Protocol Buffers Open-Sourced

One of the very few drawbacks of working at Google is that I can't really talk about any of the frighteningly cool pieces of technology that make us hum.

Well, now I can mention one more :)

We use these everywhere.

Doubtsourcing

Thanks to Nacho for pointing this out; brand new comic strip awesomeness. And there are only a couple out so far, so you can go back and read all :)

There and Back Again

I was back in Bombay for the holidays which, don't you know, is always a smashing time to visit. Firstly, it's the coolest weather one can expect (clocking in at a marrow-curdling 85F), and secondly, it's the one time of the year when the snappy "Jingle Bells" ditty belted out by the building elevator (to signal that you've neglected to close collapsible grate), is actually appropriate.

Primary purpose of the trip of course was to hang out with the old hive over Christmas-break, but as a side-benefit, I got to celebrate a dear old friend's (Michael's) decision to feed for life out of the same bucket with the lovely Fiona.

While the wedding itself was awesome, the part I enjoyed most was chewing the fat with all the old school friends that I hadn't seen in almost a decade (sometimes more!). What's interesting about a large part of that crowd is that they have practically no internet presence to speak of, and I've had no easy way of getting in touch with them.

Except, apparantly, for Facebook.

While I've heard rumors that Orkut is all the rage in India, everywhere I met up with old cronies, I was presented with the question: "Are you on Facebook?" So there, suddenly, was the "one good reason" I'd been holding out on signing up with Facebook for. And I have to admit, it's pretty scary how many denizens of the old haunts I've been able to find on there.

I still think the site is not all it's cracked up to be, and most of the "applications" are an utter waste of time (send me another stupid "gift" and by Apollo's bronze behind, I'll un-friend you, I swear). But the potential for connection discovery is awesome. Somewhat similar to LinkedIn, but for the non-professional side of your network.

But that brings up the question of social context. I'm part of something like a social network on Flickr/Blogger because the sites are particularly suited towards sharing of ideas within the social context of the photographic community. It'd be hard for Facebook to be the generic social platform for every social context: photography, basket-weaving and physics? That's why I think 2008 will be the year that the industry realizes this and sprouts an eczema of social aggregator companies that claim to unify the experience across properties. This will be an interesting circus to watch...

3d Lenses & Focus Correction

This post has been making rounds recently. It's in French, but if you scroll down you'll see a video by a guy from Adobe (speaking English) showing off a prototype compound (as in, insect compound versus human simple) lens which allows one to do some pretty amazing stuff:

• Selectively change the focal plane
• Move the camera viewpoint by a few degrees
  

All from a single image capture. It's probably several years before the big hardware manufacturers start to take notice, and he says that the compute time to render that image was of the order of a week.

If you could throw a couple of thousand machines at it though...

Oh. That was easy...

I remember trying a couple of years ago to get Flash working on my 64-bit desktop, with not much success. This weekend I thought to myself "Maybe I should give it another go, and throw a couple of hours at it again...". So quick search for [gentoo amd64 32 bit firefox] pulls up this page at the top result which (halfway down) provides the following incantations as advice:

> emerge netscape-flash
> emerge nspluginwrapper

So, I dutifully installed the indicated packages, restarted Firefox and voilà! Instant Flash. Note that the nspluginwrapper spits out this message at the end of the install:

* Auto installing 32bit plugins...
* Any 32bit plugins you currently have installed have now been
* configured to work in a 64bit browser. Any plugins you install in
* the future will first need to be setup with:
*   "nspluginwrapper -i path-to-32bit-plugin"
* before they will function in a 64bit browser
*

Good to know.

Now what do I do with the remaining 118 minutes?

My Prodigal Ogg Player

Last week I begrudgingly had to send back my shiny new ogg-player for a replacement (you can read more about that story here). To add to the agony, I was out sick yesterday, so when the replacement arrived at the office, I had to sit and pine feverishly (I did have a fever) for it for an extra 24 hours before I could get my grubby hands on the device.

Arriving home with it today however, rather than immediately commence with the music upload, I thought I'd experiment with trying to take one of those fancy product-type shots you see in magazines and such. No time like the present, I convinced myself, before fingerprint-smudges mar the visage. Here's the result:

I knew I wanted a cool blue background, and in lieu of a second flash to slap a blue gel onto, I simply used a blue sheet of card-paper as the base and backdrop. After posing the device appropriately, these are the bits I had to consider regarding how to light it:

• The bottom half of the face needs a specular highlight to emphasize the surface indentations where the buttons are.
• This should transition to no specular highlight in the top half so that the graphics on the display can shine through.
• I need some light as a fill on the right and to emphasize the metallic buttons on the side.
• All this, with just one flash.

