Camera speed on Android

Check out the photograph above. This was taken while traveling in a car. Of particular focus are the lines on the road - they are actually straight, but show up as curved in the photograph.

When cameras were first added to cell phones, they were small, slow and blurry. The sensors were tiny, the lenses were basically plastic and the processors were slow. While the megapixel count has gone up, the optics have gotten better, the biggest bottleneck still remains the processing speed.

At least the Android platform has taken an interesting approach to overcoming this processing speed bottleneck. It seems the sensor is read in sequence, line by line, starting from the top. The advantage with the approach is obvious - the camera can process one line at a time, keeping the picture sharp and well processed.

The side effect is the effect showing up in the picture above. The straight lines on the road, show up as curved because the car moved in the time between when the first line of the sensor was read and the last.

My little Tablet problem

My Thrive had a problem - no, not the earlier one with the cracked screen, but a different sort of a problem.

About an year ago, I set up an inexpensive Terabyte RAID accessible on our home wireless network - a free cloud if you please. All my photos are on said cloud, and I had hoped to use my new Thrive to actually browse through and check my photos out in style. Part of the reason to get a tablet, was to consume my own media.

Here is where standards were supposed to help. My router was technically capable of sharing the Terabyte via either HTTP, FTP or most importantly SMB (essentially Windows Share). And my Tablet was supposed to be able to browse via SMB. But, try as I might, I just did not seem to work.

I tried all the usual suspects ASTRO File Manager, AndSMB Samba Client, File Manager HD and ES File Manager. All of which had rave reviews, all talking about successful connections to other Windows machines.

But none of them seemed to work. Out of character for me - I created new accounts on two Thrive Forums, to ask for help - no luck there either.

After three days of frustration, I began to realize something. Maybe the problem was not with the Thrive at all. Maybe, the problem was with the router, that was just unable to play nice with all SMB clients, including that on the Thrive.

Luckily, here is where my obsession for freedom began to pay off. My router is a Netgear 3500L. It is about the closest to a poster child for open hackable routers, that one can buy. A fact that Netgear actually advertises on the flier for the router itself. So I figured I'd flash my router, and hopefully make the newer version of SMB play nice with my Tablet.

Whether that worked is another story, but the moral of the current post is this - having freedom is awesome. It opens up possibilities and opportunities. It makes you focus on answers, not problems. And it is green too - who knows, I could have been tempted to buy a new router and chuck this one out, instead of trying to fix it.

Movie Barcode

Movie Barcode is a fascinating look at movies. Basically each frame of the movie is shrunk down to a line, such that eventually the entire movie begins to look like a bar-code. What is fascinating is how some of the more visual movies still manage to retain and display their style.

Blade Runner, one of the more visually specific movies, is up first. The movie is about a dystopian future, and is shot under artificial lights, with a heavy blue-green cast. The dingy, cold, steel-like visual style comes right through in its bar-code.

Jaws is all about the terror under blue skies. Look at the alternating bands of the black of fear and the baby blue of a clear summer day. Notice also the scene at night towards the end of the movie.

Green and black - if ever there was a movie that epitomizes that palette, it is The Matrix. That white band a quarter of the way in is Neo's training.

Pan's Labrynth is a fantastic movie, symbolized by a deep rich color palette. Alternating between a blue reality of war and a golden-brown fantasy, the two colors represent different aspects of Ofelia's world. Captured beautifully in it's bar-code.

Dusty, dirty and hazy, Apocalypse Now, the quintessential war movie and cliche-dialog fest, is dominated by browns. This was surprising for me as I was expecting a bit more green. But going back to the trailers proved me wrong, there was always the promise of green beyond the frame, but never any in it. The blue band in the middle seems to be the night journey up the Nung river.

The trippiest for the end. 2001: A Space Odyssey. True to its nature, there is no limiting the palette of the movie, it wildly swings from one end of the spectrum to the other. Notice the black band at the end. If you have seen the movie, you know exactly what that represents.

The True Lord of the Rings

We had recently re-watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy, in its extended cut glory. All 11 hours of it. One of the advantages of the extended edition is that you not only get extra scenes, but you also get time to reflect on what you just saw. One thing that stood out for me was Galdalf's insistence at having his way, and his petulance when things were not according to his machinations. In that he was remarkably similar to Saruman, except for the fact that they were on opposing sides in the war for Middle Earth.

