Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas from the Ancestral Whiting Farm, Hidden Springs, Idaho!

-mpg, kmg, meg, nrg, and tbdg

Another Zoom blog post today

This one is from the ImTech file.

The DJIA declined, plummeted, cratered, ...

More inspired economics writing from the NYT.

14+ years of comp.risks

I've only posted to comp.risks a few times, but my first post was in 1994 which means I've been following that list for at least 14 years. Yow.

This was my favorite post, a quote that has still stuck with me over the years since Y2K.

I do what the voices tell me to

From the latest comp.risks:

On the evening of 10 Nov 2008, a man's car got stuck on the Metro-North
tracks in Bedford Hills, N.Y. in Westchester County because he said his GPS
told him to make an immediate right turn.  Police blamed Jose Silva's
overdependence on GPS.  He was cited for driving on the tracks and not
obeying signs.  Metro-North spokeswoman Marjorie Anders said, "You don't
turn onto train tracks. Even if there are little voices in your head telling
you to do so. If the GPS told you to drive off a cliff, would you drive off
a cliff?"
A bit of common sense -- thank you, Ms. Anders.

Nearest Book Meme

Okay, okay, everyone else is doing it, so I will too:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

I have on my desk two books, pretty much equally close to me: "Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 10" and "Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 9.0c: A Shader Approach", both by Frank Luna.

From the D10 book:

"In addition, we discuss the intrinsic clip function, which enables us to mask out certain parts of an image; this can be used to implement fences and gates, for example."

and from the D9 book:

"The D3DX library provides the following function to compute a plane given three points on the plane: [prototype of D3DXPlaneFromPoints]."

No, I'm not doing any game programming, I'm just trying learn how to do 3D graphics and use my GPU -- using D3DImage, natch. (Turns out D3DImage only supports D9, not D10, so I had to go buy the older edition too.)

Good books, by the way: mathematics is not glossed over, but kept to the required essentials; good mix of theory and practice; reasonable examples; diagrams & pictures not so good in the D9 edition but much improved for D10. Much better than the other books on the subject, which tend to the pulpy "How to be a GAME PROGRAMMER in 21 days!!!" dreck. In fact, Luna could drop the word "game" from the title with very little content change, but I suspect his publisher would object.

What the election really meant

From today's NYT op-ed pages, Gail Collins on the meaning of Tuesday's election:

"Now American children are going to grow up unaware that there’s anything novel in an African-American president or a woman running for the White House."

I like that.

Latest LizardTech blog post

My latest post on the LizardTech blog is about using PInvoke/Interop for our C++ SDK.

JP2 on Ice

I was listening to a BBC technology podcast on the flight down to Atlanta for the OGC TC meeting, and there was a piece about tracking icebergs in the Antarctic. I was half-asleep as they said something about needing to compress data since they have poor bandwidth down there, when suddenly I was wide-awake as they said they were using JPEG 2000 -- and with geospatial extensions!

Subsequent investigation showed they're not using GMLJP2, but still...

Text version of story here.

Nonstandard economic meta-indicators

From a piece by David Leonhardt in the NYT:

Nonetheless, a significant portion of the finance boom also seems to have been unrelated to economic performance and thus unsustainable. Benjamin M. Friedman, author of “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth,” recalled that when he worked at Morgan Stanley in the early 1970s, the firm’s annual reports were filled with photographs of factories and other tangible businesses. More recently, Wall Street’s annual reports tend to highlight not the businesses that firms were advising so much as finance for the sake of finance, showing upward-sloping graphs and photographs of traders.

“I have the sense that in many of these firms,” Mr. Friedman said, “the activity has become further and further divorced from actual economic activity.”

(Emphasis mine.)

"Bluffer's Guide" published

The September issue of GeoWorld magazine contains another piece by me and my favorite coauthor. I've not yet seen the actual copy, so I'm not sure what they finally titled it, but our internal working title was "A Bluffer's Guide to Image Compression".

Will provide link if/when available.

Cafe Retornym

Is "drip coffee" a retronym?

Outsourcing 2.0

CodyB over at Mission Mountain Tech has a project going which uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk to do feature extraction from geospatial imagery, and as a Friend of Cody I've had the good fortune to be able to present a talk on this project a few times now (GeoWeb, CUGOS, etc). [slides now published]

Satish from ESRI termed this "outsourcing for the Web 2.0 generation" and I've been using that as a tagline for the idea of using (some might say exploiting) human capital for projects that any right-thinking engineer would immediately assume should be automated. In Cody's case, finding swimming pools in Dallas.

