Summaries
My recent robotic kick was spurred on when I finally got my Arduino to work. To recap, when I ordered mine, it came with a chip that didn’t have the boot loader on it. I eventually found NKC Electronics and picked up a new chip, with the bootloader, dirt cheap.
I plugged it in, wrote a few test programs and then reached this point where I became very enthoused
http://lastblogger.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/vid-00004.3gp
That’s a servo running off of the Arduino board. It’s only going back and forth, but reaching this point meant that I was 100% confident that I was going to be able to make my robot do something, even if it was only going to be moving a little.
I still have some backlogged stuff to share, and I’m still making headway on the robot. It’s still two step forwards, one step back, but that’s how it goes when you want to try something new and different.
There should be a few more of these in the next little while. Some of you may recall that I had been working on a robot some time ago. Since that time, I’ve bought some more parts, gotten my Arduino working with a new Atmel chip, completely re-designed the chassis (though it looks similar) and have started cutting prototype chassis parts out of 1/8 inch MDF.
I’m going to post some more details including pics and such but for now, here’s a nice little movie of the new design and a few chassis details. Enjoy until I get some more posted.
I’ve finally updated to Wordpress 2.7. I won’t even tell you how far behind I was in my updates because it’s rather embarrassing. Let’s just say I wasn’t quite with the 2.0 crowd yet.
I have to say that I’m absolutely floored to see the massive UI improvements and was shocked to find how easy things were to update. The automatic updating of plugins is another huge development that I’m thrilled to see. Overall I’m fantastically surprised as to just how far the Wordpress team have taken things in a relatively short period of time.
I’ve done the whole Google Gears thing so the backend interface is wicked fast. From what I can gather, Gears pulls down a bunch of things locally so you don’t have to wait on your webserver for anything but dynamic data. It feels like the pages are permanently cashed. Since I have a somewhat slow host, that’s a really nice advantage to have.
Now it’s just a matter of familiarizing myself with the new layout so that I can figure out where my plugin data went…
There’s been a lot of news this past year over manipulated photos. The photos at the centre of the controversies had generally been photoshopped to enhance or minimize elements to suite the story. The most famous was probably that of the photo that had added smoke to a bombed area making it appear as though far more damage had been done. In this case, most people felt that it was wrong because they had changed the meaning of the photo to suite their purposes.
But today I found an example of a set of photos that demonstrate how simple cropping, which does not alter the original photographic content in any way, can be used to significantly skew a situation.
The two sets of crops each demonstrate extremes of either end of the centre picture. From the centre photo, it’s a little unclear as to exactly what’s happening. But either crop sends a clear message, one of violence, the other of caring. Even if post production never happens, the photographer can set up their shot as to exclude some of the aspects that make the situation ambiguous. Depending on whether or not the photographer felt threatened or safe would likely have a huge impact on which way he or she might have moved their lens in the examples above. This would be done to take a photo that conveyed the feeling of the situation (which happens to be from the photographer’s perspective). There can exist no political motivation, no personal slant, yet still the image can end up distorted.
All of this makes it difficult to trust the media in general because even a good, honest photographer can inadvertently mis-represent a situation. Presenting situations in a fair and balanced manner is difficult if not impossible. Unfortunately, it’s left in your hands. It’s up to you to dig in to find out just what it is that’s going on. As I said, it’s difficult but not impossible.
I’ve had my share of oops moments. One of my most embarrassing mistakes was what captured in a photo I like to call experience materialized. But I have to hand it to the guys at CERN. After spending multiple billions on a device many kilometres in diameter that had to be aligned within millimetres. An astounding feat of technology, but given the massive amounts of energy involved and the temperature extremes, being off by a bit can cause problems. Case in point:
This link is more than a few millimtres out of alignment : (
The damage is pretty significant and the LHC will be down for quite a while as the engineers work not only to fix the damage but also make preventative changes to the entire device to avoid the problem from recurring.
It’s a big deal, but when you’re on the cutting edge of science, there are a lot of little details to sort out. When you’re doing things that have never been done before, mistakes will happen. I’m looking forward to it getting up and running though.
Well now we’ve done it.
We’re in it up to our eyeballs at this point. I explained the nuts and bolts of the situation a few days ago, but now things have just gotten ridiculously messy. The Governor General chose to prorogue Parliament. That means that we have another couple of months for this thing to fester.
The major thing that’s causing problems is that the leader of the alliance is someone that Canadians voters have pretty much said, “we don’t really like this guy.” seven weeks ago. That’s muddying the waters a lot. According to the Conservatives, the big controversy is that the Alliance has support of Quebec separatists and that’s just wrong. The only thing with that is that the Conservatives themselves tried to do that in 2004 and they’ve passed legislation with support of the Seperatists, so to me that whole argument is pretty moot.
Ultimately it seems to be boiling down to a question of who Canadians want to lead the country. The problem is that it’s not really our choice since we have a parliamentary system. Polls seem to show that Canadians don’t want any of these jerks in charge. All of them are engaged in a pure political power grab. No matter what any of them say about the economy and the good of Canada, Canadians aren’t that dumb. This looks like a duck and quacks like a duck.
The big problem facing us though is that another election won’t change a thing. This country is insanely polarized right now. Right wing rule has a tendency to do that to a country. Going back to the polls would further entrench voters and we would see very little change in the number of seats that each party holds. It all has the makings of a great big mess.
Perhaps the next two months will bring about some clarity to the very murky picture we see today. Only time will tell, and thanks to the padlock placed on Parliament, that’s one thing we do have.
