Yeah, about that coding problem. More of the same. This one is about generating temperature and humidity estimates with a single latitude / longitude input using the point measurements of the National Weather Service nearest the point of interest, and interpolating in a useful and hopefully likely manner. As a project, it gets its own static page, right here.
Archive for category Technology
Astrotron
May 29
Aw, man, I got this… this… coding problem. I keep finding myself writing things that only I would have a use for. So on my iPad, I found this App called “Emerald Observatory”, and I was so, so impressed. First, it’s pretty. Really pretty. Second, it’s full of astronomical data, useful stuff. And I thought to myself, wow… I really like some of this.
Then (oh, no…) I began to think about what parts of it I would like to use, that is, have directly available to me. So I wrote those nice folks, complementing them sincerely on what a nice App they had come up with (check it out, you won’t regret it), and suggesting they write what I had in mind, because actually, they sort of had the data in the app already, it was just a matter of organizing it differently. I got a nice reply, thanking me for the suggestion, but allowing as to how they had a lot to do, and so it would be “on their list.”
In e-tech, publishers look to be an obsolescent cog. They exist(ed?) with books in a legitimate role because someone needs to take on the cost of printing a physical book, shipping it to a store, etc., and your typical author can’t afford to do that. With an e-book, the costs – such as they are – are handled by the retailer (Apple, Amazon, smaller sellers – even the author.)
Speaking as someone somewhat familiar with the industry, publishers, long known for providing only minimal advances and the smallest possible royalty to the actual artist (the author(s) and illustrator(s)), appear to have no role in the e-book ecosphere.
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Trying to figure out if there is an aurora, and if it can be photographed, really requires looking at some different kinds of data. One is the earth’s magnetosphere; how disturbed is it? That’s what causes auroras. That information has to be obtained from the GOES satellites, or magnetometers on the ground (I find the satellites to be a better indicator.) Another is the weather – if it’s cloudy, give up now. Then visibility comes into play – fog will kill the opportunity just as quickly as clouds. You can get that from NOAA (or whoever is your local weather provider if you’re not in the US.) But what if the moon is above the horizon? That’ll kill it too, at least, if the moon is showing any significant crescent. And of course, along those same lines, the sun has to be below the horizon. The moon and sun information can be calculated.
After repeatedly looking all this stuff up, and occasionally forgetting an important issue (like, is it cloudy?) before I drove out to my dark viewing area with my camera gear, I finally decided to pull all the information together into one handy place. And here it is, sized to fit on my iPod’s display, too. Further, since all the data is in one place, I have the underlying engine SMS me if conditions are right for an aurora; also, as long as I keep a browser open to the page, the page auto-refreshes.
The underlying processes keep an eye on things for me, updating their snapshots of satellite data and weather and lunar and solar states every five minutes. So I can be out and about, and if things look hot, I’ll get a text message on my cellphone. How cool is that?
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Aurora time lapse
Apr 6
This is 40 still frames from my EOS50D, taken the evening of the onset of the April 3-4-5-6 geomagnetic storm, all from the same point and with the same camera settings. I used Canon’s 50mm ƒ/1.4 lens, wide open, after manually focusing it on a star. All these shots were taken at ISO 3200, 4 seconds exposure, then combined using the Mac’s movie software and converted from .dv to .mp4 using Handbrake, and from thence to flickr.
In and amongst the fevered pro-iPad ravings today, I thought I’d throw a bit of a wrench in the works, as I’m not of the opinion that the thing is all it could have been. Mind you, I’m definitely pro-iPad, I think it’s a great device, I just think it could have been a lot better.
With that in mind, here are some things I really think can be done better:
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We’ve got a Droid and a couple of older not-that-smart phones on our 3-way Verizon plan. The Droid is relatively new, and we’ve all been interested in it; Deb (she’s the one with the Droid) just loves the thing. After we’d all had time to look it over and consider our options, we decided we were all interested in owning one. So we called Verizon, and they described a “two for one” price offer, where you end up paying about $200 “for two phones” (I realize these are subsidized, this is simply how they describe it), along with an increase of $20/month on each of the other two phones ($40/month increase in total) for the “unlimited data plan”, as compared to the more modest data plans we already had on those phones.
We thanked them, waited for person #3 (eldest son, Brian) to become available, and explained the terms. He liked the idea, so we called them back about 20 minutes after the original call to “do the deal.” Things didn’t go well.
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Google Base
Mar 5
Recently, I’ve had an opportunity to help a friend utilize Google Base.
I searched for Traxxas Slash; these are web results (and an ad.) To use Base, I'll click the link I've circled at the top in red.
I agreed to write the code necessary to create the file that packages his inventory (over 30,000 items) for Base, do the uploading, and generally handle the process for him. What could go wrong? It’s Google, right? A company with enormous respect from the technical community, a huge web presence, and a mantra of “do no wrong.” Well. That’s what makes this worth writing about.
I didn’t think it would take a lot of time to implement as I wrote his entire e-commerce system for him and was familiar with the lay of the land, as it were, and in that, at least, I was right. Base is very easy to integrate with; using Python, it only took me a few hours to be able to generate the required data file to Google’s specifications. Uploading the resulting data file to Google is trivial. But… unfortunately, Base has many problems that go far beyond just uploading a correct data file to the system.
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![fyngyrz posted a photo: The map location here shows where I was when I took the photo, rather than the photo itself. I was looking west (obviously) from the north end of the church parking lot which itself is north of Bonnie Street, and south of Airport Road. I jockeyed around until I had the sun completely behind the radar housing, and then shot a few shots at different exposures, hoping that the 50D's dynamic range would catch the gradation in the sky; it did ok, but I still wish we had another couple of high quality bits of dynamic range. Maybe the next camera generation will go there. Canon EOS 50D [modified IR response in Hα range], hooded Sigma EF-S 30mm ƒ/1.4 EX DC HSM prime [ø62mm] w/B&W 62mm IR/UV cut filter #65-014691; RAW to JPEG conversion and editing in Aperture 3.](http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4078/4912161604_6cd46bace2_m.jpg "fyngyrz posted a photo: The map location here shows where I was when I took the photo, rather than the photo itself. I was looking west (obviously) from the north end of the church parking lot which itself is north of Bonnie Street, and south of Airport Road. I jockeyed around until I had the sun completely behind the radar housing, and then shot a few shots at different exposures, hoping that the 50D's dynamic range would catch the gradation in the sky; it did ok, but I still wish we had another couple of high quality bits of dynamic range. Maybe the next camera generation will go there. Canon EOS 50D [modified IR response in Hα range], hooded Sigma EF-S 30mm ƒ/1.4 EX DC HSM prime [ø62mm] w/B&W 62mm IR/UV cut filter #65-014691; RAW to JPEG conversion and editing in Aperture 3.")
