YGingras^.net

When you live in a large enough city, watching the stars is rare delicacy that you can't often afford. This semester I took a course on astronomy and it reminded me how much I missed watching the stars. You can live in the city and completely forget that there are stars beyond that gray dome but when you learn about cosmology, about why nebulae glow, about the life cycle of stars, about dying red giants like Aldebaran, the lack of night sky becomes unbearable.

So I listened to my heart and I bought a telescope. A really nice and short 90mm maksutov-cassegrain with an equatorial mount. It is a bit heavy for the aperture but the size is a perfect fit for a motorcycle backpack. Of course as soon as I bought it there was a streak of never ending clouds. At last, after a week I was able to take it out for its first light. Now, when you have a scope one its tripod and its mount aligned and ready to watch, where do you point it? I had my planisphere in hand but all those NGC numbers don't tell much about how interesting the object is and if you can expect to see them with a 90mm scope.

Since I can't spend all my nights looking at M42, I did my homework and found the deep sky objects that can be observed with a small scope and that are well positioned at this time of the year. There is no point in keeping this information for myself so I offer this late fall watch plan to my fellow amateur astronomers who live around 45° of north latitude.

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A long time ago, during my first job as a coder, I was introduced the geek lifestyle. Being a geek is different from being a nerd though most nerds have really good unexploited geek potential. Being a geek is to be proud of your nerdiness, to a point where you expose it defiantly to the world. Geeks wear t-shirts with cryptic code snippets and talk with each others in a obscure jargon. Geeks don't enjoy the morning coffee while reading the newspaper, they do so while reading Slashdot, User Friendly and many other geek oriented comic strips.

One such strip, Megatokyo, was really influential in the development of my early geek persona. To truly understand what I mean you have to look for the early strips of Megatokyo. The characters in User Friendly are professional geeks, the ones working in tech related jobs but the ones in Megatokyo were the college computer nerds type. Now thats something someone who just graduated can really identify himself with.

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If someone typed something like date +"%Y" at his terminal, assuming that he used the Gregorian calendar, he would probably see something like 2005. If the same person was to read RFC196, he would probably see July 20, 1971 near the beginning. Only 13 years after the discovery of the Bessemer process we had the first transcontinental railroad, after more that 30 years of email, all email clients suck.

Anyone who uses email for something else than remote backups knows what I'm talking about. If you need to read your emails from more than one location you can probably forget all the nice "native" clients. But webmails requires heavy usage of the mouse, lacks many important features like a usable spell-checker and incremental search. All the webmail service provider have EULA that requires your first born and a pint of fresh blood a month. Namespace pollution is another problem, I don't want my email to be y._kk_gingras234252_asd@example.com, I want ygingras@ygingras.net. So called native clients have pretty UI but when some important feature is needed we feel that they don't want to mess too much with that UI so the feature get postponed. Spam is a plague but a great thinker found a solution a few years ago already.

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Fur is a great boon that evolution gave to mammals. Fur allows the heat conservation required to be efficiently hot blooded and to and to survive in the coldest weather of this planet. For some strange reason, the fur of humans is rather sparse. This lead to an unconscious association between the lack of fur and the superiority of a life form.

As soon as metallurgy allowed decent blades, humans started to alter their fur to look as less as possible like an inferior mammal. Shaving of the facial hairs was already popular among the ancient Greeks. Today we have advanced metalwork technology and it is a daily routine for many to shave. Nevertheless, it seems like it is impossible to make long lasting razor blades. There is a lot of buzz about the technical innovations in new shaving technology and how smooth and how close a shave can get. We sometimes even hear that a new type of blades might last a bit longer.

The sad reality is that the investment on razor blades is constant if not increasing. Those new blades feature patented technology which prevents cheap alternatives and they are sold the price of a lunch each. To motivate us to try those new and improved blades, they even inflate the price on the old types of blades. The net effect is that we keep using the same blade as long as possible with disastrous consequences for our poor skin.

