The Scale of the Universe 2

This is very cool – an interactive demonstration of the scale of the universe, from the smallest unit of quantum length to the total estimated size of the whole shebang.

I’ve just about got my head around how big the universe is, but at the other end I had no idea that the Planck Length was so small. Now my brain hurts.

No related posts.

Would all of you who picked 26 weeks in the nationwide pool please raise your hands to claim your prizes. Judges will be around shortly to check your tickets.

The fact the loveable scamp Kim Dotcom is involved is just icing on the cake. He should probably be lying low at the moment, preparing for his upcoming and no-doubt amusing trial, not poking his head into national affairs. But Dotcom doesn’t seem the type to fade into the background.

If your ticket reads 18 weeks since arrest before hitting the headlines again please raise your hands, etc, etc.

Now there is nothing wrong with donating money to a politician you support, but Donation lives just down the block from Bribery so the law is fairly strict about candidates revealing who gave them what to keep everyone honest. Money flows like water and a few buckets can do just as well as a single inconvenient barrel.

But anonymous donations are OK, right? You can’t influence someone if they don’t know if the money came from you. Perhaps in theory, but information flows even more quickly than water, particularly if you allegedly ring someone up to tell them.

I am genuinely not accusing Banks of accepting money in exchange for anything. He just appears to have fallen foul of the accounting rules meant to prevent that suspicion if the first place. If he did deliberately try to hide donations then losing his seat should be the least of his problems.

However, the law does not appear to be quite clear cut (well worth a read) and it will be interesting to see if Banks campaign has indeed acted illegally. And if the law was broken, what will be done about it. And if the law was not broken, should it be changed?

Those amongst us hoping the National Government will fall are dreaming, a (currently hypothetical) bi-election will not bring down the government even if Labor wins – which it won’t. On the other hand, even if Banks successful defends himself the government loses a trickle of credibility. And trickles soon add up.

Related posts:

1. Election Time

Now these guys have built a camera fast enough to show the same effect:

Of course, they do cheat a bit by only taking a 1 dimensional slice at a time and relying on the fact that they can repeatably fire identical pulses of light to make their images. Still this is exactly what I imagined it would be like.

Now someone needs to build the high wattage laser targeting system capable of taking out houseflies without blinding humans that I invented when I was 9.

Related posts:

1. The HTML5 Video Tag’s Fatal Flaw

I would also like to take this opportunity to say that I am interested in being captain of the All Blacks during this year’s world cup. I will be holding talks with the All Black management tomorrow, but if unsuccessful I will form my own rugby team and lead it to glorious victory on the field. I have backers and financial support – so there!

No related posts.

This quiz works in much the same way as the last one but I have tweaked the Javascript a little. I never thought that anyone would bother reversing the hash used to hide the answers on the first quiz but one of my friends admitted that they had done just that. A little salt should clear that problem right up.

This is the post you should comment on for hints and bragging. I only ask that you refrain from posting the actual answers, at least for the first few days. I think it is better to let people work things out for themselves.

Related posts:

1. New WordPress Theme

The other big advantage of Python is the useful utility libraries that come with it as standard. Want to send twenty thousand emails? Just import smtplib. Want to generate code based on data from a spreadsheet? Import csv and away you go. Need a file that is exactly 32Mb is size? No problem. These are real examples from my job where Python has saved me many hours.

The most recent use I have put Python to is a slow server. For various murky and uninteresting reasons I need a rate-limiting HTTP server, one that I can easily control the speed at which it sends data. Enter Python’s very handy BaseHTTPServer module, which allows you to create custom HTTP servers with only a few lines of code by subclassing a request handler. Although the BaseHTTPServer is fairly useless for serving real files, it is perfect for this type of thing since it does all the boring work of parsing headers and returning status codes.

I don’t care about the contents of the data, just its size and how long it takes to serve. Since I will be varying these parameters a lot, I decided to make them part of each request so that each request could take a different amount of time – this means I don’t have to restart the server between each test run. Modifying the code to serve actual file data would be very simple.

I enjoyed writing this server so much that I regret that it didn’t take longer. Now I actually have to use it for its intended purpose, which I can assure you is not going to be as pleasant.

