Roomba Robots as Development Platforms

Evidently, the iRobot home robots (the Roomba and Scooba varieties, with emphasis on the former) are now being used as robotic development environments.

It makes sense. They're tiny. They're robust. They're packed with sensors and motors. On top of all of this, they've gone through a modern manufacturing process so they make for a nice little package. On top of all of this, iRobot provides a serial interface by way of a 7-pin mini-DIN on top of the unit (this pin-out is the same as an 8-pin mini-DIN, so it's not so difficult to find a cable to work with it).

How do you use all of this? Well, iRobot has a developer page to get you started. From there, you can find information about the serial command interface (SCI). From the resources there, it's pretty easy to hack together serial interfaces to get up up and running programming the internals of your robot . . .

. . . HOWEVER, RoombaDevTools has done a great deal of the work for you. The two apps that I think are the coolest are the RooStick and the RooTooth.

So RoombaDevTools gets you right up and running with documentation, hardware (including cables), and software as well as lots of other helpful stuff. PLUS most of the importnat software is either platform-independent (i.e., Java libraries made for the JVM) or provided for OS X, Windows, and more. IN FACT, a common application is to combine a Roomba with a control system built on top of a GumStix. That's WAY cool.

So there ya' go... The Roomba(+Gumstix, perhaps) -- the next affordable robot development platform.

HyperRef Options for Proper BackReferencing with Figures Numbered Within Sections and Partial Roman Page Numbering

That's a really long title, I know.

I have a long document that has roman page numbering for its first four pages (i.e., its title page, table of contents, and list of figures). After that, the rest of the document has arabic page numbering starting at page 1 (so the first four pages of the document are i-iv, and the fifth page is page 1).

I have the option (via package amsmath)

\numberwithin{figure}{section}

turned on. This lets my figures be numbered by section (e.g., Figure 2.1).

I have backreferencing turned on (via hyperref) in my bibliography.

It turns out that hyperref won't get all of the links correct unless you massage it quite a bit. For example, page i and page 1 can get the same label (page.1) and so back references to page 1 end up getting sent to page i, which is clearly not correct. A similar thing can happen with Figure 2.1 and figure B.1; they both get labeled as figure.1 and so links to them get confused. There are lots of other pitfalls you run into as you turn on and off options to try to fix things.

Anyway, I had to dig through the hyperref and backref sources to figure out which options to set. These were the ones that I ended up needing. Things work as expected now.

\usepackage[pdfpagelabels,pagebackref,
            hypertexnames=true,plainpages=false,
            naturalnames]{hyperref}

NOTE: If you are producing a DVI rather than a PDF, if you want the links to work, you should probably use:

\usepackage[dvipdfm,
            pdfpagelabels,pagebackref,
            hypertexnames=true,plainpages=false,
            naturalnames]{hyperref}

That's the same line, but the "dvipdfm" option was added in front.

You should also use pdflatex to build your document. You can pass pdflatex an -output-format dvi option to get it to produce a DVI. (note: you can also symlink pdflatex to latex to get it to produce a DVI) (ALSO: you can add -src-specials to the pdflatex line if you're into source specials)

Phew. That took a long time to figure out. I need a beer.

People Ain't No Good

This song was in Shrek 2?!

People Ain't No Good by Nick Cave

People just ain't no good
I think that's welll understood
You can see it everywhere you look
People just ain't no good

We were married under cherry trees
Under blossom we made pour vows
All the blossoms come sailing down
Through the streets and through the playgrounds

The sun would stream on the sheets
Awoken by the morning bird
We'd buy the Sunday newspapers
And never read a single word

People they ain't no good
People they ain't no good
People they ain't no good

Seasons came, Seasons went
The winter stripped the blossoms bare
A different tree now lines the streets
Shaking its fists in the air
The winter slammed us like a fist
The windows rattling in the gales
To which she drew the curtains
Made out of her wedding veils

People they ain't no good
People they ain't no good
People they ain't no good at all

To our love send a dozen white lilies
To our love send a coffin of wood
To our love let aal the pink-eyed pigeons coo
That people they just ain't no good
To our love send back all the letters
To our love a valentine of blood
To our love let all the jilted lovers cry
That people they just ain't no good

It ain't that in their hearts they're bad
They can comfort you, some even try
They nurse you when you're ill of health
They bury you when you go and die
It ain't that in their hearts they're bad
They'd stick by you if they could
But that's just bullshit
People just ain't no good

People they ain't no good
People they ain't no good
People they ain't no good
People they ain't no good at all

The actual lyric in the song is "But that's just bullshit baby". They left out the important "baby" in the lyrics here.

