07:00

The Firefox Add-on to help you shop on-line that I mentioned in a previous blog entry has now started to go through the process of being hosted on Mozilla's addons site:

Shopping Helper Page on Mozilla's Add-ons Site

It is still in their sandbox as an experimental add-on at the time of this writing, but if you don't want to have to log in to download it, you can still get it here:

Shopping Helper Page on Pronto.com Labs Site

Shopping Helper Firefox Add-on

2008-05-30T18:01:00.000-07:00

If you shop a lot on-line, there's a neat Firefox add-on that is coming out that offers a lot of useful features. It's Pronto's Shopping Helper, which allows you to create shopping lists, get price alerts, and view current prices. It has a ton of other minor features, but is overall a useful tool for organizing and tracking products you hope or plan to buy some day. You can see the preview here, which will also eventually point you to an actual download (should be within the next few weeks).

Pronto's Shopping Helper Firefox Add-on

Absurb Baseball Ticket Prices

2008-04-03T17:20:00.000-07:00

I guess it has been a long time since I've paid attention, but a recent exploration into buying a couple tickets to an LA Dodgers home game was quite the experience.

Too Many Choices and Stupid Names

Back "in the day", you had your box seats, your mezzanine, your upper deck and your outfield bleachers: 4 choices with meaningful names. At Dodger stadium there are 22 different names for areas of the ballpark, none of which really tell you anything about where they are located. Where would you expect "Infield Reserve" to be? Well it is the upper deck area, though it is closer to the infield that the other upper deck areas. "Lower Reserve"? It's actually upper deck, but not as upper deck as some other seats.

Even when they have a meaningful part in their name, they add these cutesy variants that again give you no idea what the difference is. There's "Premium", "VIP" and "MVP", all of which tell you nothing about where they might be located relative to one another.

The Color Eye Chart Test

More brilliant graphic design here in the seating chart. Those 22 sections each have a unique color that you have to match up against the key that labels the sections. Each primary color has 4 to 5 different shades, some of them impossible to distinguish when trying to cross-reference with the diagram. Edward Tufte would be proud.

Hunting around to write this blog entry, I did find a better location to view they seating chart. Seems I got to a Ticketmaster site when going from their schedule to buy tickets. Guess I should have known that was not the right way to do things. However, this better chart page suffers form the typical MLB pages that seem to assume you have 1 Gigbit bandwith to their servers.

The Punch Line

I was debating whether to get the cheapest seats, just to get into the park, or maybe splurge $30 a piece to get an upgrade. With the price ranges at Dodger stadium, $30 does not get you much, and in fact, I think they get you worse seats than the bleachers.

In their ticket buying options (again, this is really a Ticketmaster site), they have a 'find best available' choice. So I am curious as to what might be the best available so I could make a decision on whether they were worth it or not. What they suggest to me, are the "Dugout Club" seats at $500 a piece....$500 a piece....you've got to be kidding me.

They are not even the best seats for watching the game, though I suspect anyone who thinks a $1,000 for two baseball tickets probably is not really caring about getting the best "baseball watching" seats. They just want to be exclusive, and have 40,000 other people around them to observe their exclusiveness.

Professional baseball is doing everything they can to drive away baseball fans. The prices, the catering to non-baseball fans, the greed, everything but the game is the focus. MLB is an evil organization and it is painful to watch what they have done to a great sport.

The Semantic Web

2008-03-26T21:09:00.000-07:00

What is the "Semantic Web"? It's nothing.

No one knows how to define it other than just listing about every current web-related technology being developed. It's at best a catch-all for the current technology, and at worst a meaningless term that a bunch of charlatans use to convince someone to give them money, or to convince others they are "technically hip".

Some day in the future, something being developed today will be useful, then someone with great hind-sight will say "Yes, that is what I meant by the Semantic Web!"

Keep in mind, you cannot encode semantics in any computer representation. Anyone whose says you can is kidding you and/or themselves. It's all just syntax, since semantics are something no one really understands other than some concept people seem to agree on.