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Our Sun as you probably know is a huge ball of plasma surrounding a massive thermonuclear chain reaction. The mass of the whole thing prevents the inner nuke blast from sending most of the "stuff" flying around. The "stuff" is kept there by the gravitational field of the Sun but the insane amount of energy released by the inner core also keeps the outer plasma in constant convection, a bit like how a stove can bring water to a steady boil. Once in a while, a big bubble comes to the surface and launch a big chunk of matter into space. Scientists like to give funny names to huge bubbles of plasma so they call the phenomenon a coronal mass ejection.

Just as if the idea of a giant nuke bringing an colossal amount of plasma to a violent boil and sending matter into space wasn't fascinating enough, SOHO is filming the whole thing for our viewing pleasure. The last week offered a few really brutal coronal mass ejections and SOHO features a breath taking movie of them. Keep in mind that the sun is only the tiny white circle in the middle the video. Earth is nothing compared to those ferocious solar events. Such display of pure power has to fill us with humility. The active region is expected to face us at about the same time as the peek of the Perseid meteor shower which would give us quite a night show and hopefully more of those excellent solar flare movies.

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In one of the chapter of The Mythical Man-Month you see the menu of a restaurant and the caption "Faire de la bonne cuisine demande un certain temps. Si on vous fait attendre, c'est pour mieux vous servire, et vous plaire" which would translate to "Good cooking takes time. If you are made to wait, it is to serve you better, and to please you". It is true that a quick snack can help you to wait and I hope that my fractal zooming movies helped you to wait. Now, the real meal is ready. David Steuber finished rendering his Xeno's Xomo movie! This movies is made with Common Lisp, it took months to render. It is a complete movie with a soundtrack and all.

I hope that this kind of movie stimulate your curiosity for Common Lisp. You are lucky to start now, Marco Baringer just made a great demo of SLIME, the Common Lisp interaction mode for Emacs. In this demo you'll learn some of the tricks that make editing Lisp such a pleasure. After that you'll probably want to code you own web based fractal zoomer so why not grab Marco's demo of UCW, a package for developing web applications in Common Lisp. We are not done yet! You think that Common Lisp is the perfect language already ? You are wrong, but the good news is that making the perfect language for a particular job is pretty easy if you use Common Lisp. Rainer Joswig made a really good demo of a domain specific language using Common Lisp.

Now you must have started your downloads and while you are waiting you think that you should do some googling for a good Lisp tutorial. You can stop searching since Peter Seibel was kind enough to put Practical Common Lisp online for your reading pleasure. "Are we done yet ?" you might wonder. Well... no, I'm afraid there is still more porn to download. Rainer Joswig managed to find some Symbolic Lisp Machines and made some lisp machines videos! That should be enough for now, I'll keep the rest for the desert.

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Sometimes, we hear about censorship and we are glade to live in a country where we can express ourself. I'm always glad to live in an area that provides so many opportunities to shout as loud as the big medias. Now we have the net and we can build website with very little resources and skill to spread out thoughts.

But it also happen that some people don't want you to express yourself and they can be very determined to silence you. I was under the impression that I had made a pretty good recap of Stallman's presentation until a strange email appeared in my inbox:

Bonjour,
Je ne sais pas si tu es francophone et je ne parle pas très bien anglais.
Je souhaiterai te rencontrer à titre personnel sur la journée du droit 
d'auteur où Richard Stalmann a pu être invité: je pense qu'il y a des 
informations cruciales qui semble t'échapper quant à l'organisation 
bénévole et rapide sur la mise en place d'une journée telle que 
celle-ci. De même, tu as fait des remarques gratuites et blessantes sur 
ton blog, sur la présence de participants bénévoles qui sont à mes yeux 
inacceptables.

That could have been just a misunderstanding so I replied peacefully:

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We had the pleasure to hear a talk by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation on copyrights. The event was organized by many volunteers. Strangely, most of them were not from hardcore geek groups. You could even see hippies advocating the benefits of homegrown berries and comic writers debating about the proper inking techniques.