"The old world will burn in the fires of industry. Forests will fall. A new order will rise. We will drive the machinery of war with the sword and the spear and the iron fist of the orcs."

The above quote from Saruman struck me not as evil, but as the exact same thing that we have all been doing since the dawn of the Industrial age. Or consider this, from the point of view of the Ents.

"There was a time, when Saruman would walk in my woods, but now, he has a mind of metal and wheels.
He no longer cares for growing things."

Tolkien's dislike for industrialization is well known. Within that context one could argue that the LOTR series is basically a re-write of history by the victors. Not convinced? Consider this. The men from Harad, were no different from Numenoreans, but for their appearance (tall, dark and fierce looking) and their choice of allies. For that Harad is portrayed a strange land and their people as barbarians. Xenophobia anyone?

One Kirill Yeskov, took this idea of LOTR as a victor's view of history to its logical conclusion. His russian book, The Last Ring-bearer, is the LOTR story told from the point of view of the vanquished. The English translation is available for free, in text, PDF formats. I converted the text to .MOBI format for use on my Kindle.

For the record, I am delighted Aragorn won. But unfortunately that also means we we will never quite know what Sauron was like. Did he like his beer cold? Was he a soft or hard taco guy? And what exactly was his purpose behind trying to decimate all humans from the face of Middle Earth?

Image is screen shot from lordoftherings.net

Average Human

We humans have the propensity to group and classify the world around us, including people. But it is not often that we get to put a single face to the group, a representative if you will. That is, until now.

The Postnational Monitor is the blog of a well traveled American, that struck upon an interesting idea - find out how the average person from a country looks like. So the blogger culled photographs of several people from each country, and ran them through an algorithm that produces an average face, representative of the people of that country. Here are a few excerpts:

The original blog has more, including countries in east-southeast Asia, middle Eastern, African, Americas, and Europe. This page has a good, well-attributed, summary.

This naturally got me thinking, how do these averages work. While I did not find much on the site itself, a bit o' Googling led me to faceresearch.org. These are the boffins that think about these things and make tools that help you make average faces. And turns out, in the world of faces, average is not a bad thing. Average is what makes a face more attractive.

Looking back to the list above, in addition to good looks, what is common between all the pictures above is that they are all average humans.

18 rules for living

Apparently at the start of the millennium, the Dalai Lama issued 18 rules for living. Very very useful.

1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
2. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.
3. Follow the three Rs:
1. Respect for self
2. Respect for others
3. Responsibility for all your actions.
4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
6. Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.
7. When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
8. Spend some time alone every day.
9. Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.
10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
11. Live a good, honourable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.
12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.
13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don’t bring up the past.
14. Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.
15. Be gentle with the earth.
16. Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.
17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.
18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.

The Egg of a Story

Came across a good short story while stumbling today that I really liked. Small, simple and well written. The Egg by Andy Weir.

Photocopy my Car

This is a post about how mother nature tried to photocopy my car. At least that is what I think it is. Consider the first picture on the left - at the bottom are three receipts I had left in the car, clipped under the visor, while I waited for my shirts from the laundry. They were normal when I left them, but when I reached to pull them out three days later, what I saw surprised me. I got this darkened mess, that clearly reproduces the child seat warning message from the inside of the visor.

Quick background. The receipts are generally printed on what is called a 'thermal paper'. A thermal paper works by darkening in response to applied heat above a particular threshold. For example, you could cause the paper to darken if you left it in a car under direct sunlight for an extended period.

However, I do not think that is the reason for the darkening. Consider the following - firstly, I parked my car at work in a covered parking structure for the entire time. Secondly a closer examination of the darkening shows that it was not the gradual darkening of a car left in sunlight. Instead it was hot enough and short enough to cause the darker printed portions of the visor to visibly absorb more heat than the whiter parts of the visor. Finally, there was an electrostatic discharge event (aka thunder storm) during the period with the receipts under the visor that landed close enough to blow out the garage opener, about 10 feet away.

Which brings me to my conclusion. The lightning during the night struck close, probably the car itself. This caused a quick but intense heating of the air around. During the dissipation of this heat, the darker parts of the car heated up quicker than the lighter parts resulting in a “natural” photocopy of my car.