Seattle Trip

Visited Seattle for the first time -- I like the city.  It has a lot in common with both Vancouver and San Francisco, including slightly cheesy waterfront tourist district.

Went on the Underground Seattle tour (definitely worth doing) as it gave a good history of the city.  Also went up in the Space Needle.  Toured Boeing factory to look at the Dreamliners being assembled.

New Eevorg screen shot

After mucking around for some time, I've managed to dust off my old Eevorg code and incorporate it (with minimal bells and whistles) in to a basic MFC application.  We are rendering with interpolation, to support multiple zoom scales across the child hierarchy.

We also have a simple mechanism to back up (showing the parent to the left of the current eevorg).

Still to be done, is to implement:

• a persistence mechanism 
• some properties (state count, entropy, maybe lookup table, maybe favorite button)
• filtering of later generations, to eliminate the aliases in the bottom of some of the eevorg
• implement as an OpenGL rendering (would take care of filtering using texture mipmaps)

Of course, we would like to implement as a web service so that people can use a browser to browse the eevorg.  And eventually maybe an iPhone/iPad app would be pretty nifty too...

DarwinTunes.org and Crowdsourcing

DarwinTunes.org reminds me of my idea for evolving ragtime MIDIs from this blog post Ragtime Music and Crowdsourcing.  But I think both ideas are really just recapping what happens musically around the world, which is that particular musical "memes" are heard by different musicians and thus spread.  So the most successful memes become most prevalent, and less successful ones slowly fade away.

What makes a musical meme successful?  Maybe its ability to be used to invoke particular emotions.  Or maybe it is that it can flexibly invoke different emotions given different contexts (maybe this is where my interest in the  Eastern European modalities comes from)

Snoopy (Charles Schultz) Museum Trip

For the holidays, we went to visit the Snoopy Museum in Santa Rosa. It is adjacent to the Redwood Empire Ice Rink, which Schultz started with his wife.

The museum has a little of interesting memorabilia (including some items that I once owned as a child).

I've been reading "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain"

I remember reading Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain when I was in Junior High, but I don't really remember how much drawing I did as a result.  But it insired to try a quick drawing, so I picked up the Ford Edge mailer I got today:

So I probably need to work on the perspective a bit, but at least I remember some of the things about "switching to R-mode".  Maybe I should try "switching to R-mode" more often...

Code Hygiene and Medical Devices

I've been thinking about code hygiene of late.  I recall Ekkehard (at the time the VP of engineering for Siemens OCS) giving a talk about code hygiene, arguing that diligence about design and coding was an essential part of device development. This was based on his experience involving a few instances where sloppy coding resulted in malfunctions in the field.

Having experienced similar field issues due to non-hygienic design practices, I do feel quite strongly that meticulous coding and design are an important part of medical device development. I guess you can't always know that a 'sloppy' design will invariably increase the likelihood of a malfunction, but it is a feeling probably somewhat akin to the OCD-like behavior that surgeons often exhibit outside the operating room (i.e. once you've developed a sense of hygienic vs. non-hygienic, its difficult to turn off that sense even in situations where there is a low likelihood of something bad happening).

Trip to Jack London State Park

Went on drive to Jack London State Park in Sonoma Country. I never realized Jack London was a socialist (no, not the name-calling type of today, but rather a real socialist).