Open Hatch

Archive for the ‘Techie Stuff’ Category

I’ve been wanting something like this for some time and may have finally found it. This tool is great:

tag2find

After installation you can “tag” any file with a right-click, then left click “Quick Tag this..”. To “tag” a file means to associate one or more words or phrases with it. Then this tool lets you search for files you have tagged. If you copy or move the file, this background program automatically updates its database – it keeps track of the file for you. This is very useful if you move files around and otherwise have a hard time keeping track of them, or simply don’t like the dozen mouse clicks otherwise necessary to peruse your folder heirarchy

Better still, when you install it, it asks you where you want its tag database to be located. That way, when you inevitably must reformat the Windows hard drive and assuming you maintain the good (nay, crucial) practice of backing up your files to a separate hard drive, this database will still be available and usable.

Another implication of determining the database location is (blathering now) show

The advantage of using an external database is there is no fuss with the varying, incompatible, dysfunctional standards for tagging files themselves. The tag data is external to the file yet perfectly managed in reference to it. Even when you can tag a file in Windows, this often uses file system informational extensions which can get wiped out if you copy the file to another drive (or other media), or worse, if they are copied elsewhere, it may be when you don’t want them to be.

The program runs in the background, apparently does not produce any noticeable slowdown, has a minimalistic and great user interface, and it can integrate with the Windows shell right-click menu (which is what allows you to right-click a file to tag it).

My initial impressions of this tool are very positive – I think this will probably be a keeper.

Best of all, it’s free.

Google Desktop, I hear you say? Problems:

• Privacy – you may not be aware it can submit its search index of your personal files to a server. Superfluous lawsuit and subpoena? There went all your privacy. (Never mind that we have very little privacy by modern practices – unless extreme self-protection is your avocation.)
• Inefficiency; it is behemoth and sluggish because it indexes everything
• As a consequence of 2, it is mostly useless – when I have used it to search for email or file name text I know exists, it hasn’t found it – because it is still indexing the other 90% of useless information on my hard drive, and it hasn’t indexed what I’m looking for yet.
• No file tagging.
• I boycott Google when I can, for reasons I’ve blathered about here too often. Google it under this domain or search “google” in my blog’s (non-Google!) search tool.

Nope. tag2find wins hands down.

[Update 2010-01-31]

Just spotted this YouTube video about an upcoming “next generation” version of this tool. Watching this video, I’m completely baffled why an investor would drop funding for this. The project is apparently and unfortunately lagging for that reason. But watch this video.

They’re also planning an API that will allow external tools to interact with it, including, it seems implied, link tagging (like delicious.com) and web object tracking (such as individual photographs – and/or tags associated with them? – posted to Picasa)? If so, and from that video also, I think the next generation version will be very hot when it comes out.

From here.

The green bacterial looking clusters in the final sequence before it evolves into a blur – that is one of the coolest artistic abstractions I’ve ever seen. But I think the whole sequence is breathtaking.

For example – in Mozilla Thunderbird, to add an RSS feed and manage reading it in a sensible, organized way, you must follow detailed steps involving figures A through P (or 1 to 16; PLUS, if you want to know that this is 16 steps (simply to measure the extent of your technical fatigue), you must count A-P on your fingers. Unless you happen to know off-hand that P is the 16th letter of the English Alphabet. I didn’t.)

[The header of the concluding section of that article says: "That Was Painless". Um, if you're used to following, say, 42-step technical processes in your everyday work, maybe, in comparison.]

This should be a three to four step process:

1. Click the RSS icon in the address bar of Firefox.

2. Select “Subscribe Using Thunderbird”, which should be available by default (if you want Thunderbird to even be in the equation – which, even if it is, Firefox doesn’t tell you in the subscription button – it assumes you just know). Since this is not available by default, you have to follow a 5 step configuration to make that available.

3. Thunderbird comes up with a window, asking “If you want to add [title of RSS feed] to your Thunderbird RSS Subscriptions, select the account and folder you’d like to add it to.” – providing drop-down menus to select the account and folder.

Theoretically, it’s possible to get it down to such a three or four step task (and that page only got me heading in the general right direction). I haven’t gotten it to work. And this is in lieu of many more hacking steps I’d really rather avoid.

I thought these two applications were kinda cuddly friends? My exploration of the idea doesn’t find any proof..

If you’re reading this today (10-14-2009) you’ve got about an hour and a half to grab this game campaign I made (while I was at Ninjabee) free – for download to the iPhone. Search for Kaloki Love. Ninjabee’s post about it is here (link). A previous post about this campaign is in my blog here (link).

Only a few months ago, researchers at Yale unveiled the first Electronic Quantum Processor.

It operates on two qubits, which exist in multiple states simultaneously (that’s the quantum mechanical aspect). When they add more qubits, they’ll be able to calculate multiples of multiple states in one processor cycle.

