I’ve combined my love of track days with my love of data analytics. Here’s a summary of data from my lap timer. Dashboard Powered by Tableau

I love the craftsmanship of Ducati motorcycles but it’s impossible to resist upgrading it. I’m a fan of subtle enhancements and details so I went with machined parts that blend with the amazing look and finish of the factory bike. Random Track Picture (I’m in the yellow helmet)

We got in another track day at Streets of Willow a few months ago and I’m finally posting some pictures. I managed to bring my lap time down by 5 seconds and Joel managed to destroy his motorcycle. It was hot, somewhere around 90 degrees.

I’ve recently uploaded some HD footage I have from my last trackday at Streets of Willow Raceway to youtube. This is all taken with a Sony HC1 video camera mounted to my gas tank. Luckily I managed to get some clean laps in before the track got crowded. This track is so bumpy that the camera mount can’t keep the camera pointed straight for more than a few laps! Oh, and I think I improved my laptime by about 5 seconds from the time this video was shot (the second session) and the last afternoon session I did.

Finally, another trackday at Streets. Last time I had this minor issue with cold tires. No way that was happening again. Stephane is busy healing so Joel and I requisitioned all his gear - car, trailer, generator, tire warmers - you name it we requisitioned it. I got one of these newfangled camera mounts for my video camera. Too bad the Suzuki gas cap is built like a graham cracker and broke while I was putting on the damn thing.

Stephane and I did a two day trackday at Buttonwillow. It was between 95 and 100 degrees most of the day, but going for two days was an interesting experience. We drove up Friday night and got to Buttonwillow at around 1am in the morning. The hotel screwed up our reservation but made good by giving us two rooms for the night. The first day was tough. It took a while to get used the heat and I had never been on the track before.

I just got back from the MotoGP race in Monterey! These machines sound nothing like any race bike you’ve ever heard. The first time I saw the MotoGP bikes drop down into the Corkscrew for practice on Saturday they were louder, brighter, more colorful and just plain more impressive than anything I expected. I had a pit pass but didn’t really make much use of it. I watched the Ducati bike do some engine revving and thought I might get a peek at Rossi in person, but that was a silly idea.

Just finished another track day at California Speedway in Fontana with Stephane. This was the fourth track day we’ve done at this track. Here’s my favorite crash sequence - gotta love the legs in the second to last panel - ouch! The Speedway New Tires I ditched my Perelli Diablos for some new Dunlop 208 GPs. They seem to have a more predictable sliding, but slide more often. They also shed rubber like crazy.

Another track day! This is the 3rd trackday I’ve been to at the Speedway in Fontana. The first time was really just to get to know the track. By the end of the day we were doing laptimes that placed us in the intermediate group; so that’s the group we’ve been riding with the last two times. Get your suspension tuned by someoe (I had mine done by RaceTech). It only takes about 20 minutes.

Ted Williams makes you want to do things you really shouldn’t be doing.

Preparation The biggest pain in the ass part of a trackday is getting everyone’s bikes and equipement into and onto the trailer. Last time we went I rented a UHaul trailer and my ramp was about 3 inches wide. This time one of the guys at work loaned us his trailer which made things much easier. Joel (dark blue CBR600) helped load the trailer while I stayed at work until 9pm trying to fix one last bug in the game we’re working on.

First trackday! Many more followed, but this is the one that started it all. I started out on Saturday trying to load my bike onto the trailer using a dirtbike ramp by myself. I ended up turning it on halfway up the ramp and gassing it onto the trailer. It wasn’t a pretty site and plenty of people decided to stop and watch instead of help. I finally made it to Adam’s house and his roommate helped me load his bike.

This script now has its own page, Sky Limited Exposure

I decided to purchase an SBIG ST-8300M to replace the 10D and 5DMkII for astrophotography. Although these camera are amazing performers they just don’t hold up without modifications for deep sky subjects due to their muffled sensitivity to hydrogen-alpha light. I also own an SBIG STV and SBIG ST-5C and the company makes great hardware. The ST-8300 is a bargain when compared with most other dedicated astrophotography cameras and when combined with a filter wheel and good filters you can take extremely high quality pictures for a fraction of what the ultra high-end hardware costs.

