Justin Lloyd's Thinkering

Somebody needs to think about this stuff...

Archives for 1998

Portable Power Sockets For Your Home?

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Never understood why houses and offices are not built with arrays of inductive coils laid out in a cellular mesh and embedded directly in to the walls.

We could just have a normal electrical power socket with a suction cup on the back that you stick on the wall that draws power directly from the inductive mesh.

Boom!

Instant power socket where ever you need it.

You could embed the mesh directly into the dry wall and let it electrically isolate itself whenever it is cut.

The mesh layout would also be robust enough to route power around areas that have been cut.

If you made each portable, remote power socket addressable, i.e. with an IP address and a small microcontroller built in to it, you could directly control the power socket from a central system. Switch lights on and off, monitor power draw, and so on.

Studying – The great photographers

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This month I am studying “The great photographers” and also “Female character drawing”

On-line study, with instructor lead discussions. I am combing this area of study with the female character drawing as the drawing class is too slow for my tastes.

Four, two hour sessions plus some self study for the photographers class. My 2nd month of “Female Character Drawing”

Paper – Integrative Windowing

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Today I read a paper titled “Integrative Windowing”

The abstract is:
In this paper we re-investigate windowing for rule learning algorithms.

We show that, contrary to previous results for decision tree learning, windowing can in fact achieve significant run-time gains in noise-free domains and explain the different behavior of rule learning algorithms by the fact that they learn each rule independently.

The main contribution of this paper is integrative windowing, a new type of algorithm that further exploits this property by integrating good rules into the final theory right after they have been discovered.

Thus it avoids re-learning these rules in subsequent iterations of the windowing process.

Experimental evidence in a variety of noise-free domains shows that integrative windowing can in fact achieve substantial run-time gains.

Furthermore, we discuss the problem of noise in windowing and present an algorithm that is able to achieve run-time gains in a set of experiments in a simple domain with artificial noise..

Very Large Data Sets for Compression

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An idea I have been pondering recently is using very large data-sets as a means to compression. Two parties want to exchange large amounts of data over a very limited amount of bandwidth, they can’t agree up front what data will be exchanged in the future, but they can agree for now to both receiving two identical copies of a very large amount of data that is indexed using a sliding window with the index of each piece of data stored in a lookup table.

So now each party has a large lookup table of robust CRC’s or equivalent, and each CRC maps to a piece of data in the larger data set. Both parties go off to opposite sides of the world and connect over a slow connection to each other, when one party wants to transmit a sizable amount of data to the other party the first party would scan through they local copy of the large data set, looking for either identical data matches, recording the identical match index in to the data set, or “close enough” matches, recording the index and the differences. Then the first party could transmit these indices, or indices and differences to the other party.

It would also be possible to create this large data set either from a very large prime number or a sufficiently random, non-repeating, seedable sequence if both parties agree to the random number algorithm and seed in advnace.

Obiously if we are going to store this much data then hard drives need to come down in price. I’m thinking for this to be a valid experiment you would require at least 500GB, possibly even 1TB of data storage to test out this idea but it would be interesting to see.

With this technique it would be possible to transmit web pages or binary data across slow connections much faster than what is currently possible, though as bandwidth increases in the future the value of the idea becomes less important.

Studying – Software project management

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This month I am studying “Software project management”

Have done project management for quite a few software projects so far but I think some formal training in the subject wouldn’t hurt.

Open University has a non-credit course being offered and best of all, I don’t have to watch any of those terrible videos from the 1970’s.

This is an on-line class delivered via a website (ooh! fancy!) and some interactive conference calls with the instructor and other class members.

It is three months long, but none of the material is gated. There are no team based project assignments from what I can see. Just a bunch of reading, a couple of essays and two multi-choice exams. This should be pretty easy in terms of workload.

There is a five-day optional residency that goes with the course I am going to take as well.

Update: Done with all the class work. Will take the residency in late August and then I am done.

Are you there god?

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If you could be a god, the only god in fact, a supreme being, in an alternative reality, would you do it?

Let’s assume this reality is just a big simulation on a powerful computer.

You would “live” in that reality for as long as you like, but once you step in, you cannot leave.

If you could be god in a virtual reality and give up this reality, would you?

Why not?

What’s the difference?

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