Excerpt:

Because of the counterintuitive laws of quantum mechanics, however, scientists can effectively place qubits in a “superposition” of multiple states at the same time, allowing for greater information storage and processing power.

For example, imagine having four phone numbers, including one for a friend, but not knowing which number belonged to that friend. You would typically have to try two to three numbers before you dialed the right one. A quantum processor, on the other hand, can find the right number in only one try.

“Instead of having to place a phone call to one number, then another number, you use quantum mechanics to speed up the process,” Schoelkopf said. “It’s like being able to place one phone call that simultaneously tests all four numbers, but only goes through to the right one.”

What is the potential? Here’s a way to spell it out mathematically, going off Wikipedia’s article on the topic:

A classical computer has a memory made up of bits, where each bit represents either a one or a zero. A quantum computer maintains a sequence of qubits. A single qubit can represent a one, a zero, or, crucially, any quantum superposition of these; moreover, a pair of qubits can be in any quantum superposition of 4 states, and three qubits in any superposition of 8. In general a quantum computer with n qubits can be in an arbitrary superposition of up to 2n different states simultaneously (this compares to a normal computer that can only be in one of these 2n states at any one time).

Where that describes a pair of qubits (two) in a superposition of 4 states, this means the qubits are in 4 different states at the same time. Following this, a trio of qubits (three) are in a superposition of 8, so that it follows the order of exponents or powers, which proceed like this:

• 2 qubits = 2 to the second power (2^2) = superposition of 4 simultaneous states
• 3 qubits = 2 to the third power (2^3) = superposition of 8
• 4 qubits = 2 to the fourth power (2^4) = superposition of 16
• 5 qubits = 2 to the fifth power (2^5) = superposition of 32..

With each additional qubit, the simultaneous states (or superpositions) doubles, so that:

• 8 qubits = 2 to the eighth power (2^8) = superposition of 256..
• 16 qubits = 2 to the sixteenth power (2^16) = superposition of 65,536..
• 32 qubits = 2 to the thirty-second (2^32) = superposition of 4,294,967,296..
• 64 qubits = 2 to the sixty-fourth (2^642) = superposition of 18,446,744,073,709,551,616..

What is that last extremely large number leading with an 18? That’s eighteen quintillion – going from thousands, to millions, to billions, to trillions, to quadrillions, to quintillions. More precisely, almost 18-and-a-half quintillion.

What does this all mean? Current computers operate in Gigahertz, meaning a billion calculations in one second; a computer processor with a speed of 3 Gigahertz runs around 3 billion calculations in one second.

(This is staggering, just by itself.)

When they create a sixty-four qubit quantum computer, it will be capable of running a calculation requiring around 18 and a half quintillion guesses in a few clock cycles (only a few millionths of a second).

Carl Sagan, eat your heart out.

Don’t get too excited yet. They haven’t figured out how to even build a computer around this yet. It’s only a processor.

But it’s a quantum processor. A two-bit quantum-processor, with quantum logic gates and a quantum bus.

With this kind of power, you’ll be able to find the 39-digit number which, when you run it through an image processing algorithm, will by algorithmic decompression happen to exactly match a digital image which without compression takes 1 gigabyte to store, but once you find the one out of 5 duodecillion 39-digit “fingerprint” numbers that match the image, you’ll be able to losslessly “compress” the image to only several hundred bytes. I don’t necessarily know what I’m really talking about here, but it will be something like that.

You live in a Star Trek universe.

One day, possibly in your future, this will look something like this article.

[Myeh. The Wordbook plugin copied the first draft with an innacuracy too soon at FaceBook, and I can't change it.]

I’ve become fascinated and very impressed by public-key encryption, which I’d never understood, but have now read up on at Wikipedia.

With this setup, you and you only hold a private decryption “key”. You also have a public encryption key. Anyone can encrypt anything with your public key, but anything so encrypted with your public key can only be decrypted with your private key. Your public key can therefore be completely public.
Read the rest of this entry »

As you know if you’ve been reading this blog, I’m a huge fan of these “Electric Sheep” images and the screensaver.  This morning I’ve started describing it in more detail at my Wiki page.

I’ve figured some basic ways to create my own original “children” Sheep by cross-breeding Sheep that someone else designed.  I’ve rendered them at a resolution to please virtually any computer “wallpaper” collector.  In the following two galleries, the link that says “open full image (click) ” is your friend

The first gallery is of the “parents” whose genes I crossed to create various children.  (Adobe Flash is required to view the galleries.)

The following gallery is of the “children” (original creations!) whom I thought were pretty.  (I killed the others.)  Some of these were found by panning, zooming, and scrolling through their loop animation with Apophysis.  Again the “open full image (click)” link is your friend.