I’m evaluating MaxIm DL and PixInsight at the same time because I only want to purchase one image processing package. The first significant obstacle I’ve come across is that PixInsight doesn’t seem to scale dark frames very well. I’ve run the exact same calibration process on the same image and I get completely different results with the two packages. I’m testing using a 600 second raw image, a 300 second master dark frame, and a master bias frame.

Took a quick trip to the Birch Aquarium to kick off my vacation and shot a little video of the coolest stuff. This was all shot with a Cannon 5D MKII in low resolution video mode.

After scanning in some of my old slides I decided to stack a couple of M8. This image is a total of 1.5 hours of exposure from 2001. The Lagoon nebula is a bright nebula in the summer sky. It’s easy to see with the naked eye if the sky is dark enough and its brightness makes it a relatively easy target for astrophotography. However, any tiny technical mistake shows up with exposures this long.

This is a picture of the half moon from early in January 2009. This was taken with a Canon 10D through a Takahashi FS102 refractor at prime focus.

There have been a lot of reports of the 5D’s trouble with bright point lights. I recently updated to the new firmware (version 1.0.7) and took some test shots with the 5D Mark II and a Takahashi FS102 refractor. I also wanted to test out the sensitivity at various ISO values. All these pictures were taken from my driveway on a day with fairly bad seeing and transparency. I got out a ladder and threw a blanket over one of the street lights but it didn’t help much with the sky glow.

I recently had some of my old astrophoto slides scanned with a Noritsu slide scanner so I can put them into permanent storage and finally move into 100% digital photography. I’ve learned a lot about image processing and the tools are much better now than they were when I originally took the photos. There are three major changes that affect the quality: The slide scanner is much better (although the lab gave me JPG files instead of 16bit TIFF files, what the hell?

It’s been at least three years since I’ve done any astrophotograpy but last night I lugged out the equipment and shot a few frames. I only made it out as far as the driveway and the sky isn’t very dark in northern San Diego but it’s amazing what kind of results you can get with a Canon 10D. Traditionally you would use either slide film or a cooled, black and white CCD sensor.

I ended up at the Red Bull Air Race last weekend. The tickets were $25, but we just stood at the convention center for free and watched from high-up. These guys are crazy, it was like MotoGP plane racing.

While playing around with the Aperture database I decided to try to make something useful. The result is an Automator workflow that looks for duplicate master image names. Here’s the result. Disclaimer: it’s not pretty and the output goes so TextEdit instead of some fancy Cocoa application or Aperture album. Please give it a try and let me know if anything goes wrong. Find Aperture Duplicates v0.1

Most of the time we want more resolution in our images so they can be printed on bigger and bigger formats. However, for web publishing it’s important to have quality downsized version of our images. A question about how Aperture does this was raised on the Aperture discussion group about image downsizing. I used a few test images from Oshyan Greene’s website to find out. Here are the results. It’s hard to tell exactly what algorithm Apeture is using, but it’s probably bilinear filtering since it’s very easy to do using the GPU.

Recently went on a trip to Bootleg Canyon and Las Vegas. I’m still recovering from my shoulder surgery, so I spent the day with Joel shuttling these lucky bastards up and down the hill.

I’ve tried a couple Aperture folder hierarchies and this is the one that seems to work the best for me. Initially I imported my entire image collection into one library with subfolders for the date. I quickly realized that I was going to hit the 10,000 image-per-project limit. I’ve now decided on a different organization that has worked really well. The basic idea is major category folders at the top, year folders under that and all projects below that.

Apple’s new Aperture program is awesome. It’s easily the best image cataloging program available, and it’s in version 1. However, the performance leaves quite a bit to be desired. Here are the things I’ve discovered. I used a combination of the fs_usage tool and the Thread Viewer tool to profile Aperture. Both excellent tools are included in the Developer package. I wanted to find out why it always takes 10 seconds for the search filter dialog to open up, causing the application to become unresponsive the entire time.

Just added some new surfing photos. Shooting against the sunset makes the color a bit odd, but not bad overall.