This morning I stumbled across an article on the Pandora "radio station" which pays (living, breathing, human) musicians to process their music selections -- as opposed to, say, last.fm which uses a social network graph.

I'm now on the hunt for other cutting edge projects and services that have humans in the loop.

WPF and C# notes

I've been learning C# and the .NET framework and WPF in the background lately -- most recently reimplementing "jiffy", my JPEG 2000 dump utility.

Some random notes as I climb the learning curve:

• Petzold's book really disappointed me. These two quotes from an Amazon reviewer sum it up nicely: "I prefer sample applications to be shorter in order to illustrate the point. I found myself wading through code listings that had very little to do with what I thought the lesson was about" and "I felt that the explanations spent more time on how the sample application worked as opposed to going over the WPF technology that was supposed to be covered by the sample". I'm not looking for a dumbed-down version, no, but some screen shots or diagrams, please! Anyway, Sells' book is the one I've been toting around with me.
  
• Liberty's C# book is a good intro (I've rarely gone wrong with an O'Reilly title), but doesn't go deep enough for an ex-compiler wonk. I need Books Two and Three, probably a C# language reference and a Framework reference.
• A small thank you to John Skeet and his utility classes -- I'm using the EndianBinaryReader. (suggestion: namespace his classes a bit more, e.g. from MiscUtil.* to Skeet.MiscUtil.*).
  
• Thanks also go to John Stewien for his multi-select tree control. (That behaviour really should be part of the framework itself.)
  
• ObservableCollection seems to live in WindowsBase.dll. At least I wasn't the only one stuck on that.
• Cold-start app startup times are waayy painful. I've seen a few blog posts on this topic, I try some of the ideas myself at some point.
• Building produces lines in the output pane of the form: "C:\WINDOWS\...\Csc.exe /noconfig /nowarn:1701,1702 /errorreport:prompt ..." Alas, using F4 to cycle through the compilation errors line by line always "hits" this line. Why is that? Can I omit that line somehow as a build/config option? (F4 is able to skip other kinds of lines, like "Compile complete -- 2 errors ...")
• Refactoring is nice. More kinds, please!
• "AddReference..." takes a long time to open the dialog. Why?

GeoWeb 2008

Abbreviated trip report over on the LTI blog.

Gartner's Seven Grand Challenges

In this month's CACM, there's a short piece highlighting the "seven IT grand challenges that, if met, will have a profound economic, scientific, and societal impacts" according to Gartner.

1. manual recharge of wireless devices
   
2. parallel programming
3. non-tactile, natural computing interfaces
4. speech translation
5. reliable long-term digital storage
6. increase programmer productivity by 100-fold [CAMC got this wrong, they said "100%"]
   
7. identify the financial consequences of IT investments

My knee-jerk reactions are:

• 2 and 4 definitely.
• 1 and 3 and 6 maybe.
• 5 is a good problem to solve, yeah, but I'm not sure if it meets what I think of as Grand.
  
• 7 is probably not on the right list. How is this different from, say, understanding where my marketing dollars go?

Rebirth of CACM

CACM is apparently trying to reincarnate itself, and so they sent me a free copy this week; this is probably related to the demise of Queue. CACM is trying to appeal to a "diverse mix of researchers, practitioners, and educators" -- well, okay, so that matches my profile at about (0.20, 1.0, 0.20), given my nonpracticing interest in research and CS higher education.

And I must admit, the articles I skimmed were really pretty good. I was a little dismayed to see Yet Another Interview With Knuth, but it was actually a nice behind-the-scenes approach. And the ISCA review made me more than a bit nostaligc.

But for $100/year membership? Probably not, I've no real need to join ACM, do I? If they had a magazine-only rate, that might be appealing.

GeoExpress 7 SDK now available

Another of my LizardTech blog posts.

Tiles and precincts and progression orders, oh my!

A post by me on the LizardTech blog.

FogBugz - It’s smart and it helps us get things done

One of my occasional posts to the LizardTech blog.

Michael P. Gerlek dons the editor hat

A post about me (blush) on the LizardTech blog.

Happy 2nd Birthday, OSGeo!

A Happy Birthday post on the LizardTech blog.