Here's the ghetto-setup shot, metered for the flash:


And here it is again, metered for ambient (I opened up the windows to get more light in -- hence the splotchy sunlight).


The guts of it is essentially hooking on that piece of cardboard to the top of the flash as a gobo to produce that light-to-dark transition on the paper which is then reflected in the face of the device. That, and making sure that there's enough shiny stuff at the top and at the right to reflect what little available light makes it through back onto the device for a fill.

Another detail: I was working at a fairly tight aperture, so in order to get the display and button lights to register, I had to use a tripod and keep the shutter open for about a half-second.

Stuff I could've done better?

• Move the specular highlight producing paper further away so the grain of the paper doesn't show up in the reflection. This would've made the fill reflection on the left dimmer though, so it's tough without that second flash.
  

My Fancy New Ogg Player

I've ranted and raved for a while about how the iPod is simply the aesthetically pleasing spawn of the devil, whose sole aim is to rob us of our hard-earned dough for substandard features, and incompatible media formats.

Unfortunately, my trusty iRiver iFP-890 died on me about 2 months ago, and I have not been able to find a replacement. Worse, the pointy-haired fools running that company have gone and sold their souls, and now don't support Ogg files, and only provide a proprietary (Windows Media Player) means of getting music on and off their devices.

So after wandering hither and yon and reading countless technical specifications in Korean, my replacement is here at last! The Cowon iAudio 7. Features that matter to me the most:

• Plays Ogg Vorbis. Even at the insanely high bit-rate (256kbps) that I encode my CDs to.
• Mounts as a standard VFAT filesystem under Linux. And because of this, it hooks nicely into Amarok from which I can drag/drop music, podcasts, etc.
• 8GB of flash memory storage. No spinning hard drives, so I get (supposedly --- I haven't tested) 60 hours of continuous playback time.
• Integrated FM radio.
• Records from integrated mic, line-in, and FM.

The only glitch? I had to return mine for a replacement because (and you're not going to believe this), there was a hair trapped under the screen. Yup. I kid you not. I didn't notice it at first, but when trying out the image-viewing features, I noticed it in stark contrast against one of the brighter pictures. Luckily Amazon has a pretty good policy on replacements, although I'm pretty sure they've never heard a reason like mine before. So Jayita has another week or so before she loses another part of my soul to yet another shiny flashy gadget.

Methinks...

...we should rechristen it SueTube. Don't you?

New ER-6i Isolator Earphones

Here's the nub. I love listening to jazz while working. So picture me at my desk at Google, happily hacking away, and listening to Ornette Coleman (for example). Now picture a pair of spectacles surrounded by anguished features goggling at me from across my office. Multiply spectacles and anguished map by three, and you'll have an idea of what would come to pass were I inconsiderate enough to do this without personalizing the aural experience.

Hence, I've been on the lookout for a good pair of headphones for a while now. I considered the Bose noise-canceling variety that are hawked at every airport these days, but I couldn't stand the size. And my earlobes feel sore if I have stuff pressed against them for too long. True, I could use the button-headphones that come with most mp3 players, but you need superglue to keep them in place while running at the gym.

I finally found everything I was looking for in these. Awesome frequency response for the size, and the in-ear design meant that they would be locked in place and provide about 35dB of noise reduction pretty much across the spectrum.

The near (officemates) and dear (ball and c.) now can rest easy in the comforting thought that I won't be inflicting any jazz goodness on them. Poor blighters.

Moodbar

This was a weekend of tinkering. One of the things I discovered was Moodbar --- a cute blend of signal-processing and UI design. The motivation for this toy was that intra-song navigation is still largely guesswork since one has to know in minutes/seconds where one would like to jump to in a song. Now why would you want to jump around a song? Well, if you're like me, you might want to jump to an interesting few bars of a musician's solo, for example. So rather than dealing with this antiquated interface:

this is what I can work with instead:

I'll point you to their paper for all the interesting details, but the gist of it is that for each few-millisecond slice of the song, the intensity of the power spectrum in the low, mid and high ranges is translated into R, G and B values respectively. What this means for those of you (yes you Jayita) who've forgotten signal-processing basics, bright shades mean loud bits, red parts denote bass-dominated parts of the song, while green and blue indicate more stuff in the soprano and higher regions. Here's what a few of my favorites look like:

"2 and 2" has 3 distinct regions corresponding to solos by Miguel Zenon (soprano sax), Joshua Redman (alto sax), and Eric Harland (drums). The horn solos are green, indicating a strong mid-range response, while Eric's solo is a mixture of bass (red) and high-frequency (blue) cymbal-work. It's also interesting to see the pattern of tension buildup and release in each solo; the colors start out dark, and build up to a bright glow towards the end of each solo (a common idiom in jazz).