I managed to injure my ankle and get pretty sick right when a large swell showed up in San Diego. The weather was awesome so all I could get was vicarious surfage. The Ocean Beach Pier I’ve never surfed here. It looks like a narrow break with some nasty rocks and pier poles to watch out for. Sunset Cliffs This place was crowded. There were tons of surfers and even more sightseers.

This is a tutorial on replacing the bearings on the Losmandy G11 telescope mount. This may or may not improve the tracking ability. It’s kind of fun to do anyway. The Losmandy G11 mount is a great piece of hardware. However, the included bearings seem to fall short when compared to the rest of the mount. Unfortunately these bearings can play a large role in the tracking accuracy of the mount.

I have always been irritated that most adapters and extension tubes only come with a single set screw. This not only feels insecure when holding expensive eyepieces, but also allows excessive play burring astrophotography. I’m usually chicken about drilling into my equipment, but I finally added a second set screw to all my adapters and thought I would share my experience for anyone else who may want to do the same.

Takahashi FS102 Refractor This Apochromatic telescope provides very sharp images with no color fringed stars. When reduced to F/5.9 you get about 3 degrees of coverage in the sky. I prefer to take pictures of large, wide field objects and this is just about the right focal length for those objects. I also use the extremely well made Takahashi camera angle adjuster to make framing easy. I use a collection of camera bodies and lenses along with the telescope tube for pictures.

Because most CCD cameras made for astronomy are monochromatic it is neccessary to place a series of filters over the camera and take seperate images that each cover a different spectral region. These images can then be combined to create a “true-color” image. The problem with placing filters over the camera is that it reduces the amount of light that strikes the chip. This means you need to take longer exposures.

Update: I now use Noise Ninja for all my noise reduction. It works really well. Using Photoshop Adapted from a paper by mwcook@cris.com The idea behind this method is that the low-light areas of the photograph need to be smoothed in order to remove grain artifacts while the bright stars and nebulosity should remain unchanged. To achieve this in Photoshop you need to construct a mask for the Gausian Blur filter.

I don’t have my own observatory so I use the San Diego Astronomy Association’s dark sky site in Tierra Del Sol most of the time. The following are some pictures of Tierra Del Sol at various levels of activity. These are some pictures taken durring the SDAA yearly barbeque.

PixInsight 1.6.9 introduced a new automated update system - a system that allows developers to easily deploy updates as soon as they are ready. Automated deployment can bebothamazingly convenient for your users and a complete nightmare for the developer. Without proper automation accidents will happen and user experience will suffer. This post details a method for automating the deployment of your software in an effort to minimize defective releases. The example content is a simple PJSR script, but the described method applies to PCL modules.

After almost two years of work the Transformers: War for Cybertron game is finally done and the demo is available for download. I had to rewrite some of the code in our data collection system* because so many people are playing! So far the reception has been really good. The demo currently has a 4.5 / 5 star rating and the forums seem to be filled with positive comments.

I haven’t updated this page in a long time, mainly because I’ve been working on this game night and day. It’s going to be good! Transformers: War for Cybertron Video Game, Exclusive Debut Trailer HD | Game Trailers & Videos | GameTrailers.com

I used the GDC schedule builder to make a lecture wish list. It’s fairly obvious that I won’t be able to see everything I want. This happens a little every year, but this is ridiculous.

My Gallery2 embed plugin for MovableType kind of sucked before. It dove right into the SQL database to grab information which makes it brittle if the schema changes. I’ve updated it to use the GalleryEmbed API to grab image blocks. It works a lot better. I also threw in some support for floating thumbnail boxes to make the pages look a little more interesting. I’ve started uploading some macrophotographs into a new album.