Here is the complete Python source:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71

# A very simple HTTP server designed to for testing situations where the data returned
# is not important but the rate at which it comes down is. This server can be started
# using the command: python delayserver.py
#
# Once started, it will listen for requests on port 8000
# Requests should be of the form http://<address>:8000/size=<bytes>,duration=<seconds>
# where: <bytes> is the size of the response data
# and    <seconds> is how long you want it to take (at minimum, it may take longer)
#
# Notes:
# * The timing is pretty inaccurate for small byte sizes, this isn't a problem for
#   what I need it for
# * Press ctrl-c to stop serving
 
 
import time
import BaseHTTPServer
 
class MyHTTPRequestHandler(BaseHTTPServer.BaseHTTPRequestHandler):
 
	def do_GET(self):
		request = self.path.strip("/")
		duration = 1
		size = 1024
 
        	validRequest = False
		params = request.split(",")
		for p in params:
                    temp = p.partition("=")
                    if (temp[0] == "size"):
                        size = int(temp[2])
                        validRequest = True
                    elif (temp[0] == "duration"):
                        duration = int(temp[2])
                        validRequest = True
 
                if (validRequest == False):
                   self.send_error(404)
                   return
 
                self.send_response( 200 )
                self.send_header( "Content-Length", str(size) )
                self.send_header( "Pragma", "no-cache" )
                self.end_headers()
                self.slowWrite( self.wfile, size, duration )
 
 
        def slowWrite(self, output, size, duration):
                bytesWritten = 0
                startTime = time.time()
                while ( bytesWritten < size ):
                        now = time.time()
                        if (duration != 0):
                                desiredBytes = ( (now - startTime) / duration ) * size
                        else:
                                desiredBytes = size
                        desiredBytes = min( size, desiredBytes )
                        if (desiredBytes < bytesWritten ):
                                time.sleep(0.2)
                        else:
                                while (bytesWritten < desiredBytes):
                                        output.write('A')
                                        bytesWritten = bytesWritten + 1
                                output.flush()
                now = time.time()
                self.log_message( "Request took %f seconds",   now - startTime  )	
 
if __name__ == "__main__":
    http = BaseHTTPServer.HTTPServer( ('', 8000), MyHTTPRequestHandler )
    print "Listening on 8000 - press ctrl-c to stop"
    http.serve_forever()

I should point out that I am by no means an expert at Python, so take this code with a pinch of salt.

Related posts:

1. Jumping Frogs – Using Python to Solve Puzzles
2. Arduino POV Device Part II
3. The Boost C++ Libraries Part 4 – boost::date_time

“Once you’ve been tagged… (1) Turn on your MP3 player. (2) Go to SHUFFLE songs mode. (3) Write down the first 25 songs that come up–song title and artist–NO editing/cheating, please. (4) Choose 25 people to be tagged. It is generally considered to be in good taste to tag the person who tagged you.

If I tagged you, it’s because I’m betting that your musical selection is entertaining, or at least amusing.

(To do this, go to “NOTES” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, enter your 25 Shuffle Songs, Click ‘Preview’ below to tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click Publish, the little blue box at the bottom of your screen).”

Damn! I’ve been tagged with the 25 Random Songs meme-virus. Oh well, here goes:

Beauty Has Her Way by Mummy Calls (The Lost Boys Soundtrack)
I listened to The Lost Boys soundtrack religiously when I first got it, and while I still like it a lot there is no denying that it contains far too many sax solos. The whole CD could easily be the soundtrack to Saxophone:The Movie.

Who Put the Bomp (In The Bomp Ba Bomp Ba Bomp) by Barry Mann
I grew up in a small town with only one radio station. Looking back they did a pretty good job of trying to satisfy everyone, but means that I know more about 50s and 60s music than I do about, say New York punk. Anyway, they used to play this song – basically a piss-take on DoWop bands. I still find it hilarious.

E=mcHawking
I explode like a bomb. No one is spared;
My power is my mass times the speed of light squared.
I don’t know where Stephen Hawking finds the time to be both the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge and a hardcore gangster rapper simultaneously.

Pulp Culture by Thomas Dolby
I got this from a Thomas Dolby Best Of, pretty good stuff, although this is not one of the standout songs.

Como Sera by Edgar Joel
I bought an album of salsa music a while ago. It is pretty cheesy.

Merry as a Grig by Van Philips (Ren and Stimpy Production Music)
Ren and Stimpy made a point of plundering recording archives for old-old-timey orchestral music. Lots of muted trumpets and xylophones.
I have just realised I have no idea what a Grig is, nor why one should be merry.

Jango’s Escape by John Williams (Star Wars Episode 2 Soundtrack)
The music was the best part about Star Wars, and this is one of the better pieces.

Christmas is Interesting by Jonathan Coulton
From a CD I ordered online after I downloaded a couple of songs off his website after he was linked to the Wikipedia page on The Mandelbrot Set, of all things.

A Thousand Miles by Vanessa Carlton

Grieg: Peer Gynt Suite #2, Op. 55 – 3. Peer Gynt’s Homecoming
I have a whole bunch of classic CDs in my library, mainly for when I am working and I need to concentrate. I was debating whether to exclude the classical stuff from this list, but it seemed like cheating.