The first part of the event was featuring various kiosks by several organizations active in the Montréal area. There was my former employer, several GNU/Linux user groups and few free speech activists. There was not many visitors. Given the lack of prior notification that was understandable but still disappointing. Nevertheless, it was fun to see former coworkers again. I finally had the occasion to brag about by new π memorization skills. At university, I'm affiliated with the LaCIM, the lab Simon Plouffe was affiliated to when he came up with his formula for the computation of digits of π. Simon Plouffe is also a former world record holder for remembering digits of π so I don't impress anyone there.

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When you read that the human brain can recall 83431 digits of π, you ask yourself many questions. What is the process of learning all those digits? How can you recall where you are after 10 hours of recitation? How do you "see" the number in your head?

The discussion on /. gave a few tricks for memorizing digits and I decided to try myself. I made a really simple trainer that groups the digits by blocks of 10 and color code them. I already feel some improvement with the color code. I can recall the block transitions and it helps to "know where I am".

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The weather was really painful today in Montréal. Humidity was over 85% and temperature climbed at 32 Celsius degrees. Needless to say that there was a visible smog. I was hiding from the weather in the comfort of UQAM's AC when I saw the t-15 fireball announcing the imminent start of the fireworks. It was a big green ball over the bridge, the air was so heavy that there was a big halo all around it. The sky had faded back to black before the bang could reach my observatory. I was disappointed that I forgot about the show but a quick look at my watch confirmed that still could make it so I dared to sprint on my bike across the Saturday night traffic in the damp weather.

The weather was painful but it was perfect for such a show. I arrived just on time, dripping sweat like a marathon runner. Tonight's fireworks were particularly great. The high humidity could carry all the sounds with a strong echo and the smog was inflamed in an eerie aura with every flash. Tonight's contestant was France. They did In the Hall of the Mountain King. You could feel the climax coming with great low altitude ground work. There was spiraling strait traveling rockets, alternating colors and each time climbing higher and higher. Then then the fireballs, many simultaneous big and bright fireball with the loud echo of the bangs. Some people even started to leave thinking such a climax could only be the final.

Fortunately it was not. It soon came to Temple of Love, the (1992 ?) version with the female signer. There was solitary small really bright flashes. Alone that part could have been boring but it followed the music nicely until the lyrics came to "fire from the fireworks up above me" and the sky was filled with heart shaped fireballs for a few minutes. The show went on with mini climaxes and we would not see a particular kind of rocket being over used. Every song hand a dominant type of fireball and groundwork. The final was jaw dropping. The width of the St-Laurent was covered with simultaneous explosions. You always see a few really large ones for the final but this time it was more than that, it was like a non-stop bang with multiple smaller fireballs while the bigger ones were expanding. I'm happy to have dared the weather, it was well worth it.

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Since I decided to use XMMS as my alarm clock, I've put a lot of pressure on the stability of my workstation. There are no big problems here since I'm using Debian GNU/Linux. Note that some features are missing from the XMMS alarm plug-in like snooze and and stuff like that. But back to the story, I was in my bed, fully awake, with the sun flowing from behind my curtains.

No possible doubt, my trusty system did not wake me up. What a shame, it was not a power failure or a bad setting from me, it was crashed. It went back up without problems but only to crash a few hours latter with big ugly vertical stripes on the monitor. When I rebooted it, the stripes were still there at the BIOS prompt. Easy diagnostic: dead video card. My system is back on track with a crappy PCI card from the emergency spare parts bin.

Gauging by the smell of the card, it is roasted. Even if spare fans were available that would not save it. Why is that so? Why can't a 400$ card come with a decent ball bearing fan? I have the fan on my 200MHz still running, event with all the lint tightly packed in the heat sink. I have six years old 5$ case fans still running. When the heat sink on the CPU got clogged by lint, the system crashed but the core did not melt. Thats my second roasted video card with that six years old system.