Computer Camp Love

"Computer Camp Love" lyrics by Datarock

Artist: Datarock
Album: Datarock Datarock
Year: 2006
Title: Computer Camp Love

I ran into her on computer camp
Was 1984, not sure
I had my commodore 64
Had to score
(Not with a -- tramp)
She’s not a tramp
Her name is Judy
That’s a nice name
Yeah she’s a nice girl
Big deal
Did you get in her pants
She’s not that kind of a girl booger
Why, does she have a penis
Seen as supremus
You better know she’s a genus and a Venus
Tell me more was it love at first sight
That’s right this was god giving grace with a face you could praise
Tell me more did you put up a fight
I don’t think so but before we tour the chorus stall let’s all explore a more a
Computer cabin war
That right
I said before we explore the amore on my story do a dora
Computer cabin war
Seen as supremus
You better know she’s a genus and a Venus
Tell me more was it love at first sight
That’s right this was god giving grace with a face you could praise
Tell me more did you put up a fight...
I ran into her on computer camp
Computer cabin war
Hard core
It started like a boar ending up on the floor
Come on now tell me more
Seen as supremus
You better know she’s a genus and a Venus
Tell me more was it love at first sight
That’s right this was god giving grace with a face you could praise
Tell me more did you put up a fight...

Technorati Tags: computer camp love, data rock, datarock, music, lyrics

Three Little Words

I hate Microsoft.


Technorati Tags: microsoft, patents, open source, opensource, novell, deal, business, partnership, php, shared source, evil, bill gates, steve ballmer, GPL, war, intellectual property, IP, law, news, opinion

A news story about my brother

The Columbus d'Feet ALS Walk is this Sunday. Please visit my walk page. Make a donation or come and walk with me. Your support will be very much appreciated.

Grove City man fights ALS with son's help

Local fifth-grader Sam Timmons has been knocking on doors recently asking residents in his parent's and grandparent's neighborhoods for money.

Sam is not collecting for a paper route. He's not selling magazines for school. He's not collecting money for a Boy Scout trip. He's asking people in Grove City to help his dad, Kenny, who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

Fifteen people per day in the U.S. are diagnosed with ALS, or 5,600 new cases per year, according to ALS's Web site. Roughly 30,000 Americans have the disease. Seymour said there are 450 ALS patients in the 56 Ohio counties of the Central & Southern chapter of ALSA. No exact figures pinpointing greater Columbus are available, she said.

ALS patients gradually lose muscle control until they become paralyzed and the disease is eventually fatal.

"I couldn't hit a golf ball over 170 yards and I knew that something was wrong," Timmons said.

After the doctor's diagnosis, "I was devastated. She told me I had three to five years." Another doctor told Timmons, some ALS patients live more than a decade.

Timmons said he went through a hard period of anger and jealousy.

"I was angry at God. I would see other dads at baseball fields throwing a baseball or kicking a soccer ball with his kids and I couldn't do that. And I was jealous. I knew I shouldn't be. I thought why me."

After Timmons started attending healing services at Grove City United Methodist Church on Columbus Streets he said he woke up one morning, "I was down and I looked at my self in the mirror and and said, You can either live with this or die from it. Every day I get down on myself I tell myself that."

And his friends, he said, have been coming out in scores to help him.

"I don't know how someone could go through something like this without a support system like I've got."

Technorati Tags: ALS, Lou Gehrig's Disease, Lou Gehrigs Disease, d'Feet ALS Walk, dFeet ALS Walk

Studio 60: Perfect for Aaron Sorkin Return

If you haven't heard, the upcoming Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip premier show is available for streaming from AOL.com (it will air on TV next Monday, the 18th) (see the news, and some short reviews). I watched it. You can too at the AOL site; however, because it uses WM DRM you'll probably need Windows Media Player 10, which is only available on Windows XP. That's right, you probably won't be able to watch it even on Windows 2000. That really sucks. But that's just how stupid Microsoft DRM is. Well, that's just how stupid DRM is. Additionally, STRANGELY it opened FINE with Firefox but there was a JavaScript error with Microsoft Internet Explorer, so you might want to try viewing the site with Firefox in order to watch the episode. I watched it (45 minutes) in full screen mode, and it looked fine.

