Personal blather about one of my favorite people – Me! (This should not be a common topic, actually…)
Too tired to do a real post at the moment. I’ve seen other bloggers do this “Open Thread” thing, inviting readers to post comments about whatever the heck they want so as to make the blog look more active without actually having to post anything. So what the heck. Real post in the next 24 hours hopefully, but in the meantime, what’s on everyone’s minds?
Oh, yeah, and am I right that typical cola drinks are about 3 mM phosphate (as phosphoric acid)?
I suppose this is slightly off the usual topics for this blog, but what the heck.
Asterisk® software is an open-source system for computer telephone stuff. Yes, I did just say “telephone stuff” instead of “PBX, VoIP, and Telephony”. Cope. Anyway, it’s an entirely legally-free (aside from the cost of a computer and any desired additional equipment) replacement for the kinds of many-thousands-of-dollars proprietary software systems that your cable TV and telephone companies use to prevent you from talking to human beings on the phone (so they can fire most of them, and outsource the rest to India or the Philipines or Florida or China or whatever other “developing” area has cheap low-grade labor). In other words, they seem to use their telephony system mainly for telephony prevention. The fact that “The Man™” uses the power of a PBX for evil in this way shouldn’t trick you into thinking that having your own is a bad thing, though. For example, my Minister of Domestic Affairs was recently in Australia for work. Since calls back to the US on the cellphone cost $1.50/minute, I set up a voice-over-IP client on her computer before she left. She could then use her computer’s internet connection to connect to the Asterisk box at no extra cost. The Asterisk box could then forward her Voice-Over-IP call out our residential phone line to my cellphone – a local call for the Asterisk box. No $1.50/minute for “The Man™”! Take that, The Man!
(Oh, “PBX”? That’s Private Branch eXchange. It’s a fancy way of saying it’s your own personal robotic Ernestine the Operator for your house or office.)
I discovered Asterisk a few years ago and have been puttering with it off and on. I figured if I wanted to learn how to use it, it’d be a good, simple start to replace my answering machine with it. It was a little trickier than I thought. I got my hands on a working “X100P“-type card, which is really just a specific variety of cheap voice-modem that was used originally for early development of Asterisk prior to the fancier hardware being developed. This connects my Asterisk box to the phone line. Like my old answering machine, it shares the line with an ordinary telephone that it doesn’t control.
Googling turned up all kinds of information on getting Asterisk to answer the phone and do all kinds of amazing tricks, but not a lot about controlling the answering in the first place. I wanted it to act like my old answering machine. It wasn’t answering the phone and taking messages that was hard to figure out, it was getting it to not answer the phone if someone in the house beat Asterisk to it.
I couldn’t find any references to this anywhere online at the time (and still can’t, actually, though they may be out there). Asterisk doesn’t seem to have any way – at least not with the X100P – to explicitly detect when another device picks up the shared line, but I came up with a workaround.
Now, when the lines starts ringing, I have Asterisk wait 11 seconds (which works out to about 3 rings) before doing anything. Then, I have it explicitly check for one more second to see if the line is still ringing. If not, the assumption is that someone picked up the phone and Asterisk leaves it alone. If it DOES detect one more ring, it picks and and carries on with whatever incoming-call magic I feel like programming into it – like detecting and saving incoming faxes. A copy of the relevant portion of my dialplan for any other Asterisk users out there who care may be found at the end of the post.
Once the house-hunting frenzy I’m in the middle of dies down, I’d like to start adding some nerdier features. For example, we’re moving to Southeast Texas, where there are occasional tornado warnings. Apparently, the National Weather Service’s warnings online contain embedded geographic information defining the boundaries of the warning area. I could have Asterisk watch the warnings page, and call my cellphone to tell me if I have to worry about tornadoes or not. (Kind of silly, I know…). It’d also be nice to finally test the fax reception that hypothetically is set up to work on my Asterisk box, too. (Dang crippled Motorola cellphones won’t let me fax despite supposedly supporting Class 1 fax mode, among other missing features…But that’s another post for another time.)
And now, the dialplan (or fragment thereof) (Update 20080523, fixed missing “]” after “[incoming”):
[incoming] ;give time to allow for someone to pick up 'regular' phone before asterisk does exten => s,1,Wait(11) ;pause to check for one last ring, just in case someone picks up at the last second exten => s,n,WaitForRing(1) ;So, you get 11 seconds - about 3 rings - to answer the phone. ;after that, Asterisk waits one more second for another ring. ;obviously if someone has picked up the phone before then, ;that last ring will never come and Asterisk will leave the call alone. ;otherwise, answer the phone: exten => s,n,Answer() ;supposedly this will correctly jump to the fax extension if it's an incoming fax ;give announcement that ain't nobody here.. ;(after waiting 3 seconds in case of fax tone detection) exten => s,n,Wait(3) exten => s,n,Background(nobody-but-chickens) ;...then go to 'leave a message' like a normal (if extremely powerful) answering machine exten => s,n,Voicemail(9000) exten => s,99,Hangup() ;end of line for now
Any questions?…
Carl Zimmer wrote a book. Of course, that’s no reason to hate him, and I don’t hate him for that.
