I like my e-mails to look a particular way. I send plain-text only e-mails with line wrapping at about 80 characters. This way I feel I can control to some degree what the e-mail will look like at the receivers end. And I want my e-mails to look like that even when I’m quoting someone.
Up until now I hated to use Thunderbird because it did not allow me to send e-mails like that. Since gmail looks ugly as hell now I came back to Thunderbird and set out to solve this issue once and for all. I searched for “thunderbird plain text wrap” and whatnot. A smart fellow on a forum had the answer:
There are two hidden preference settings which one can access through Edit > Preference > Advanced > General > Config Editor button:
mailnews.display.disable_format_flowed_support must be set to true to avoid rewarpping of messages received for which the sender allows flowed formatting
mailnews.send_plaintext_flowed must be set to “false” to avoid sending flowed format e-mails
The problem seems to be something called “flowed format” but I’m too ignorant to go into the details of what it does, what it means and why I would want it. I’m just happy the e-mails my Thunderbird sends look the way I want them to look. Finally. Thank you rsx11m!
I just returned from a world of distorted day-night-rhythm, caffeine, camping, data toilets, colorful lights and most importantly ingenious people and projects. There were some great talks and many great hackerspaces from Germany and around the world were attending.
Every attendee at the conference received a r0cket badge when arriving at the campground. It’s a “full featured microcontroller development board” including a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 LPC1343 microcontroller, a 96×68 monochrome LCD and 2.4GHz transceiver for mesh networking.
HAM-radio enthusiasts from Metalab were working on Moonbounce: radio communication over a distance of at least 2 light-seconds using the Moon as reflector.
A couple of microcopter and drone projects presented their work. There was for example the NG-UAVP project. They released a couple of great areal videos. A project I did not know but I find particularly fascinating is the Paparazzi project. It is an “exceptionally powerful and versatile autopilot system for fixedwing aircrafts as well as multicopters”. This is a project that is for example used by Scientists from the Finnish Meteorological Institute to measure temperature, humidity, pressure, wind direction and speed in altitudes up to 1000m at Antarctica. Very impressive!
For me personally, meeting a number of interesting people that are part of the decentralized web movement was really great. Because of some truly enlightening conversation with people from the FreedomBox Foundation, Michiel de Jong from unhosted.org and buddycloud developers I started thinking about the whole topic again especially about host-proof applications and what a host-proof social network could look like.
I added a Talks-page to this blog. I plan to list and publish interesting talks I gave at various occasions. Currently the page lists two talks: a GPGPU seminar I gave a year ago at my old university and just recently I had the honor of speaking at BoostCon about the project I worked on last year: a library for the Cell processor.
“Stallman was right” is one of the important messages Eben Moglen conveys in his recenttalks about Freedom and the Cloud. He’s a convincing speaker, his arguments are striking and the cause might very well be one of the most important challenges the Internet faces right now.
He speaks about privacy: the freedom to choose who to share what information with. He speaks about freedom of speech: the liberty to speak and communicate freely without censorship. He speaks about how we give up those freedoms, often without noticing or worse, without caring. By signing up to facebook. By using Gmail.
It’s insane if you think about it. We communicate with our friends, send them private messages, through a database in Northern California. We store our personal information including images in that same database. And while we put more and more information, more and more of our lives in that database, its owners are busy thinking about ways of how to make money with our data. By now I’m sure they have come to at least one conclusion: to make money they will share our data with entities we never intended to share it with.
It gets worse, and Eben Moglen elaborates this very well in his keynote speech at Fosdem 2011. All our data is routed through and even stored in a company’s database. We can choose to trust that particular company to not do anything bad with our data. But we can never be sure that the company will act in our interest if it is offered incentives (“We won’t shut you down if you comply”) to share certain data with certain government agencies. Since our data is stored in a centralized manner, agencies the likes of NSA would have a field day.
So indeed, Stallman was right when he called cloud computing a trap. He advises us “to stay local and stick with our own computers”.
Eben Moglen sees the urgency of these problems so he is taking action: informing the public with persuasive talks and gathering smart, ingenious and influential people to find solutions under the newly founded FreedomBox Foundation. The ingredients to the solution, in accordance to Stallman’s suggestion have been identified:
cheap, compact plug computers that can be used as personal servers
a free (as in freedom) software stack that is designed to respect and preserve the user’s privacy
mesh networking technology to keep the network alive if centralized internet connections fail
The idea is simple: replace all cloud services (social network, e-mail, photo storage etc) with distributed systems. The FreedomBox project aims to provide everyone with a compact, cheap, low-power plug computer. Such a device will come preloaded with free software that “knows how to securely contact your friends and business associates, is able to store and securely backup your personal data and generally maintaining your presence in the various networks you have come to rely on for communicating with people in society”.
