80/35 Music Concert in Des Moines

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I’m living in Des Moines now for internship. I had call on Saturday (delivered my first baby!) but was able to attend the rainy Sunday show at 80/35, a mostly rock/indie concert. I got there too late to warrant paying the extra money for the main stage ticket, but there were some great musicians at the free stages too. Dar Williams was especially good. I had missed Sara Watkins‘ performance early in the day so it was great to have her come on the stage with her fiddle and join Dar Williams. I love that blue grass/ folk music.

Between Dar Williams and The Heavy, there was a Middle Eastern bellydancing show. I got my iPhone out to take a video of some of it.

Later in the night we were able to watch the big TV screen from the free section where Modest Mouse was playing on the main stage. Not too long later they opened the main stage up for everyone. We also randomly met up with some other residents that we had met at our ACLS training.

MCW Cycling Club site

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I just updated the MCW Cycling Club site. Previously, it ran completely from my own hosting service. This worked okay, but required a lot of work to add new pages since I was literally doing the HTML coding by hand. My experiences using the WYSIWUG editors are that they add a bunch of code that destroys the readability. Anyway, I was looking for something simple and went ahead with transferring the data to Google Sites. In the past, Google Sites didn’t offer much ability to customize, however, a lot has now changed. After switching the CNAME to point to Google, the switch was seamless. It looks pretty good and will be much easier to update. I can even add collaborators to help me with posting club events and updating the bike routes. This will be tremendous as I will be leaving for a year. The only thing still running on my hosting package is the punBB forum. It would be terrific if there would be a way to host that within Google Sites as well.

Check out the new site: MCW Cycling Club

Opera Mini for iPhone

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I’m typing this from the new Opera Mini browser for the iPhone that was just released today. It definitely is fast. It gets that speed by doing the rendering on a outside server and then sending a compressed picture with an image map of some sort to allow you to still click on things. For simply viewing the news, it works great. I also really like the tab implementation. But, it will not come close to replacing Safari quite yet for a few reasons. For starters, the autocorrect for textboxes like this is not working. It also defaults to the mobile versions of some webpages, and I can’t figure out how to stop that. For websites that do load the full version, Opera Mini displays a scaled back version that allows you to see in general what the site’s layout is but is too blurry or zoomed out to actually read any of the text in that mode. The  pinch-to-zoom feature is also broken. There is no granulation in the zoom. Also, the formatting for some sites is broken.

However, this is the very first version and some of these complaints can be fixed. It would be great if you were stuck with EDGE, but it just isn’t astheticallly pleasing enough to replace Safari.

Update: The above post was typed in Opera Mini but then it got deleted when I clicked the “Save Draft” button. Fortunately, I had saved it to clipboard. So, there are still a lot of bugs. Moral of the story is to make sure to save whatever long post or comment you type in case it gets lost. 

Running with route mapping for iPhone

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So I haven’t been updating this blog much, but I’ll begin again soon once I’m less busy. My update for today is that I’ve begun carrying my iPhone with me during runs. Not to listen to music, but for mapping my routes using the builtin GPS. I’ve tried iMapMyRun and RunKeeper so far. Both have free and paid versions for the iPhone. (I’m carrying the iPhone in my hand, which isn’t exactly the greatest solution compared to having it attached to my arm). I had used mapmyride (same company and website) before to look for bike rides in the area. It used to be really nice for biking because you could look for routes or create your own and then print out the maps with turn cue sheets. It worked great. However, it has now gotten quite commercial and lost a lot of the initial ease of use and charm that the original site had. It has, though, grown into a much larger fitness community. Many of the good features now are only available with a monthly subscription. And the free version includes a ton of advertising. RunKeeper looks much simplier, but is just as powerful. It doesn’t yet have cue sheets (most likely because it started off just for running). On the activities page you get a google maps view of the route; below that you get a graph showing a overlay of how speed varied with elevation over the course of the route. And below that there is a section for notes and mileage splits with elevation gained or lost. Both apps allow “live” tweets during the run, however only imapmyrun allows you to customize these tweets from within the app. RunKeeper will tweet automatically for you but you cannot yet add your own comments or include the pace. It does, though, provide a shortened URL link to your RunKeeper public profile (see below), which displays the route and other info that you choose to make public.