If I say "car", you know what I mean and I know what I mean. Since we likely agree, or can find no evidence that we are not referring to the same concept, the three characters can be said to have semantic meaning, but they do not really. It is you and I that give those characters semantics, not the computer. Most work on semantics and ontologies just create more elaborate syntax, which generally just obfuscates things so people think its semantics, and even probably convince themselves it is.

Superbowl Upset?

2008-02-04T12:05:00.000-08:00

The Giants and Patriots played each other 5 weeks before they met in the superbowl. The game was very competetive, with the Pats winning by just 3 points. Given these facts, can someone explain to me:

why the entire sports journalism world is calling this an upset; and even more ridiculously
why there is even debate on where this sits as one of the greatest upsets of all time?

I guess the answer is that logic, and prior football knowledge is secondary to outcomes that simply disagree with the media-induced frenzy that is the superbowl hype-machine.

Shameless Journalism

2008-01-13T08:02:00.000-08:00

This morning's top "news" story on CNN:

Chevrolet Malibu wins Car of the Year

General Motors' Chevrolet Malibu mid-size sedan, radically redesigned for the 2008 model year, won the North American Car of the Year Award today at the first media preview day for the Detroit Auto Show.

This is not news, but free advertising for General Motors. Just more signs that corporations, one way or another, are deeply connected to the media and are being used to manipulated the public. And if you think that being the "car of the year" is generally interesting news to people, I might agree if this was really the story. But if you look carefully, it is qualified as the "North American Car of the Year", which implies it really is not the car of the year since they've excluded all the imports that typically win the real car of the year awards. Maybe CNN is just trying to show their patriotic side?

Goose Gossage and Hall of Fame

2008-01-08T19:59:00.000-08:00

From cbssportsline.com this evening:

"It's insane it took nine years on the ballot for Goose Gossage to get elected to Cooperstown, but thankfully voters come to their senses."

Kind of funny to see a sportswriter say that what sportswriters do is "insane" (it is sportswriters that determine who gets in the hall of fame after all). Anyone paying attention knowns that (almost all) sportswriters are definitely not journalists, and are more typically not any smarter or thoughtful than a random person off the street. So when a sports media outlet publishes a headline that effectively admits that sportswriters, as a group, are behaving with no rhyme or reason (or possibly with deliberate capriciousness), that's something I find refreshing.

Experts miss target on storm numbers

2007-11-30T20:32:00.001-08:00

Every year, about June-time, you here the media outlets regurgitating some press release put out by some government/academic body (usually the NOAA) about the upcoming hurricane season. It's typically got some eye-grabbing headlines predicting something close to Armageddon. Once you've lived past the age of about 25, and if you've been paying attention, the question starts to creep into your mind as to how accurate have these people been over the years, especially since you have yet to see Armageddon despite 25+ years of expecting it.

So each year, you see the same story in the media (which is what passes for news) and start to think that responsible journalism would require publishing the record of the people making the predictions. Yet all that is ever included in these articles are the fear-mongering predictions, nothing about the past accuracy of these agencies making the predictions, which seems like the most logical thing that should be included.

So it was quite the surprise for me to see the CNN article that appeared today that seemed to actually revisit the predictions, especially because they were stating just how wrong they had been: not even in the ballpark. I've been paying attention to this for many years, and this is the first instance where I have seen any main-stream media outlet make any attempt to revisit the predictions, so it was a pleasant surprise.

I suspect that, come June, CNN will still run the same annual article on the NOAA press-release. I'd like to hope they mention just how wildly wrong they were in 2007 when they report their 2008 predictions, but my experience tells me not to get my hopes up.

CNN Atrocities

2007-11-29T20:35:00.000-08:00

I have, and I will continue to rant about CNN's treatment of news and/or journalism. I read the CNN home page mainly to ensure I do not miss 'mainstream media', since I tend to be forced to interact with people whose entire view of the world is derived from such sources.

Still, even in this context, the ineptitude of this "news source" drives me to a semi-uncontrollable need to rant about its coverage. Therefore, if you think I should stop reading CNN's headlines if I don't like them, you should understand that I really have no choice: society is forcing me to stay "informed".