Dream Theater's "Caught In A Web" has nice green highlights where James LaBrie's voice dominates the midrange. Now I know how to jump around those bits since I think he's typically the weakest element of the band's music (sorry Arjun!).

Surprisingly, jazz tends to display more structure in the moodbars --- probably because of the long solo sections featuring instruments in different tonal ranges. Bill Evan's "All of You" shows nice demarcations with Scott LaFaro's bass solo taking up the dark-red section in the middle followed by a short solo by Paul Motian on drums. Joe Henderson's blistering saxophone solo also shows up in bright green on McCoy Tyner's "Passion Dance".

Pop and rock moodbars are less organized, but song structure such as choruses (such as the bright loud cyan regions where "We Will Rock You" is yelled by the crowd) are easily identifiable too.

I should mention that the moodbar is available as a plugin to Amarok.

New Blog Home

Assuming DNS has updated, you should now notice that this humble blog is at http://blog.randomprocesses.net/. Still hosted on Google servers (so I don't pay extra for bandwidth cost), but by mucking about with DNS and adding a CNAME alias from the hostname "blog" to ghs.google.com, I get it all working quite seamlessly.

Wobbly Windows in Luminocity

This is some of the slickest stuff I've seen in a long, long time. You have to check out the videos.

Tags: linux, eyecandy

F@#$ Windows!!

Destroyed my partition table. I'm wondering if I should just keep it on a separate drive. Of course, the problem is they don't make 5GB drives anymore.

I wish I wasn't such a game-addict. Ah well, backups are a good thing :)

Tags: windows

imaxima

This weekend I was toying around with Maxima, a pretty nice symbolic math package (like Mathematica, but open-source), and I discovered a really slick little feature that Emacs users can latch on to. By adding on this package called IMaxima (where the "I" stands for "image"), one can get the results of symbolic computation automatically rendered in LaTeX, and displayed inline in the Emacs session. It kinda looks like this:
That's just so cool, it makes me want to do more symbolic math :)

Rant!

As much as I love open-source software, sometimes using it can just be really frustrating.

Since yesterday afternoon, I've been playing with GnuPG. This is the first time I've mucked about with encryption and signing so my first stops were the man page, and The Gnu Privacy Handbook which were resources every other page pointed me to. While the handbook provided an excellent overview of the process of creating and managing keys, there are some basic aspects that we're just left to guess at.

Take the output of the gpg --list-keys command. It spits out the following:
pub 1024D/460E03D0 2005-10-18 My Name and id
sub 2048g/9BB40D91 2005-10-18

Why can't I find a simple explanation of this output? Some components are obvious (e.g. 2048 is the key length), but others (like the 'g' after 2048) is cryptic. Nowhere have I been able to find a concise explanation of this. Additionally, the idea of subkeys (the "sub" on the second line) is pretty much ignored in most documentation.

Arrrgh!!

Update: I finally found some decent documentation.

Tags: linux, encryption

Why iPod???

I'm still puzzled by the lemming-like fascination that the world has with the iPod.

Here's why I prefer the iRiver flash-memory series of devices:

1. Integrated FM receiver.
2. Removable AA batteries.
3. Plays OGG Vorbis as well as ASF, MP3 and WMA.
4. Supported recording and direct encoding to MP3 from 3 sources: integrated microphone, FM radio, and line-in jack.
5. Linux drivers available.
   

I'm an extremely satisfied owner of one of the 800-series flash memory players. The rechargeable battery life is well in excess of 40 hours of continuous playing time, and there's no spinning hard drive that will eventually fail and turn your device into nothing more than an aesthetically pleasing doorstop.

The disadvantage of the flash-based device is of course the (presently) limited capacity, but the convenience of the extended battery-life, tiny footprint, and recording capability far outweigh the downside.

Tags: rant, gadgets

Fluxbox

I've finally moved to fluxbox :)

Tags: linux