Thats what you get with a "gamer" card: crap. They make it cheap because they expect you to move to a bigger card as soon as you can. Next time I'll get a 50$ card with open specs and free software drivers for GNU/Linux. I'll get one without a heat sink, one not designed to melt as soon as the warranty is over.

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The FEUQ is an provincial "student union union". It is to blame for the miserable ending of the 2005 student strike. My student union, AESS, will have a referendum next semester on the possibility to stop being a member of the FEUQ. I made a Sans-FEUQ Wiki for the disaffiliation promotion committee.

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Once the Fract Movie Pack 1 was rendered, Zach Beane offered to host a torrent. Fract is now featured on Planet Lisp! Since that means that I get a lot of instant hits, I had to take the other movies offline. Do not despair, you can now grab the Movie Pack 1 torrent and get 20 high resolution movies for the same price!

update: The traffic is almost back to normal so you can hammer the old movies again.

update: The torrent is gone. Many gigs were uploaded, something I could not have handled alone. Thanks to everyone who seeded! You will have to wait for the Movie Pack 2 if you didn't get the torrent while it was up.

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I had to opportunity to have a chat with David Steuber, a truly dedicated fractaler. David have been rendering frames for his new fractal movie for the last few months. After I watched his first movie, I wanted more so I added the movie support to Fract. It's basically the same thing as the zoom trail but with many times more frames and a file numbering that helps the encoder. The Fract generated fractal zooming movies are from spots in the scoreboard, I may add automatic movie rendering for the top rated regions in the future.

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I added anti-aliasing to Fract. For regular images, anti-aliasing is best done by averaging a grid of sub-pixels. For the Mandelbrot Set, dividing a pixel into sub-pixels actually increase the probability of falling into a punctually detailed region. A solution found by SunCode on sci.fractals is to keep only the minimal escape value of all the sub-pixels. The result is great! Unfortunately a 3x3 sub-pixels grid is 9 times slower to compute so I'm not likely to add anti-aliasing to the Web interface unless I receive some hardware donations.
; )

In the mean time someone called Lahvak decided to take over the top 10. In the last few days he submitted several great regions. Many of them made it to the top 10. Lahvak now rules more than half of the top slots. Congratulations Lahvak!

With the trail feature, I could notice a trend. Many of the best regions originate from the tail or somewhere behind a random cardioid. Also, most of the top 10 is dominated by the funky-2 color map. This either means that this one is particularly great or that all the other maps are really ugly. I fear the later case so I'll try to make a few other maps.

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Many really interesting regions were submitted and many votes helped to sort them out. The top region (dropped to second as I write this) was promoted to t-shirts. I made a few tweaks to the color map in order to blend it to white. As usual, I made a hi resolution render with a several orders of magnitude more iterations, 1000 times more colors and anti-aliasing. You can get the new gears from the EU and US Spreadshops or from Cafe Press.

Thanks to everyone who submitted regions and who voted!

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The student strike is now over and it's time to get back to work. In all of my courses, teachers were collaborative about the how to arrange the calendar, assignments and exams. All but one, Philippe Gabrini decided that strikers were not worthy of his collaboration.

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After a few submission to the voting boot I realized how ugly my color maps were. I decided to tweak them a bit but they were still ugly so I looked for an alternative. Gimp gradients were my first stop and I'm really pleased by the result. The file format is undocumented but really simple. The gradient editor in the Gimp really lacks a undo but except from that it was just what I needed. The gradients shipped with the Gimp are not really adapted for fractals but I made a few of my own with interesting results.

With multiple gradients inside a single color map, the color step from one iteration to the other is more apparent. I found an interesting article talking about using the modulus from the last iteration to compute partial iterations. The result is impressive. One draw back is that it requires a bit more precision to compute the partial iteration so we lost a digit of freedom on the zoom and a few interesting submissions from the voting boot.

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