Results of performance optimization study on both PowerPC and CoreDuo machines. 100 runs of the same two functions were done and the best time from each is recorded as changed are made to the code and compiler flags. The “Sum” test sums 10,000 vectors (c = a + b). The “Diffuse” test runs a fluid diffusion pass on a 2D array of vectors. PowerPC (G5 1.8Ghz) Change Sum Diffuse Baseline 28ms 48ms Switch to vFloat type 68ms 116ms 'inline' Vector ctor 69ms 128ms AltiVec Vector functions 27ms 62ms 'inline' AltiVec functions 25ms 58ms 'inline' getNeighborSum() 25ms 38ms Hand tune diffuse with vec_madd n/a 23ms -mtune=G5 24ms 22ms -ffast-math=16 24ms 22ms -falign-loops=16 24ms 22ms

While playing around with the Aperture database I decided to try to make something useful. The result is an Automator workflow that looks for duplicate master image names. Here’s the result. Disclaimer: it’s not pretty and the output goes so TextEdit instead of some fancy Cocoa application or Aperture album. Please give it a try and let me know if anything goes wrong. Find Aperture Duplicates v0.1

Noel Llopis and I did a lecture at the Game Developer Conference this year about test driven development. It’s a process we’re using at High Moon and I use at home for all my coding. Gamasutra wrote an article about it, but they’re the ones throwing the conference so it’s not unexpected. I didn’t realize how much work it takes to put together an hour lecture. In general is was pretty stressful, but worth doing.

I’ve just discovered the Quartz Composer. It’s a graphical tool for rendering things. You can use it to build all sorts of cool stuff. My first project was to build a 3D clock - seriously boring. So I’ve uploaded a screen saver I just finished. I tried to do an optimization pass on it, but it still grinds both my dual G5 and MacBook to a measly 20fps. Regardless, it manages to look good.

I’m working on decoding the Aperture database structure. Just playing around in the database has been very interesting. Update: this was written with Aperture 1.0 in mind. This is probably completely inaccurate now These tables are incomplete. However, they do contain the columns that I used in my test queries. Update: I just found a cool tool called SQLite Database Browser that makes it much easier to look around the db than using the command line sqlite3 tool.

After more than two years of work it’s finally out the door. I worked as a senior programmer on this one. Please buy one.

I’ve finally finished the major work of converting the site to the MovableType blogging system. After years as ‘astronerd.net’ I’ve decided on a new name as well.

While working on a small script at work today it occurred to me that had I been writing it in C++ I would have already had quite a few tests for the logic I had written. In a fit of madness I wrote a small test function in Perl and called it from the start of the script. After working on a couple more tests to verify some subroutines that I wasn’t sure were working properly I realized that I had more test code than script code!

Noel’s article Test-Driven Game Development mentions that unit test suites should run quickly. That usually means as little file I/O as possible. However, sometimes you’re dealing with middleware or legacy code that requires deserialization to construct objects. What do you do? The Problem Let’s say you have a class that can only be constructed with a stream, something like: class Mesh { public: Mesh(InStream& stream); }; You would like to construct a Mesh in a test so you can check some functionality.

After getting sick at the XBox developer conference (and dosing up on plenty of dextromethorphan) I decided to move my website content over to MovableType. I had been using a home-brew system but it was nowhere near as feature rich as the MT system. However, I’m really happy with my old photo gallery system and wanted to be able to show photos from the gallery in my MT entries. It only took me about three hours to adapt my image embedding tags into a MT text formatting plugin.

I used to do artwork for Vision Scape Imaging. Here are some work and personal projects from back in the day.

When I worked at VSI I created a bunch of custom Lightwave plugins. This is one that was never released, but it was pretty cool.

Plume is a volumtric renderer I have been working on for a while on my free time ( which explains the lag ). It is a pixel filter for Lightwave which originated as a stand alone Ray Marching program I wrote. I have ported it to lightwave and what follows are samle renderings. This is just the start of the project and I plan to have some downloadable beta versions soon.

I love the iPhone as everything but a phone. I barely get any reception where I live or where I work. It feels like I get dropped calls all the time. I didn’t know there was any way to get real quantitative information about your experiences, until now. It turns out that when you sync your phone with iTunes it collects all the information about your phone calls and stores them on your computer.

We’ve been keeping this part of the game under wraps for a while. I’ve been focusing my effort on this part of the game for the last year and it’s turning out to be a really fun part of the game. The game’s website has gone live as well: www.transformersgame.com

Can’t wait until next we can talk about multiplayer…

Just hung a new mobile in the living room. It turns out that a drill on a long stick works really well.