My favorite "CNN Atrocity":

One morning, maybe 9 or 10am EST a few month ago, in the top stories list of headlines was something very close to the effect:

Ford recalls 500,000 vehicles

Interesting. A bit of a black eye for Ford I thought. An hour later, in the same position in their "top headlines", I see the two part headline to the effect:

Ford offers big rebates | Recall

Are you kidding me? Ford offering rebates is a "top story"? That's a commercial, not a news story. Yet CNN decided that this is more important that 1/2 millions vehicles being recalled, or in reality, used this as a sorry excuse to bury the recall story.

Is there anyone out there that doesn't think that someone at Ford called someone at CNN to get this headlines changed? If so, please refrain from contacting me: you clearly need more experience in the world before having an opinion on such matters.

I even suspect that someone at CNN thought they were maintaining some form of journalistic integrity by still including the link to the recall story in the second part of that line. All the while, someone at Ford is smiling with how clever they were in turning a negative news article into a free advertisement platform.

Your computer may be part of criminal network

2007-11-29T19:10:00.000-08:00

The title of this post is the same as the CNN title of what appears to be the 6th most important thing happening in the world (or maybe just the US) at 10pm EST tonight. Essentially, they took a non-news story and cleverly crafted it to the most inflammatory, eye-catching headline they could.

The fact that millions of personal computers serve as a bots in these spam bot networks is a known fact and this situation has existed for many, many years. This is not news to anyone that knows of such things, and is very, very late news for anyone that does not. Still, because someone, somewhere, issued a press release that was news to the generally technically-naive CNN reporter(s)/editor(s), this was clearly something they needed to report as "breaking news". Then someone at CNN decides to do it in a way that would have the highest emotional impact among people that were just as naive about such things (since all great journalism tries to cater to the lowest common denominator). If I were the unscrupulous editor-in-charge, I would have boiled down the headline to say:

"Your computer is a criminal!"

Maybe this might be a little too obvious that we were depending on the shock factor to lure readers in, so maybe the editors made the right choice in their toned-down headline. Then again, just removing the exclamation point might be enough to turn that 'National Enquirer' headline, into being CNN-worthy.

Just another example of how rare good journalism is in this day and age. It seems two types of people dominate in today's media: the naive lower-level journalists and the corrupt editors that are in someone's pocket. That's a very, very bad combination.

The Making of Sparky II - Preparing the Brain

2007-11-22T11:04:00.000-08:00

See Part I if you want to read the preceding article. Lots of progress made recently, and the picture shows the current look of Sparky.

Though the Roomba has an on-board processor, to use as the main 'brain' for a roomba-based autonomous robot requires a lot of contortions. The iRobot folks provide a nice API, and underlying control algorithms that run on this processor, but do not provide any direct way to download arbitrary software to it. The best way to use the roomba is to allow its processor to do the low-level motor/sensor control, and add a 'brain' to it.

Even a small form-factor computer is too much weight for the roomba, and often too much of a power hog. The best thing to use is a device made for low-power, small form-factor, embedded situations. It turns out that a typical Linksys wireless AP/router is an ideal device to use for this. It can be made to run GNU/Linux, has built in wired and wireless ethernet, a built in switch, and through the SDK of the OpenWRT project, a semi-easy way to develop custom code.

The Linksys WRTSL54GS model also has a USB hub, and extra flash memory, which makes it a little more expensive than the generic WRT54G routers, but worth it for this application.

Installing GNU/Linux on the Linksys routers is pretty simple and safe IF you do not get too adventurous. You download the image from OpenWRT, go to ther Linksys admin page on the routers web pages, choose to install new firmware, and that's it.

The pitfalls to avoid that resulted in two 'bricked' routers for me:

even when the software reports that the firmware is upgraded and ready, do not believe it: don't reboot the thing or otherwise look the wrong way at it if it still has flashing lights;
do not use the 2.6 Linux kernel;
avoid building your own kernel/image unless you absolutely need it.

I am not sure exactly which ones of these was the cause of my failures, but by avoiding these, you can save yourself some money. Keep in mind, every one of these I did successfully more than one time before I hosed up the router, so these are things that can safely be done, but something in this space of things also caused the problems.

There are a number of ways to salvage a 'bricked' router. I tried them all, multiple times, with no success (including some very tricky soldering for the last-resort JTAG method).

