Tag: 10d
Articles
Half Moon
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.
Tag: 5d
Articles
5D Mark II Astrophotography Tests
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.
Tag: ama
Articles
AMA SuperSport and Buel's Performance
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.
Tag: aperture
Articles
Finding Duplicate Images in Aperture
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
Articles
Aperture Downsampling Results
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.
Articles
My Aperture Folder Structure
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.
Articles
The Aperture Database Structure
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.
Articles
Aperture Performance
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.
Tag: art
News
New Mobile
Just hung a new mobile in the living room. It turns out that a drill on a long stick works really well.
Tag: astrophotography
Articles
Building an Automated Build and Release Server for PixInsight
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.
Articles
Sky Limited Exposure Script for PixInsight
This script now has its own page, Sky Limited Exposure
Articles
First Light with the ST-8300
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.
Articles
Scaled Dark Frames in MaxIm DL and PixInsight
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.
Articles
Half Moon
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.
Articles
5D Mark II Astrophotography Tests
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.
Articles
New Scans of Old Astrophotos
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?
Articles
M42 shot with a Canon 10D
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.
Articles
G11 Bearing Upgrade
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.
Articles
Adding A Set Screw
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.
Articles
Astrophotography Equipment
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.
Articles
Combining LRGB Channels
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.
Articles
Noise Reduction In Film Images
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.
News
SDAA BBQ
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.
Tag: bike
News
Bootleg Canyon
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.
News
Freeriding at Ted Williams
Ted Williams makes you want to do things you really shouldn’t be doing.
Tag: buel
Articles
AMA SuperSport and Buel's Performance
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.
Tag: buttonwillow
News
Trackday at Buttonwillow
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.
Tag: c#
Articles
Thrift Protocols, AJAX, and Language Support
Two of the major strengths of Thrift are its support for a wide range of languages as well as its collection of available protocols. However, not every protocol is available for every language and not all protocols perform the same. I’ve spent a little time researching these issues and this is a quick summary of the results.
Language Support Thrift supports a wide range of languages, but the support is not uniform.
Tag: code
Articles
The Transformers Xbox 360 Demo is Live
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.
Tag: coreduo
Articles
Performance Optimization
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
Tag: crash
News
Road: 1, Joel: 0
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.
Tag: darkwatch
Articles
Darkwatch has shipped!
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.
Tag: data
Articles
Balance and Flow Maps
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.
Articles
Sky Limited Exposure Script for PixInsight
This script now has its own page, Sky Limited Exposure
News
Worst Phone Ever
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.
Articles
The Transformers Xbox 360 Demo is Live
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.
Articles
Lap Times with Tableau Public
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
Articles
An Experiment: RescueTime
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.
Articles
Using Dashboards to Reinforce Memory Budgets
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.
Articles
Real-Time Earthquake Map
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
Tag: design
News
New Mobile
Just hung a new mobile in the living room. It turns out that a drill on a long stick works really well.
Tag: ducati
News
Ducati 1098s Bling
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)
Tag: earthquake
Articles
Real-Time Earthquake Map
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
Tag: flash
Articles
Real-Time Earthquake Map
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
Tag: flex
Articles
Real-Time Earthquake Map
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
Tag: fontana
News
Trackday at California Speedway
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.
Tag: g11
Articles
First Light with the ST-8300
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.
Articles
Half Moon
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.
Articles
5D Mark II Astrophotography Tests
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.
Articles
New Scans of Old Astrophotos
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?
Articles
M42 shot with a Canon 10D
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.
Articles
G11 Bearing Upgrade
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.
Articles
Astrophotography Equipment
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.
Tag: g5
Articles
Performance Optimization
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
Tag: gallery2
Articles
New Gallery Integration
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.
Tag: games
Articles
Balance and Flow Maps
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.
Articles
Backwards is Forwards, my GDC lecture
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.
Articles
Darkwatch has shipped!
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.
Tag: gdc
Articles
Backwards is Forwards, my GDC lecture
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.
Tag: graphics
Articles
VisionScape Gallery
I used to do artwork for Vision Scape Imaging. Here are some work and personal projects from back in the day.
Articles
Anime Lightwave Plugin
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.
Articles
Plume Lightwave Plugin
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.
Tag: iphone
News
Worst Phone Ever
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.
Tag: maxim-dl
Articles
Scaled Dark Frames in MaxIm DL and PixInsight
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.
Tag: motogp
News
The 2005 MotoGP Race at Laguna Seca
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.
Tag: motorcycle
Articles
Lap Times with Tableau Public
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
News
Ducati 1098s Bling
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)
Articles
AMA SuperSport and Buel's Performance
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.
News
Road: 1, Joel: 0
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.
News
Racetrack From My Perspective.
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.
News
Trackday at Streets of Willow (Part II)
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.
News
Trackday at Buttonwillow
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.
News
The 2005 MotoGP Race at Laguna Seca
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.