Gummi Bears Theme
For a while I was collecting TV theme tunes. I cannot recall how I got started, but I still have them. This one always makes me smile when it comes up on shuffle – The Gummi Bears was a pretty good show.

The Sixth Sense Malcolm Is Dead – James Newton Howard (A History of Horror)
One fine day about 8 years ago I walked into Borders with too much money. I solved that problem by buying A History of Horror, a two CD set of horror movie themes going back to the 1920s. It has some great music on it, but also some tedious muck (this track lies somewhere in between.)
I recall that I was torn between buying this or BatBoy:The Musical original cast recording. I am still not sure if I made the right decision.

More Than A Feeling – Boston
Sometimes you just have to close your eyes and drift awaaaay… Ironically a song about reminiscing over an old song has turned into an old song that reminds me about my youth. God that makes me feel old, but I bet not as old as it makes the members of Boston feel.

Swear It’s True – The Mockers (25 Years of Kiwi Rock)
I liked The Mockers, but Forever Tuesday Morning is a better song.

Second Solution – The Living End
The Living End are still going, but rebellious punkesque bands really have a hard sell-by date (c.f. Green Day). This is them from their prime.

Crepe Suzette – Cyril Watters (Ren and Stimpy Production Music)
More Ren and Stimpy

Org Con in B flat, Op.4, No.2 – Halleluja
I once help win first place in a quiz by knowing that Handel’s Messuah was first performed in Dublin. I also know it makes for good background music.

I Get a Kick Out of You – Felix Slatkin Ultra-Lounge Volume 3 – Space Capades
The Ultra-Lounge series mines much the same vein as the Ren and Stimpy Music, just from a couple of decades later – lots of 40s and 50s cheese. This is from Space Capades, so there is lots of vibraphone.

Stravinsky: Pulcinella – Scherzino

Symphony No.1, Op.7 ‘Le Poème de la forêt’ in D minor. II. Renouveau

Leave A Tender Moment Alone – Billy Joel
Billy Joel is deeply, deeply uncool. I don’t care, I like it.

Best That You Can Do – Christopher Cross
There is going to be hell to pay when I find out who broke in and planted this in my iTunes library.

William, It Was Really Nothing – The Smiths
You know how I missed out on whole musical trends growing up? One of those trends was The Smiths, the only song I knew was How Soon is Now which I liked. A few years ago I bought a 2CD Best Of The Smiths collection to see what I had missed. And you know what? I hate The Smiths.
How Soon in Now is still pretty cool though.

I Could Be So Good For You – Dennis Waterman
Not sure where this comes from, maybe from my TV Theme collecting days.

Ode To My Family – Cranberries
Everyone of a certain age has either this or Wonderwall by Oasis in their collection.

No related posts.

This was wandering around next to my laptop tonight. I am pretty sure it was a white-tailed spider for two reasons: 1: it was skulking around in the middle of the night with evil intent rather than just sitting in a corner like most of my spiders, and 2: it had a white tail.

The bite of the white-tail spider has a bad reputation for making bits of you drop off. I have always figured that this was an exaggeration and wikipedia backs me up. Still, I have been bitten by similarly sized spiders before and did not find the experience pleasant, so outside he goes. I can’t say I will be too upset if he gets eaten by a tui.

I have a new house rule: anything with more than 4 legs must be able to fit on a fifty cent piece.

No related posts.

A bog standard revenge film, Taken does little to distinguish itself except by being a little more brutal than average. The hero kills and tortures dozens of nameless people to get his idiotic daughter back. Sure, “dey were all bad” (read the previous phrase in an Austrian accent) but half the people killed were only tangentially involved. Of course, the police are no help and are actively working against him – the city of Paris should sue the producers for defamation.

In short, not one of Stephen Seagals best films.

What did you say?

It’s a Liam Neeson movie?

No way!

Not recommended unless you really, really like this sort of thing.

Related posts:

1. Movie Review : Iron Man
2. Movie Review : Watchmen
3. Movie Review : Black Book

Pan’s Labyrinth is the type of magic realism that is not often seen in movies. I guess it resembles older films like The Wizard of Oz and Labyrinth in some ways, but Pan’s Labyrinth is a much darker tale despite featuring such a young protagonist.

This guy has excellent hand-eye coordination

The film is also unusual in that the story focuses more on the events in the real world, while the fantasy elements exist more as a subplot. In fact, you could edit out the fantasy scenes altogether and still have a complete story. The deliberate contrast between the sinister creatures the girl must encounter in her quest with the more mundane human monsters she must live with is well done. This is not a story for young children – the film earns its R16 certification with several gory scenes.

Pan’s Labyrinth is one of the better films I have seen all year; highly recommended!

Related posts:

1. Movie Review : The Avengers
2. Yet Another Movie Review
3. Movie Review: The Departed