I enjoyed it. I actually thought Matthew Perry did an especially good job. You can feel the similarities between it and the format of The West Wing. Music rumbles quietly in the background as title credits put a period on a tense scene at the beginning, for example (oh, and they brought Snuffy back to produce the music). However, there are major differences too. I think Bradley Whitford is trying very very hard not to slide into the Joshua Lyman typecast that actually started well before The West Wing (by the way, have you now noticed movies before The West Wing where he and John Spencer both had roles? (e.g. Presumed Innocent) This happens a lot with certain groups of actors. I wonder if this has something to do with having a shared agent. It makes me wonder about how much casting is actually done on pure connections and not primarily on merit). I think Whitford does a good job avoiding the Lyman trap.

Overall, I think it's great how this show is about two men (a producer and a director? Two producers? Maybe I'm slow, but I didn't catch exactly all of the roles that people would play) who are asked to return to a show that they were forced to leave earlier in life. This seems to parallel Aaron Sorkin's dismissal from The West Wing and his welcoming back for this show. There are some other very specific parallels to the Aaron Sorkin dismissal, but I won't ruin the surprises for you. However, I will mention that I especially like how at the end of the show in the final scene, when the two men march out onto the stage to make their first speech to the cast, and the cast welcomes them with clapping and cheers, the scene pans out and fades away as the final credits appear in the middle of the screen. Behind the credits all you can really see are the backs of the two men who have accepted the charge to take over Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and rescue it. What do those final credits say?

Executive Producers
Aaron Sorkin
Thomas Schlamme

(note: Thomas Schlamme worked with Sorkin on The West Wing)

Welcome, fall TV season.

Technorati Tags: aaron sorkin, thomas schlamme, the west wing, studio 60 on the sunset strip, AOL, television, tv shows, tv, entertainment, news, reviews

Telephone telepathy study: some kind words

There has been a lot of criticism (from the popular media/lay folk) of the study that is the subject of this story. The study that asks each of 63 people for the telephone numbers of 4 different friends or family members and then randomly calls those numbers and has the friend/family member call the person back. Before the call is answered, the person is asked who is calling. You would expect that the correct rate would be 25%. However, it was 45%.

Telephone telepathy - I was just thinking about you

Each person in the trials was asked to give researchers names and phone numbers of four relatives or friends. These were then called at random and told to ring the subject who had to identify the caller before answering the phone.

"The hit rate was 45 percent, well above the 25 percent you would have expected," he told the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. "The odds against this being a chance effect are 1,000 billion to one."

People who seem to have a problem with this study are saying that the sample size was too small. This criticism didn't make any sense to me. This wasn't a poll. They weren't trying to use a small number of people to estimate some statistic of a large number of people. This wasn't about estimation at all. Thus, I think 63 is not only sufficient, but actually really BIG. It's like the researcher says, the odds against this being chance effect are 1,000 billion to one.

Unfortunately, the criticism about sampling effect is even referenced in the article by the Reuters reporter who wrote it.

However, his sample was small on both trials -- just 63 people for the controlled telephone experiment and 50 for the email -- and only four subjects were actually filmed in the phone study and five in the email, prompting some skepticism.

This obsession with sampling size fascinates me. Was I overlooking something? You could certainly do the Bernoulli trials and calculate exactly what the probability of this being pure chance was, couldn't you? In fact, didn't the researcher do that specifically? That's what he was referring to in his quote, right? What was I missing?

So I e-mailed an ecology professor I know who does some really impressive things with statistics in his data. He's very humble about his capabilities, but we all know better. His response? (note: I think I told him 64 people instead of 63, if you want to check these numbers yourself)

An exact probability of 3.4x10-14. That's more unlikely than encountering Moses on The Oval. My criticism: the sample size was ostentatious.
I'll try to remember this example. Good for those teachable moments.

Yes, exactly! (note, "The Oval" is much like "The Quad" at other universities)

Now, I'm not quite sure exactly what he means by the sample size being ostentatious. That is, could this sample size be TOO large? Could that be causing problems? Or does he just think the researchers are being obnoxious and including far too much data?

Regardless, anyone saying that the sample size is too small needs to really think through what that would mean. Why is 63 too small in THIS case? What exactly is being "sampled?" If 1000 people are enough to poll the opinion of a few million people (or much more, actually), then how many people do you need to say something conclusive about the abilities of humans in general? (there are near 7 billion of them in existence now, but that number could change greatly with time)

It's not about sample size. 63 people is plenty.

If you're looking for something to criticize, look elsewhere.

Technorati Tags: telephone telepathy, large sample size, small sample size, sample size, Bernoulli trials, statistics, probability, trials, news, research, study, studies, Reuters

She's 14. She should know about sex, idiot.

For one, does the girl on the left look 14? Evidently I'm a dirty dirty old man.