Link to MapMyRun route.

Link to RunKeeper route.

I think I’m going to stay with RunKeeper because of how well the app works and because of the simplicity of the website.

Google Wave Invites

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Update: As of 10/13 17:05 Central Time, I’m out of Google Wave invites.

Please only request an invite from one location. That way there will be more invites to go around. I doubt that accumulating invite requests would get you one any quicker.

Hey guys,

I have 7 Google Wave invites left. Just leave a comment and fill your email in on the email section. I’ll then send you one right away. First seven people that reply. It may take awhile for Google to send you one. Don’t know if this means hours or days…

Here’s the disclaimer that Google gives:
“Google Wave is more fun when you have others to wave with, so please nominate people you would like to add. Keep in mind that this is a preview so it could be a bit rocky at times.

Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick.

Happy waving!”

I read about a tweet from a Google Wave engineer who said that invites might take a couple of days to go out. Just so you know.

Scott

PS For you iPhone users out there, this is kind of cool.

Prank Research Papers

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Sometimes jargon really is gibberish.

Take the “scientific” papers generated by a computer program and submitted by three MIT computer science students to a scientific conference. One of the papers, “Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy,” was accepted by World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics 2005 as a non-reviewed paper. “The Influence of Probabilistic Methodologies on Networking” was rejected.

Graduate students Jeremy Stribling, Max Krohn and Dan Aguayo had doubts about the standards of some conference organizers, who they say “spam people with e-mail.”

“We were tired of getting these e-mails from these conference people, so we thought it would be fun to write software that generates meaningless research papers and submit them,” said Stribling. All three of the students are doing research in the Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems Group at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT.

The paper’s acceptance proves their point, Stribling said. Their computer program generates research papers using “context-free grammar” and includes graphs, figures and citations. The program takes real words and places them correctly in sentences, but the words used don’t make sense together…

Source: Prank research paper makes the grade

Here’s the group’s website: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/, including links to the two papers that they submitted to the WMSCI 2005. Their first computer-generated paper, Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy, was actually accepted. Their second submission, The Influence of Probabilistic Methodologies on Networking, was rejected for some reason. I don’t understand a lot of the titles of the real papers that are presented at these computer science conferences so these seemed to fit right in.

The grad students raised enough money to attend and present their paper at the conference. They were actually going to have their program generate a Powerpoint presentation for their talk. Unfortunately, the conference heard about this plan and rejected the paper. So, they decided to hold their own “technical” session in the very same hotel that the WMSCI used for its conference. The (randomly-generated) title of the session was The 6th Annual North American Symposium on Methodologies, Theory, and Information. The grad students presented three randomly-generated computer science papers using randomly-generated Powerpoint presentations that they had not seen prior to standing up and presenting it. The resulting talks were pretty hilarious and are available to watch as a video called Near Science. The website is a little old, but the first high quality AVI still works.

Here’s a SCIgen created computer science paper that my brother and I “wrote”: NAWL: A Methodology for the Visualization of Consistent Hashing

iPhone, iCal, and Google Calendar 3-Way Sync

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DISCLAIMER: The following method is what I used on my personal computer and iPhone and found to be successful. I take no responsibility for anything bad that happens to your system. Always backup your data before doing anything. I use a Powerbook G4 – OS X 10.5.8 – with an iPhone 3Gs – OS 3.0.1. (I wish I had Snow Leopard, but, alas, it’s Intel only).

I just got an iPhone and wanted all my calendars to sync together. I had previously set up a 2-way sync between iCal and Google Calendar (gCal) using CalDAV, a free, open-source way to sync calendars. I also wanted to continue to use iCal as a live calendar and not have it function as a “read-only Master Calendar.” (See INSTRUCTIONS: The iPhone-iCal-gCal Sync Setup). Below are the instructions I used to successfully allow a three-way sync without duplicating calendar entries:

1. If you currently use a standalone iCal that you now want to be synced to gCal, then backup your current iCal: To export go to File > Export. And then save to your Desktop. Import this calendar into gCal to save all your current iCal events. If you don’t use iCal currently (or already have it set up to sync with gCal using CalDAV), then go to the next step.

