Rotating Android Videos

Android phones have been able to take videos since Android 1.5 launched early this year. However, if you take a video in portrait orientation, it is exceedingly painful to get the movie rotated to display correctly, e.g., when uploaded to Youtube. I wrote a knol on rotating 3gp videos (hello knol, this page still hasn't made it into Google web search!?) but I hear that the iPhone 3GS actually solves this the way it should be solved: on the phone.

Clock reads 5:30 when it should read 9:30

One of the LEDs in the seven-segment displays on our oven clock broke. Interestingly enough, the failure maps two valid numbers to two other valid numbers and that's as bad as it gets for a single permanently-off segment.

The segment that broke is denoted by "B" in the diagram on the left. The seven segments can represent any 7-bit string and the Hamming(7,4) code is capable of encoding 16 values with error correction for any single-bit error, so the common representation of the digits is sub-optimal from a fault-tolerance perspective. Can this be improved while maintaining human readability?

A wet weekend

Martin after the sailing race
Originally uploaded by Hein

Last weekend was rather wet -- first I got drenched on Saturday bicycling back from the climbing gym at 40% chance of rain and Sunday I sailing with Martin. I only took a single picture because most of the time we were either busy with the boat or busy getting rained on. Finally a good excuse to put all that mountaineering gear to test :-) (It was definitely a time for hard shells.)

To round things up, it hailed on Sunday night but now the sun is shining again for a clean start of the week.

Weekend reading: Glennkill

While traveling this weekend I read a book in German, the first in a long time. Glennkill (English translation) is a sheep detective story--set in Ireland, its protagonists are sheep whose shepherd has been murdered. The sheep talk among each other and can understand humans, but humans can't understand the sheep; this gives rise to many funny misinterpretations. Of course there is a fair amount of suspense as well, and the book makes for an altogether fun light read.

Weekend reading: Little Brother

This weekend I picked up Little Brother (at the library). It is the best "near future science fiction" book I have read this year.

Set in San Francisco a few years from now, we witness a revolt by young geeks against the police state imposed by the Department of Homeland Security in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on the bay bridge. The students use a network of game consoles to establish a darknet. In civil disobedience, they organize an unapproved rock concert and fool the government's surveillance tactics. The novel is technically well researched and I enjoyed being taken to familiar places around San Francisco -- Dolores Park, the Tenderloin, the ruins of Sutro Baths.

The suspense and the geek humor made it hard to put down this book and I finished it in little over 24 hours. It also left me a bit paranoid. I brought up again my tor node (you should too!) and started wondering what happened to Freenet...

Library books I read this year

Six words each better than nothing.

1. Near-future SF: suspend less disbelief

Pattern recognition: a quest for superhuman art (reprise).
Execution Channel: fake bloggers and other media fabrications.
Halting state: Augmented-reality role playing games predicted.
Snow crash: Avatars invented but like comic book.

2. Detective&spy stories with a twist

An ordinary spy: agent turned novelist, reminds of Greene.
A death in Vienna: no weeping Nietzsche, but Freud appears.
Back to Bologna: Zen's penultimate, a comedy of errors.

3. Everything else that I finished reading

Kafka on the shore, Sputnik sweetheart, After dark: must reads, but in small doses.
China road: by bus and lorry across China.
The prophet: not sure whether I finished; avoid.

Sailing

Today Martin took us sailing again on the bay. It was awesome, even though we didn't make it all the way to Alcatraz; the spray just got too annoying so we turned toward calmer waters near Berkeley.

Later we played Puerto Rico. Imagine my surprise when I won (by a tiny margin) -- I am usually really bad a board games and even had a hard time tallying my score at the end.