Moving on, the story is about the HPV vaccine. That's right, it's an HPV vaccine. Sure, it can prevent cervical cancer. However, it's an HPV vaccine. Cervical cancer is linked to the pathogen HPV. Not telling your kids that it's an HPV vaccine is hiding something silly from them. They should know -- it's a vaccine for an STD. If they're 13 or 14, they should know about sex by now. If they don't, you're an idiot for not addressing it with them, and you're basically asking them to learn about it from their peers (which they'll probably do anyway). Additionally, all schools should have had sexual education by that point (unless you live in backwards Deliverance hickville land). Sure, they may not know about STD's yet, but if they know about sex, they're at least ready to talk about STD's with you.

From the story . . .

Cervical cancer vaccine changes 'the talk' for many parents

What they thought would be a routine physical for her volleyball team found 14-year-old Amanda Zaborowski and her mom facing a big question: Did they want Amanda to get a new vaccine that would protect her against the common and serious sexually transmitted disease HPV, or human papillomavirus?

What's the big question? Yes, you want her to get the HPV vaccine!! Are you an idiot?

This was a doctor that her mom, Linda Zaborowski, had trusted since Amanda was a child. She thought the vaccine sounded like a good idea. But she ultimately wanted her daughter to make the decision.

Huh? Are you an idiot?

Do they simply say it's a vaccine against cancer and leave it at that? Or should they also explain that HPV is a sexually transmitted disease that, among other symptoms, causes genital warts?

Are you an idiot?

The next section of the story is called "Growing up faster" and begins . . .

Linda Zaborowski says it was clear that she needed to give Amanda, her eldest daughter, more information than less.

Did you really need to think about that for very long? Concealing SEX from her when she's FOURTEEN is just SILLY.

She started to realize that when she sat in on Amanda's fourth-grade lesson on reproductive anatomy a few years ago and discovered that some girls were already menstruating.

Okay. Now you're really pissing me off. And now is when I stop quoting from the article.

Clearly Amanda was taught about sex in fourth grade. She KNOWS it exists. Sure, she may not know much about it, but she knows that one day she'll be having it. She may not know about STD's. So right now, without knowing about STD's, she thinks sex is just something natural that people do that doesn't have any consequences outside of maybe pregnancy (which, I'm sure, hasn't really sank in yet).

So keeping her from knowing about STD's actually seems to promote sex MORE than telling her about them.

Tell her about STD's. Tell her about all of the complications of sex. Give her information. Make her responsible. She's got an active reproductive system. That's just as much of a weapon as a car is. When she turns 16, you want her to be responsible in her car. Well, now that she's 14, you should give her all the tools to be responsible about her reproductive equipment. After all, women mature faster than men at that age. She'll be able to handle it.

The whole debate is stupid. Would you not give your child an MMR vaccine because the child protested against it?

The vaccine is just good sense. It will be nice when it becomes good common sense.

Technorati Tags: HPV, vaccine, cancer, cervical cancer, young girls, news, current events

Steve Irwin is DEAD!

Stingray Kills 'Crocodile Hunter' Steve Irwin

Steve Irwin, the Australian television personality known as the
"Crocodile Hunter," was killed Monday by a stingray while filming an
underwater documentary. He was 44.

'Crocodile Hunter' Steve Irwin dead

Steve Irwin, the enthusiastic "Crocodile Hunter" who enthralled audiences around the world with his wildlife adventures, died Monday after being stung by a stingray while shooting a TV program off Australia's north coast.

Media reports say Irwin was snorkeling at Batt Reef, a part of the Great Barrier Reef about 9 miles (about 15 kilometers) from the town of Port Douglas, when the incident happened on Monday morning.

Irwin, 44, was killed by a stingray barb that pierced his chest, according to Cairns police sources.

Irwin was in the area to film pieces for a show called "The Ocean's Deadliest" with Philippe Cousteau, grandson of Jacques, Irwin's manager and friend John Stainton told CNN's "American Morning." But weather had prevented the crew from doing work for that program, said Stainton, so Irwin decided to do some softer features for a new children's TV show he was doing with his daughter, Bindi.

"He came over the top of a stingray that was buried in the sand, and the barb came up and hit him in the chest," said Stainton.

Wildlife documentary maker Ben Cropp, citing a colleague who saw footage of the attack, told TIME that Irwin had accidentally boxed the animal in. "It stopped and twisted and threw up its tail with the spike, and it caught him in the chest," said Cropp. "It's a defensive thing. It's like being stabbed with a dirty dagger."

I guess that means his daughter (a child?) was there with him? That's really sad. Well, it's sad either way.

Crazy marine life.

Technorati Tags: steve irwin, crocodile hunter, television, death, stingray, news