My final call was to use the newer Kamikaze openwrt build, but with the 2.4 kernel. That runs fine and has the right module for operation of the webcam that will serve as the robot's eye(s).
Instead of trying to make a custom image, I just use the SDK to cross-compile any software that is not already available that I need.

Barry Bonds Indictment

2007-11-16T15:56:00.000-08:00

Bary Bonds is probably not the sort of person I would like if I knew him. He might even be a big jerk, though probably not as big a one as the media makes him out to be. However, the whole case against him reeks of someone powerful with friends and influence deliberately singling him out for for their own personal reasons. Either they're ticked off because they personally do not like him, or else they want to make an example of him to help boost their position, or cover up just how bad a job they do in their position. It's a politically-based witch hunt. Who might be abusing their power this way? Bud Selig? He may or may not be he main protagonist in this, but he's certainly fully on-board with this sordid game. The case against Bonds will serve as a nice diversion for how asleep at the wheel MLB has been, or rather, how much they've be culpable in the whole steroid mess.

The Making of Sparky I - Preparing the Roomba

2007-11-01T20:41:00.000-07:00

First in a series of posts about how Milestone #1 of creating the autonomous robot "Sparky ". This post deals with the basics of using the Roomba as the platform for moving around.

Modern Roomba vacuums come already capable of being controlled through a serial interface, using a well documented API of commands via a 7-pin DIN connector on their sides hidden by a covering piece of plastic though. Prior to this modern era, there was a "near" modern era that had the 7-pin connectors and all other the other hardware setup to make it controllable. However, its software did not support this. I happened to have one of these.

Luckily though, the iRobot folks provided a software updater for it called the OSMO Hacker. It costs $30, and there are two versions which adds a little thrill to purchasing it. One needs to decipher serial numbers to determine which is needed. Fortunately, I got it right.

Once delivered, it was relatively (though not completely) obvious how to use it: plug it in, turn on the roomba, watch light blick, wait for light to stop blinking, restart.

Now, since it is all flashing lights and invisible software, who really knows what was happening or if it worked. First test is to make sure the Roomba itself still operated, which was a relief when I found out that I did not just create a $300 paperweight. Next up is to hook up a computer's serial interface to the Roomba to see if it accepts and responds to API commands. Here's where the fun begins.

Being a hardware novice, the book Hacking Roomba was a very good crutch and how-to manual on the basics. In the book, the author shows a number of ways to do this, which basically comes down to a build vs. buy decision. I opted for 'buy' at this point, wanting to worry more about the software, though many things would conspire to have to build anyway. Given I was a soldering klutz, Iwanted to ensure my software upgrade worked without having to worry about failure being caused by my soldering. I'm much, much better at soldering now btw.

Simplest solution was to buy the 'RooStick', which I got from Sparkfun Electronics.
$30 seemed a little expensive, but figured the time it saved me would be worth it. When it actually arrived, the size of it (puny) certainly made me wonder about its price tag again. This thingy's job is to convert a computer USB port into a serial port specifically for talking to a roomba. This is no small trick because of two important things:

the Roomba has this funky, non-standard 7-pin DIN connector; and
the Roomba's serial port operates at +5 Volts (the RS232 spec is a +12V serial port).

And if $30 seemed a little steep for this, wait because we are not done yet: one needs a non-standard cable to hook up the RooStick to the Roomba (actually an 8-pin DIN cable, which happens to fit into the 7-ping female connectors).

With (pricey) hardware in hand, onto hooking it up and seeing if we can control the Roomba. This was successful, both from my Mac Powerbook (OS X 10.3) and my GNU/Linux (Ubuntu 7.04) laptops. Below are details on getting this to work on each platform. While the excitement of being able to control the roomba for the first time was great, it was also severely constraint by a 6 ft. cable. Still this was a major mini-milestone, proving that a Roomba can indeed be used as my robot platform.

RooStick on GNU/Linux (Ubuntu 7.04)

Plugged in RooStick to USB port, and dmesg reads:

[86202.740000] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial

[86202.744000] drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for generic

[86202.744000] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial_generic

[86202.744000] drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial Driver core

[86202.784000] drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for cp2101

[86202.788000] cp2101 1-2:1.0: cp2101 converter detected

So it was automatically detected, and driver installed. Nice.