There are a number of other projects out there that are worth mentioning here. A very interesting assessment of the current state of the social web and existing standards is the W3C Social Web Incubator Group report. The Diaspora project develops distributed and secure social networking software and is worth keeping an eye on. The FreedomBox community maintains a comprehensive list of existing projects.
I expect the foundation to develop a software package that provides stable system software and that encompasses a number of existing projects that allow users to move from cloud services to their own server. I will help were I can and so should you!
I added an “art” and “music” section to the blog. I’d like to share two albums I currently enjoy a lot and listen to almost exclusively. There’s “Black Rainbow” by Aucan and “Peanut Butter Blues & Melancholy Jam” by Ghostpoet. Two very different but ingenious albums.
My favorite track from the Aucan album is “Heartless”. It’s really incredible. Listen to it here:
From the Ghostpoet album I currently most enjoy “Run Run Run” but I expect this to change over time since it’s an album that grows on you and that you have to listen a couple of times to really appreciate it. I don’t want to go into why I like these albums, others are light-years better at music critique than I am. I just want to say: it’s really good music. You should check it out.
I like to scribble with Inkscape while listening to greatmusic or radio plays to relax and clear my head. Today I created a couple of icons that I plan to use in documents to mark special boxes:
It’s a question, an error, a warning, an information and an idea icon. I currently use them in software documentation using the Shpinx Python Documentation Generator. It’s a very good tool to create beautiful documentation especially for software projects but I also use it to publish my game design document. Here’s an example of how the icons could be used:
I based the icons upon images from the Tango Icon Gallery. You may download an archive containing the source (Inkscape .svg) and PNGs of different size here. Use them as you wish, if you find them useful I’d be very happy if you left a comment here.
Today I stumbled across a great thread at Stack Overflow about great programming quotes. Here are the ones I liked most and therefore had to save:
On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. Charles Babbage
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If it’s original, you’ll have to ram it down their throats. Howard Aiken
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware. Alan Kay
And on a less serious note a colleague of mine told me a couple of hilarious science jokes from Brian Malow. Watch a video of the jokes here. My favourite:
A room temperature superconductor walks into a bar. The bartender says, “We don’t serve any superconductors in this bar.” The room temperature superconductor leaves without putting up any resistance.
There’s quite a lot going on in the ever interesting internet search and communication business these days. Wolfram launched its Wolfram|Alpha search engine, Microsoft launched its new Bing search engine and Google demoed its newest product Wave. They also rather quietly released Google Squared. Here’s a graph generated with BlogPulse’s Trend Search showing the buzz these products created over the last month.
I admit the graph is a bit ambiguous and it would be much better to count the number of links in blog posts that link to the respective product. But let’s just assume that the graph is an accurate representation of the buzz those products created.
So Wolfram. I like what they did but have a couple of problems with it. For one I feel like they kind of not understood what it is all about these days. They ignore collaboration, wisdom of the crowd, free knowledge and all that good stuff we have today. But they don’t want that, they want scientific accuracy and control over their content. That’s fine I think but I would have loved to see all those smart people to contribute to a project like Wikipedia or freebase. And maybe they could have dedicated some of their enormous brainpower to finally getting NLP off the ground to provide a nice interface to all the information out there and to establish some ground rules about how we should do NLP.
Bing, well – pretty pictures. That’s really all it is for me personally. The name is certainly better than their Live Search thing but I don’t like the interface at all.
And then for Google Wave: I really hope this product will not succeed and will not revolutionize anything. It’s in the first few minutes of the demo why it would be very scary to have Wave around. Lars Rasmussen says that E-Mail is bad because it’s peer to peer, not very comfortable and whatnot. So he proposes to put the Wave (i.e. Google) in the middle of all that communication. Scary.
What’s really awesome is Google Squared. It’s by no means perfect – still a lot of rough edges – but has a lot of potential. I hope to see some serious work done on that thing and maybe an API for us developers to play with and create new things.
A friend and I joined forces to build a simple ECG (or EKG) Amplifier for our Signal Processing class at University of Applied Sciences Regensburg. We searched the web, magazines and books for suitable circuit diagrams and instructions on how to build one. We found that the instrumentation amplifier INA121 (datasheet) was a suitable IC and also the precision instrumentation amplifier AD624 (datasheet) mentioned in this Scientific American article seem to be viable option. However as it turned out those ICs are very hard to come by and rather expensive ranging from about $10 to over $50.
