Author: RagManX

Mathematics: A visual exploration

While checking out the latest news on some of the geeky things that interest me, I found a link to this visual walk through of mathematics. The most interesting facet of the Dimensions Math page to me, and what made me think I needed to post about it, is that the 2 hour video that is the visual walkthrough of math was created entirely with the raytracing program POV-Ray. The entire video is available for free online, can be purchased on DVD, and is licensed for distribution under a Creative Commons license.

A film for a wide audience!

Nine chapters, two hours of maths, that take you gradually up to the fourth dimension.
Mathematical vertigo guaranteed! Background information on every
chapter: see “Details“.

Here is the sample video for the visual walk-through:

Watching this, seeing that it was made with POV-Ray, and thinking of the power of legally freely available tools like this makes me feel that I owe my readers a write-up of some of the many free tools and toys I use on my computer at home and for work.

[tags]Dimensions, Mathematics, POV-Ray, Video[/tags]

Posting again?

I’m trying my damndest to get posting again. Unforunately, I’ve had problems with WordPress (well, really a problem with MySQL, but I might be able to rectify with WordPress changes until I can get my new host to upgrade MySQL), the problems with my previous host I’ve mentioned before, and problems finding the time to get back in to blahgging. I know no one wants to hear about my problems, so I’ll skip all that and just mention that my goal right now is to have 50 new posts of actual content by the end of the month. If I can hit that target, I suspect that will be a good motivator for me to get active again. Just not sure what I can give up timewise to get around to blahgging enough to hit my target. But I’ll try, because I miss writing and miss having visitors.

A little mo’ better than before

OK, dear readers, I’m finally getting back on track.  I’ve had to make an ugly hack to get WordPress to display posts in the right order.  I’m going to have to take up the real cause of this malfunction with my new hosting provider, but the ultimate cause of the problem is a bad MySQL bug that made it in to the release a lot of web hosts are using.  Expect some real problems while I work out further troubles (like no history of older posts available, sadly), but hopefully I can resolve everything soon and get going on content again.

If you’ve ever wondered how to kill a blog, sticking with a host for months after you discover a problem that you can’t get resolved, then taking too long to move once the problem kills your site is a powerful motivator for readers to move elsewhere.  I’ve gone from roughly 1000 readers a day at the start of the year to about 500 per day by the end of March when posting slowed and eye-candy pics stopped showing up, to fewer than 50 a day now after more than 15 days of irregular site availability.  Since the Blahg is still more a hobby to entertain my own interests than a site maintained for real for readers, I’m OK with that, but it’s still moderately disappointing that I let myself fall down on getting this situation resolved earlier.

Look for more and real updates to start soon, and hopefully all posting and reading problems to go away very soon.

On the new host

Well, I’ve gotten set up on a new host, and early indications are this is a good move.  Unfortunately, the blahg is appearing backwards, with the oldest posts showing up first.  Once I fix that, I’ll be able to sort through and figure out what’s missing from the move and get going again on updates.  More information on my hosting and the move once I’m sure it’s working somewhat.

Down time

Lately, the site has been down a lot.  I have tried to make some updates but haven’t been able to most times when I’ve had free time because the site has had trouble.  I’m seeing a lot of errors in my web logs, but when I contacted my hosting provider in the past I was told first that yes they could see the problem and then that no, I shouldn’t have that problem because they’d patched it months earlier.  Since I can’t seem to get it resolved, I’m looking to move to another host I use and like.  Hopefully that will happen before the week is over and I’ll have opportunity to update the site more regularly again.

Quick draw

For my gun enthusiast visitors. I worked with a fellow years ago who claimed to have a rated speed of 0.02 seconds for draw and fire motion of his handgun. I was skeptical, but knew this guy to not be one to brag in general, so I tentatively accepted his claim although I never could imagine it being true. After seeing this video of Bob Munden, I’m not so skeptical any more.

I’m especially impressed with his accurately shooting 2 balloons, tied 8 feet apart, with two shots fired so quickly that it appears to be only a single shot. This looks like a prime candidate for the Time Warp treatment from the folks at the Discovery Channel:

I think it would be awesome to see this quick-shooter filmed at 1800 frames per second or higher. Too bad it looks like Discovery Channel hasn’t taken that show past the first episode. (via Bill at DQ)

[tags]Quick draw, Quick-Shooter, Handgun, Fast, Video, YouTube[/tags]

Too much pr0n? -or- How can you even surf that much pr0n?