In an xterm, set device setting with:

stty -F /dev/ttyUSB0 57600 raw -parenb -parodd cs8 -hupcl -cstopb clocal

And test commands to drive (though need to pick it up to stop it due to cable length):

printf "\x80" > /dev/ttyUSB0
printf "\x82" > /dev/ttyUSB0
printf "\x89\x00\xc8\x80\x00" > /dev/ttyUSB0

Worked, but I had to send the last line a few times before it seemed to take. Maybe the sequence got messed up and it took a while to coordinate what the first byte was.

Roostick on Mac OSX 10.3

First needed to download and install the USB driver:

https://www.mysilabs.com/public/documents/software_doc/drivers/Microcontrollers/Interface/en/Mac_OSX_VCP_Driver.zip

Needed to restart the machine. I hate that.

Device now shows up as:

/dev/cu.SLAB_USBtoUART
/dev/tty.SLAB_USBtoUART

Next, needed to get and unzip RoombaComm java library from Hacking Roomba site.

After downloading and unzipping, I needed to initialize something with respect to the rxtxlib that java code calls out to.

% ./rxtxlib/macosx_setup.command

Also needed to restart after this. Yuck again.

Power on manually roomba, then run this:

% sh runit.sh roombacomm.SimpleTest /dev/cu.SLAB_USBtoUART

And it worked.

Class Struggles in America

2007-10-31T20:16:00.000-07:00

CNN "top story" this evening:

Title: Diplomats angry at forced Iraq postings
Summary: Several hundred U.S. diplomats expressed resentment Wednesday over a new State Department policy that could force them to serve in Iraq or risk losing their jobs. One veteran staffer told bosses: "[It] is a potential death sentence and you know it. Who will raise our children if we are dead or wounded?"

Of course, as usual, CNN misses the most important point of this story: the culture of diplomats is such that most of them clearly believe that they are better than the average enlisted person in the armed services.

Most public servants do lip service to the 'public servant' part, but are clearly focused on their personal situation (e.g., your average elected official), and use the 'good of all' reasoning only when it suits them. What the average enlisted person accepts as a part of their responsibility, the average diplomat views as a hardship of the utmost extreme, where they will fight to make sure they serve their own interests instead of the public's.

The Roombinator - Milestone #1

2007-10-30T21:40:00.000-07:00

Major milestone this past weekend on developing an attack robot from a Roomba. After months of preparation, false starts and failures, all the hardware (except the industrial-strength "laser") was functioning as a single, untethered, stand-alone unit.

It's pretty ugly and unbalanced: it is using cardboard boxes and velcro to hold it all together and I just stuck things in the most convenient places. Turns out that the auxiliary battery is all the way at back, which might be good if I can get it to do some wheelies, but otherwise is not good.

See the ugliness for yourself in the photos. His name is "Sparky".

First picture is from the front, second from the back, and third is the first picture taken from Sparky's webcam after attaining his initial freedom.

Sparky currently consists of the iRobot's Roomba (Discover SE) itself for locomotion, a Creative Instant (VF-0400) webcam for vision (no link here because the Creative web site sucks), a Lynxmotion pan-tilt head and SSC-32 servo controller for moving the webcam around, and a Linksys WRTSL54GS wireless router for the brains (which runs Linux via openwrt). There's also a special Lantronix WiPort wireless device that drives the Roomba and pan-tilt servos (via serial interfaces), while the linksys router operates the webcam and sends pictures back over its own wireless connection. The linksys router is powered by 8-AA batteries, while everything else is powered from the Roomba battery itself.

This was all only remotely controlled through a simple web interface (php), but getting all the hardware build, working and connected was a challenge. Next up is to start refining the remote control software and writing the software to make it fully autonomous.

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

2007-10-30T21:29:00.000-07:00

With another 'bad back' couple days in horizontal mode, I took the time to read the lengthy ars technica Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Review. Was a good balance of reviewing from front-end eye-candy to back-end OS/API/internals perspective. I went in not thinking there was any chance I would be interested, but the 'time machine' backup feature and (finally) virtual desktop support did start to make me interested.