Feel free to use and reuse these for any purpose.  The license is Creative Commons attrib. share-alike – and I request credit given to Richard Alexander Hall in reuse.  If you make derivative works from these, they’re completely yours.

I’d wait until I’ve added these to a page to market them as available for print on a huge poster (+ 2′ x 4′, like this one), but I haven’t the patience.  (I want to redesign that whole pick-a-sheep page as a blog page, anyway).  I’ve created some pretty things, and the world must know about it now!

Great news.  iTunes will drop copy protection on every song they sell.

If they also adopted LAME mp3 as their default encoder, added support for .ogg files to the iPod, reduced the software and memory footprint of iTunes by about half (it is such a hog!), and announced an iTunes extensibility/add-on API, I’d be wowed.

I use Winamp, but don’t really recommend it to people.  It’s a nerd’s music toy.  I use plugins with it that let me do a number of things:

• Rate songs, sort into cue folders (such as “edit”, “re-rip”, “audition”), send to recycle bin, etc. – using keyboard shortcuts (which really speeds up music tryouts)
• Auto-sort and rename files by my own custom preferences
• Rip from various video game music formats
• Play back a wide variety of music formats
• Navigate and cue music from a branching directory view
• Copy files anywhere merely by dragging them from the playlist
• Backup library and rating information
• Sync my collection (including “smart views” – which iTunes calls “smart playlists”, which for example will play all songs of genre x or y above a rating of 3, or everything with an “audition” comment in the tags, etc!) with my iPod.

That is all thanks to Winamp’s open plugin API, which invites the good will and genius of thousands of people who program so many plugins voluntarily.  iTunes can do only the last two on that list, and backing up the library never saved song ratings for me (that was several versions ago, so maybe they’ve clued into allowing that by now – I don’t know).

Winamp also has play/pause/rewind etc. keyboard shortcut capability “out of the box”.  It is also skinnable, meaning the way it looks can be very customized (thousands of skins have been created I’d guess), and optionally change at random with every played song.

Based on feedback I got from a post I made to the Electric Sheep user’s forum (here – including from the creator of the screen saver himself!) on the.. electric fleece? – I updated them.  Many ready-to-order examples at my zazzle page.

I’ve unintentionally mislead people to thinking I designed the images in that page (linked from the previous post).  No – others have designed them; they are from an “electric sheep” screensaver.  I’ll update the top of the page to clarify (because it credits the electric sheep way down at the bottom.)

People that submit these images to the render farm which the screensaver coordinates – people use a program called Apophysis to design these “sheep”.  Coincidentally though, I have come on that program and used it independently.  I used it as the basis of the following image, which I worked up further in Painter X.  This is a large thumbnail – click it for the original huge size.

My first Apophysis-related image.

I’ve mentioned this electric sheep screen saver. Here’s one mpg from it.

I may find a way to batch convert them and incorporate them into the blog design. That won’t make it impossible for you to read.. Click either “play now” or “play in popup” to see it. If either of those don’t work, click the download link and have a look at it in Windows Media Player.

The screen saver has downloaded a bajillion of these goodies into its cache on my machine. Eye candy. I think this one is morphing between four different “sheep” IDs.

Referring to the previous entry, good luck with the truth anyway if the internets are against you.

Wow.  Bizarre twists on meaning become dominant and obliterate everything else.

(Except for one brilliant article pointed it out, and I’m posting about it, and you’re reading it.  Maybe it is always free or bound to be free.)

Ah ha ha!

“The truth will make us strong.”

I’m waiting for more.  Please.  Feed me another verse.  I’ll start compiling it into a Windows Bible.  Not that there isn’t at least one already.

I ran across this today and tried it – so worth it.

It’s a screen-saver that does mutating, “genetic” computer-generated animated art for your screen-saver, and distributes these across the internet to everyone else who has the screen-saver installed, and users can vote for or against the various “electric sheep” (up arrow key votes yes, down votes no) so that cooler ones get promoted.  I took the following image from the sites gallery of current images (which fluctuates – they render new “sheep” images from user’s machines during idle time/bandwidth) and scaled it up – it’s a desktop now.

This is a link to the image because the thumbnail isn’t working for some reason.

I love that MATRIX screen-saver I found and will probably go back to it from time to time.  Meanwhile, this.

My wife has a legal copy of Adobe CS2 purchased from BYU Bookstore when she was a student at BYU.

Today, mysteriously, every time Photoshop would boot up it would close automatically, no questions asked, no statements made, no crash – just.. gone.

Exasperated that reinstalling it and several other things didn’t fix it, I started looking through Windows system services one by one, googling them, and shutting down ones that I don’t want (I want a way to make those not start – there must be some kind of service blocker tool out there..). I ran across one entitled “Adobe LM Service”, which starts automatically at system boot, and googled it. I found this page, which informs me that the cause of the problem is spyware – which was installed by Adobe with CS2.  It says: show