According to rule 34, there is a pr0n for everything on the intarw3bs – if you can think it, there is pr0n for it. Given that, it’s probably unsurprising for most people to know that many people surf for pr0n at some point in their intarw3bs-life (note: I have not been able to verify those statistics yet, but believe from previous research that site to be reliable in this aspect irrespective of other doubts I may have over the site content). However, sometimes, just every-once-in-a-while, there enters the web-world an internet-pr0n abuse story that shocks the mind and makes you wonder, well, WTF were they thinking?

A Japanese civil servant was demoted for logging more than 780,000 hits on pornographic Web sites on his office computer over nine months, an official said Friday.

. . .

The man’s supervisors discovered his extensive porn site visits after his computer became infected with a virus, prompting officials to examine his Web browser’s history.

Those viruses are causing all kinds of problems, though, aren’t they? There is, of course, the possibility that the worker did very little of the pr0n surfing, and the virus caused many non-human-driven pr0n-site hits. The linked MSNBC article does not hit on this aspect of the story, so I can’t personally say how much of this might be automated rather than user-created.

I will admit to being surprised by the punishment for this. Most places I’ve worked, very-light pr0n surfing is enough to get one fired, although most typically a warning on high will come down first unless the viewed content involves non-adult subjects or any animals (yes, I’ve worked in a field where I have to know these kinds of things and have had to monitor people doing this stuff). As already noted in the above quote – the worker was demoted for his actions. Additionally:

Along with the demotion, he received a 20,000 yen ($190) monthly pay cut, Waki said.

Yup. Loss of rank, and small paycut. Now in a society like Japan, where appearances of propriety are so highly valued, I realize this is much more of a punishment than the same actions would be here in the States. I’m still surprised by this, though, as it sounds fairly mild compared to what I’ve seen in places where I was one of the net-abuse monitors.

NOTE: All links above are safe for work – I try hard to keep stuff here mostly worksafe, and hide non-worksafe stuff below “Read More” tags or NSFW warnings.

[tags]Pr0n, 780000 pr0n hits, Virus, NSFW, MSNBC, WTF, Stupid[/tags]

Purple Turtle Products – outstanding bookseller

Recently I ordered a copy of the book Virtual LEGO: The Official LDraw.org Guide To LDraw Tools for Windows from the Amazon seller Purple Turtle Products. I buy from Amazon sellers all the time, and normally don’t post anything about them. However, Barbara and Purple Turtle Products were so amazing to deal with when my book arrived and I had a problem that I wanted to publicly compliment her for outstanding support.

My book arrived last week on Monday and all looked good. When I grabbed it to start working some with LDraw and associated tools on Wednesday, I noticed that a chunk of the included CD was crushed into pieces no bigger than half the size of a pencil eraser. I searched online for the contents of the disc, hoping to just download everything I needed and get to work. When I was unable to find the files I needed, I contacted the general support email for Purple Turtle Products about the problem and got a response within 24 hours. Barbara offered to send me a new disc from another copy of the book they had.

Since I know books resell for less without the CDs than they do with the CDs, I told her that I felt bad because, and I stress, this problem was clearly a book binder’s error, and not a problem caused by improper handling or packaging for shipping. The disc was actually partly folded into the spine of the book, and obviously attached to the binding improperly – I’m guessing a temporary alignment glitch with the book-binding machinery. I offered to at least pay shipping, since I knew they couldn’t be making much of a profit from my purchase. Barbara, as you might guess, would have none of that and sent the disc to me at the start of this week. It arrived today, in perfect condition, and I am now able to practice creating virtual LEGO structures using the LDraw drawing tools and render them after conversion to POV-Ray format.

Thanks Barbara – you have been outstanding to buy from, and I will most assuredly be looking for Purple Turtle Products’ offerings when I buy from Amazon in the future.

[tags]Purple Turtle Products, Amazon seller, Support[/tags]