Eye of Sauron

Another demo from our CMU ETC team working with the Magic Planet display. The Eye of Sauron will follow you around the room – it’s pretty creepy.

Details on the lighting: The high rim light came from overhead spot lights in the high ceiling, which also created the nice spills on the blue wall. I bounced my flash off a white wall to the right which gave just enough fill to catch the details in Michael’s face. I used a 1/10th second exposure so the globe would be lit enough by the internal projector.

I’m a Sudoku addict. There, I said it.

In particular, I like to solve them in pen, and without writing down little numbers all over the place. I take pride in a clean and solved sudoku – just correct numbers in their squares.

Over time, I developed a straightforward set of algorithms that I step through in my mind that solve all but the hardest puzzles. Since they are just a process I go through, I found I couldn’t actually verbalize them, I just knew how to look at the puzzle and find solutions. I thought it would be a fun exercise to try and program a sudoku solver, thus forcing me to be able to explain to myself the process I go through.

This solver is my current solution. It can’t yet solve every puzzle, but it gets as far as I do without guessing. I know the next algorithm that needs to be added to make it better, but as you can imagine they get harder and harder to implement as the complexity grows, and I haven’t quite got that code part figured out yet.

Feel free to play around with it. It has a few example puzzles built in and you can input your own. The ultimate solver (not mine!), with explanations of a few dozen algorithms is here.

Hey, it works! I moved my blog from using Movable Type over to WordPress. I had two reasons for wanting to do this.

First, I wanted a link at the bottom of the main page to older posts. This seems trivial, but Movable Type builds static pages so it’s a lot of work to get it to do that. WordPress serves up pages dynamically (meaning each page is created when it’s requested) so it’s easy. I don’t get enough traffic to need the performance increase that MT’s static pages give you, and if I did I’d set up caching to handle it.

Second, and even more significantly, I like the direct php access to WordPress templates. MT uses their own Template Tags which makes their templates easier to read but harder to customize.  MT allows you to include php in the pages, but I would have had to change all the URLs to end in .php rather than .html which I really don’t like.  Yeah, you can rewrite those in Apache but ugh. WP’s templates are all in php, so getting into them is easy, making integration into the rest of my site very simple.

As promised on WP’s site, it was fast and easy to install WP and import all my MT posts. Maybe 10 minutes. I spent a lot more time than that working on the templates (which is still a work in process).

Finally, I changed the URL from ‘weblog’ to just ‘blog’ – really, what was I thinking before??? I also did some Apache rewrites so that old links aren’t broken.

I enjoyed getting out and shooting again today. I visited the baylands in Redwood Shores and mostly photographed the birds, and though I wasn’t thrilled with any of the final shots I think I learned a lot about how to do better next time.

Afterwards, I wanted to do some macro-photography and walked along the levee. It isn’t very green there this time of year, and insect life wasn’t visible so I almost gave up. Then the dried plants along the side of the path caught my eye.

These first two images are both called “Glory Days”, as they looked as if they had had theirs. Springsteen’s song was running through my head the entire time.

Glory Days I

Glory Days II

The third is titled “Last Grasp.” It’s of dead Queen Anne’s Lace, and reminded me of small skeletal hands reaching up to the heavens.

Last Grasp

All these shots were heavily processed in Lightroom 2 to get the dreamy quality.

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