News
Trackday at California Speedway
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.
News
Trackday and AMA race at Fontana
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.
News
Trackday at California Speedway
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.
News
Trackday at Streets of Willow
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.
Tag: mountainbike
News
Bootleg Canyon
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.
News
Freeriding at Ted Williams
Ted Williams makes you want to do things you really shouldn’t be doing.
Tag: movabletype
News
New site!
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.
Tag: music
News
Sunday Drivers Release Party
Come inside for the video.
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Tag: optimization
Articles
Performance Optimization
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
Tag: osx
Articles
Quartz Composer Screen Saver
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.
Tag: performance
Articles
Performance Optimization
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
Tag: photography
Articles
Sky Limited Exposure Script for PixInsight
This script now has its own page, Sky Limited Exposure
Articles
Scaled Dark Frames in MaxIm DL and PixInsight
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.
Articles
Half Moon
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.
Articles
5D Mark II Astrophotography Tests
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.
Articles
New Scans of Old Astrophotos
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?
Articles
M42 shot with a Canon 10D
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.
News
Red Bull Air Race
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.
Articles
New Gallery Integration
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.
Articles
Finding Duplicate Images in Aperture
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
Articles
Aperture Downsampling Results
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.
Articles
My Aperture Folder Structure
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.
Articles
The Aperture Database Structure
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.
Articles
Aperture Performance
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.
News
Surfing photos from Ponto Jetty in Carlsbad.
Just added some new surfing photos. Shooting against the sunset makes the color a bit odd, but not bad overall.
Articles
Better Photo Handling In MovableType
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.
Articles
G11 Bearing Upgrade
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.
Articles
Astrophotography Equipment
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.
Articles
Combining LRGB Channels
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.
Articles
Noise Reduction In Film Images
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.
Tag: pixinsight
Articles
Building an Automated Build and Release Server for PixInsight
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.
Articles
Sky Limited Exposure Script for PixInsight
This script now has its own page, Sky Limited Exposure
Articles
Scaled Dark Frames in MaxIm DL and PixInsight
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.
Tag: programming
Articles
Using Dashboards to Reinforce Memory Budgets
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.
Articles
Backwards is Forwards, my GDC lecture
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.
Articles
Avoiding File I/O In Unit Tests
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.
Tag: quartz
Articles
Quartz Composer Screen Saver
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.
Tag: screensaver
Articles
Quartz Composer Screen Saver
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.
Tag: st8300
Articles
Sky Limited Exposure Script for PixInsight
This script now has its own page, Sky Limited Exposure
Articles
First Light with the ST-8300
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.
Tag: streets-of-willow
News
Trackday at Streets of Willow (Part II)
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.
News
Trackday at Streets of Willow
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.
Tag: surf
News
Surfing photos from Ponto Jetty in Carlsbad.
Just added some new surfing photos. Shooting against the sunset makes the color a bit odd, but not bad overall.
News
When You're Too Sick To Surf, Take Pictures
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.
Tag: tableau
Articles
Balance and Flow Maps
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.
Tag: takahashi
Articles
First Light with the ST-8300
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.
Articles
5D Mark II Astrophotography Tests
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.
Articles
New Scans of Old Astrophotos
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?
Articles
M42 shot with a Canon 10D
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.
Tag: tdd
Articles
Backwards is Forwards, my GDC lecture
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.
Articles
Unit Testing Perl
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!
Articles
Avoiding File I/O In Unit Tests
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.
Tag: thrift
Articles
Thrift Protocols, AJAX, and Language Support
Two of the major strengths of Thrift are its support for a wide range of languages as well as its collection of available protocols. However, not every protocol is available for every language and not all protocols perform the same. I’ve spent a little time researching these issues and this is a quick summary of the results.
Language Support Thrift supports a wide range of languages, but the support is not uniform.
Tag: trackday
Articles
Lap Times with Tableau Public
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
News
Road: 1, Joel: 0
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.
News
Racetrack From My Perspective.
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.
News
Trackday at Streets of Willow (Part II)
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.
News
Trackday at Buttonwillow
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.
News
Trackday at California Speedway
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.
News
Trackday and AMA race at Fontana
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.
News
Trackday at California Speedway
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.
News
Trackday at Streets of Willow
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.
Tag: unit-test
Articles
Backwards is Forwards, my GDC lecture
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.
Articles
Unit Testing Perl
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!
Articles
Avoiding File I/O In Unit Tests
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.
Tag: usgs
Articles
Real-Time Earthquake Map
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
Tag: visualization
Articles
Balance and Flow Maps
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.
News
Worst Phone Ever
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.
Articles
Lap Times with Tableau Public
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
Articles
AMA SuperSport and Buel's Performance
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.
Articles
An Experiment: RescueTime
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.
Articles
Using Dashboards to Reinforce Memory Budgets
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.
Articles
Real-Time Earthquake Map
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
Tag: web
News
New site!
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.