2. Turn on iCal < -> gCal syncing. Follow Google’s directions to set up CalDAV support for Google Calendar in Apple’s iCal. Create an entry to verify that changes made in iCal are reflected in gCal, and vice versa.

3. Turn off calendar syncing in iTunes. Since I only have a single calendar that is shared between my iPhone, iCal and gCal, I unchecked “Sync iCal calendars” under the Info tab in my iPhone device. It is fine to select other calendars that you only want to sync between iCal and your iPhone, but DO NOT select the newly created CalDAV calendar.

4. Turn on iPhone < -> gCal syncing. Here you have two options: Option 1, Google Sync (Exchange ActiveSync). Option 2, CalDAV. The thread on the Google Calendar support form compares these two methods. The gist of the comparison is that with ActiveSync your calendar appointments are “pushed” to you. Updates made to a calendar will be reflected instantly on your iPhone or any other device which supports ActiveSync. Currently there can only be a single ActiveSync account on the iPhone, so if you already have one from work, then CalDAV is your only option at this time. Google Sync allows you to sync contacts and calendar. CalDAV can only fetch appointment data on scheduled intervals or manually whenever the iPhone Calendar app is run. It does, however, allow up to 25 calendars with colors matching the gCal scheme.

Both ActiveSync and CalDAV worked great. I chose to stick with CalDAV because I don’t need appointments pushed to me. Running iPhone Calendar and having it quickly refresh is fine with me.

Option 1, Google Sync
Option 2, CalDAV

5. Try it out. Changes made on any of the calendars will now be synced. Let me know if this works for you. Thanks!

References:
Enable Google Calendar in Apple’s iCal
How to configure Google Calendar CalDAV in iPhone 3.0
Which is preferred on iPhone CalDAV or Exchange?
Sharing calendars with Google Calendar, iCal, and the iPhone
CalDAV: CalDAV Calendar Sync
Calendar & Contacts Sync: Set Up Your iPhone or iPod Touch
INSTRUCTIONS: The iPhone-iCal-gCal Sync Setup

Animoto Wedding Slideshow

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A friend just showed me this terrific program that creates a unique slideshow with background music. You can upload your own photos or access galleries already created on Smugmug, Flickr, Picasa, and others. Clips of around 30 seconds are free, but then there is a charge for already videos.

Here’s one of Joe’s recent wedding that I think turned out pretty well:

Amazing Photos of Shuttle and Hubble Transiting Sun

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In this tightly cropped image, the NASA space shuttle Atlantis is seen in silhouette during solar transit, Tuesday, May 12, 2009, from Florida. This image was made before Atlantis and the crew of STS-125 had grappled the Hubble Space Telescope. Photo Credit: (NASA/Thierry Legault)

In this tightly cropped image, the NASA space shuttle Atlantis is seen in silhouette during solar transit, Tuesday, May 12, 2009, from Florida. This image was made before Atlantis and the crew of STS-125 had grappled the Hubble Space Telescope. Photo Credit: (NASA/Thierry Legault)

In this tightly cropped image the NASA space shuttle Atlantis and the Hubble Space Telescope are seen in silhouette, side by side during solar transit at 12:17p.m. EDT, Wednesday, May 13, 2009, from west of Vero Beach, Florida. The two spaceships were at an altitude of 600 km and they zipped across the sun in only 0.8 seconds. Photo Credit: (NASA/Thierry Legault)

In this tightly cropped image the NASA space shuttle Atlantis and the Hubble Space Telescope are seen in silhouette, side by side during solar transit at 12:17p.m. EDT, Wednesday, May 13, 2009, from west of Vero Beach, Florida. The two spaceships were at an altitude of 600 km and they zipped across the sun in only 0.8 seconds. Photo Credit: (NASA/Thierry Legault)