A good friend of mine, Scott Carter passed away this month. He loved two things in life: chocolate cake and motor-sports. I’ll always remember his giddiness after running into Shigeru Miyamoto In-N-Out.

Come inside for the video. <object classid=“clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B” codebase=“http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab" width=“480” height=“300”> <object data="/StreamLinks/SundayDriversEndlessSummer.qtl” width=“480” height=“300” type=“video/quicktime”>

I just saw the new movie Superman Returns and I’m not sure but I might be missing the intended point. I kept seeing Superman as a symbol of men’s insecurity. He’s your wife or girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend and you’re pretty sure she’s still in love with him. He’s better looking, stronger and he won’t stay away. Lex Luthor, on the other hand, is just like you and I. He’s balding, has crap friends and just wants a bit of land to call his own without Superman coming around to mess it all up.

I drew a pig to test my personality. Click on it to check out the results.

This is a faithful retelling Canadian odyssey. On Sunday we left LA at around 5:30 p.m. and headed for San Francisco. Brady’s friend John flew out and we were going to stay with him at his friends' house for a couple nights. San Francisco Lori and Sheryl lived in a converted garage right in the middle of SF. The front door was literally a hold cut in a garage door with a normal door nailed in.

Heatmaps are an excellent tool for visualizing data with a two dimensional spatial component. They are frequently used to map out player deaths in shooter games. The most common heatmaps use the location of the victim and aggregate the number of kills as the visualized measure. However, this simple metric doesn’t tell the whole story. With a few simple tweaks we can build balance and flow maps, which can be useful tools for understanding the way players use the map.

Studies have shown that a good review score can propel a game’s reputation. However, with such a large amount of data available, the two review aggregation sites simply present a single number for each game. With a wealth of review score data available, a few web scraping scripts, and a couple data analysis tools, some very interesting patterns emerge. The Data The following charts are backed by 46,000 review scores for 800 games.

In Part I we looked at review scores in isolation. When we combine review score data with sales data some interesting patterns emerge. This section includes sales data from around 7,000 Xbox360 and Playstation2 games as well as the review score data from Part I Sales and Scores An interesting property of the sales data is the lack of sales variation below a score of 70. Games that score above this threshold show a clear trend of increasing sales.

Scraping Data All of the data used to build these visualizations was extracted from various web sites using a few Python scripts. The Beautiful Soup library was used to parse and traverse the HTML. Google Chrome’s developer tools are an excellent way to discover the structure of a web site so it can be traversed quickly with scripts. Scraping data from web pages is easy as long as you completely ignore the impulse to follow good coding practices.

I’ve combined my love of track days with my love of data analytics. Here’s a summary of data from my lap timer. Dashboard Powered by Tableau

The AMA is responsible for creating rules for the motorcycle racing series that ensure fair competition between motorcycles of different manufacturers and construction. The AMA Sport Bike series mixes motorcycles with 2, 3 and 4 cylinders from many manufacturers. Lately, the underdogs (Buel) have been doing really well and people are starting to suspect that the rules are slanted in their favor. The AMA recently dyno tested all the bikes and released the minimum and maximum weight-to-power ratios.

RescueTime is a great tool for monitoring what you do. It allows you to big-brother yourself. You install a background service that monitors which applications you’re using and it aggregates and sorts the data in a way that helps you understand what you’re spening your time doing. This is a live chart of how I’m currently spending my month. I think most of the ‘untagged’ time is consumed by random web sites I’m visiting.

Console video games run on memory restricted environments and even with half a gigabyte of space it runs out quickly. It’s easy to know when you’re out of memory, what we want to know is exactly what approach to take to fix the problem. With all the information available the challenge is presenting the information in a way that gives clear indication of problems while providing enough low-level detail to zero in on individual assets.

Update: the USGS has changed their service and this app no longer works. Plus, I lost the source code after a hard drive crash. Remember - back up your data! Flash, and Flex in particular, has a solid set of tools available ata visualization. When I found that the USGS provided realtime earthquake data as csv files I couldn’t resist building a viewer. It’s based on a traffic map by Nathan at Flowing Data