We also found a quite professional solution in Funkamateur, edition 12/93, pages 794-796. The article is in German and can be found here. We found another very simple circuit diagram for an amplifier in Elektor, edition 7-8/2000 that we ended up building. Here’s the diagram:
The components cost about 10 Euro. We built it on two breadboards one for the amplifier itself and one for the power supply. With two 9V batteries connected it supplies -9V and +9V. Here’s a picture of the amplifier board:
Green red and black cables are connected to the power supply, the thick black cables are connected to the subject and at the bottom there are two pins to connect the oscilloscope probe or an AD-converter.
We used real ECG pads from the hospital to collect the signal from the subject. At first we used regular unshielded copper cables to connect the electrodes which resulted in a lot of noise. We then replaced the copper cables with shielded thin microphone cables and connected the shield to ground. This hugely reduced the signal noise. Here’s an image showing an EKG taken with our amplifier:
The electrodes are connected to right hand, left hand and right foot. As you can see it’s pretty much what you would expect. You can see the P-wave, the QRS-complex and the T-wave. We’re quite happy with the results.
If you try to build something like this yourself please be advised that you should be careful when connecting this amplifier to anything that carries high voltage (line voltage). The amplification circuit and measuring devices are not separated from each other. So you should only use battery powered devices like a USB oscilloscopes connected to a laptop running on battery. This is important as you consciously connect the subject to your circuit in a very well conducting manner (because that’s what you want) and at very dangerous points. So you should take care that no high voltages can flow between the electrodes at any time.
This post lists a couple of more or less random thoughts on blog analysis, data mining, social media analysis and sentiment analysis. I’d like to start out with an interesting graph from blogpulse.com comparing the number of blog posts that talk about the two candidates for U.S. presidency Senator McCain and Senator Obama:
Looking at that graph without thinking about it one might say: well, looks like the democratic candidate is winning. But all this graph shows is that people talk more about Senator Obama at the moment. The graph doesn’t show if the blog posts are positive or negative. One might argue that any attention is good attention but it’s hard to tell from the graph. Additionally I suspect that when writing about the presidential race, chances are both candidates are mentioned. I’m doing it right in this post. So I’m not one hundred percent sure what the divergence of the trends means.
But extracting keywords is only the beginning. What we really want is a tool that is capable of some form of natural language processing. It should to some degree be able to understand the text it is analyzing in order to extract its sentiment or the connotation associated with certain words or phrases. There are numerous experiments in that direction out there, the most prominent being powerset. They got quite a bit of media attention and they were praised as being Google’s successor and then got bought by Microsoft. For the fun of it here’s a comparison of powerset and cuil buzz created with data from blogpulse.com:
Please notice the logarithmic scale on that graph. I guess the point I’m trying to make with that graph is that ever since they got bought it got kind of quiet around the powerset guys. They are probably integrating their technology into Microsoft’s search engine.
Speaking of Microsoft, the Datamining Blog talks a lot about social streams and in particular the politics implementation. From the blog posts and the FAQ I conclude that they are building some kind of platform called “social streams” that is able to mine various social streams, preprocess the data and then apply various analysis algorithms on that data. Very interesting. They don’t want to limit themselves to blogs but really try to cover as many social media streams as possible (think Twitter or Usenet). They probably have some kind of plug-in architecture where they can add new mining components as they see fit. The data might be stored in a generic way, regardless of the source – at least that’s how I would try to do it (don’t know if it is possible). I’m looking forward to what comes out of this.
At the moment they only seem to have the afore mentioned politics application. I don’t like it that much because it mixes “news”, “blogs”, “people” and “places” in a really strange way. It gets its data from news or blogs and it is about people and places. But what are those 4 boxes telling me? Obama: People 9? Is he associated with 9 people and 9 places? The number is probably rather irrelevant. Here’s a graph similar to the first one taken from social streams:
What I’ve been thinking about doing in this area is the following: I’d like to create a simple blog analysis tool that analyzes one blog at a time. I’d like to provide a time line where one can see when and how often a new post was published. It might also be interesting to automatically extract some key words from the blog that might give you an idea what the blog is all about. Kind of what Google AdWords is doing. And finally a trend search engine that allows you to extract how often and when certain keywords are used in the blog. I thought about using the Google Feed API to grab the content of a blog’s feed in a convenient way. They also provide a history of the feeds which would allow an analysis of not only the current feed but a larger time span. If you’re interested in the Google Feed API check out this and this article.