His book is all about Escherichia coli (“E.coli”). The friggin’ “Microsoft” of the biotech world. Accursed E. coli, hogging up all the print space and protocol development and sucking up electricity for -80°F freezers. I mean, come on people! You could be doing transformation of B. subtilis and related organisms instead, which form nice, sturdy endospores which you can dry out and keep in an any cool, dry place, no -80°F freezer needed! Or you could use something like Agrobacterium tumefaciens, and as a bonus be able to then transfer your nice transformed genes into plants, too! But NOOOOOooo….it’s always “E.coli, E.coli, E.coli.” DAMN YOU, E.COLI!
Of course, none of that is Carl Zimmer’s fault, either, so this is also no reason to hate him.
Now, if his book was lousy, that MIGHT be a reason to hate him, but as far as I can tell there’s no reason to think the book is lousy, so this is no reason to hate him either. In fact, that’s kind of the problem.
No, the reason I Hate Carl Zimmer is that he’s written a book about friggin’, stage-hogging E.coli…and I want it. (Well, a copy of it anyway.) It sounds like a very interesting book. I feel like a Republican who wants a copy of “The Audacity of Hope”. Or a Democrat who wants to plan a vacation to visit the George W. Bush Presidential Library. The cognitive dissonance torments me, and it’s all Carl Zimmer’s fault! CURSE YOU CARL ZIMMER!
Okay, got that out of my system. A review might follow eventually if I manage to get a copy of the book. Meanwhile, for a change of pace, anybody want to hear about my Asterisk setup? Or should I just get back to the fermentation stuff?
P.S. Here’s a bit of trivia for you: “Frig” is apparently an old-English word meaning “to wiggle”…
Once I dove in and started messing around, I only had to fix two typos as the example I was working on seems to work correctly, at least to the extent that I’ve tested it. I now have what appears to be a working example of Geostring parsing in PHP. In this case, the example reads my feed from the Twitter website, sifts out any geostring tags it finds, then generates Google Maps links for each one found. As I write this, there are two geostring tags on that page, representing places (and times)
that I have actually been, and it seems to work.
You can take a look at the source code for the example here, or see it in action here.
Feel free to grab a copy to play with if you’d like (or write one yourself that isn’t so messy – hey, as someone who doesn’t consider himself a professional “coder”, I’m just happy that it did exactly what I wanted it to do on the first try…). You should only need to worry about two things – changing the $text_to_read, and whether or not your web server (or CLI) has fopen wrappers turned on so the script can read another web page if you use a web page as your text to parse rather than a local file.
Since generating a geostring tag is trivial, I didn’t bother trying to incorporate that into this example. If you want one, then here:
<?php
//generate a geostr tag with the most typical information only
//point not part of a track nor including heading or angle
$lat=44.027168;
$lon=-111.297892;
$elev=”1711.9m”; //could leave off the “m” and treat as float, since it defaults to “meters”
$timestamp=”20071125T123438-06″; //6 hours behind UTCprint(“geostr:$lat,$lon,$elev:$timestamp:geostr”);
//”full” version: print(“geostr:$lat,$lon,$elev:$timestamp,:,:geostr”);
//completely unnecessary, but legal
?>
As always, comments and suggestions are welcome.
“Framing” came up briefly on one of the other small independent blogs I follow. I’d link
to the post but it’s gone now. I sincerely hope its disappearance wasn’t related to the
comment I posted there, unless it was just because of the “don’t feed the trolls” part
of it – (in which case excuse me for a moment while I tell myself what an amazing fountain of useful advice I am and feel self-important for about 15 seconds before I return to reality…). I’m guessing the poster just decided he didn’t want to keep the post, but I won’t let that spoil my brief ego-feeding fantasy.
For those lucky enough to have missed it so far, here’s my flippant and extremely brief explanation
of my understanding of how the “framing” thing goes. An assistant professor of communications popped up among the science blogs one day with what seemed to begin as a couple of reminders of the obvious (mainly because it occasionally seems that people have forgotten). Namely, that if you want someone to understand what you are trying to communicate (particularly scientific matters) and agree with you, you are more likely to succeed if you can connect what you are discussing to something that your audience already cares about, and you are less likely to succeed if you are, shall we say, unfriendly to them as you present your subject.
From there, “framing” seems to have grown into something resembling the brand-name of some kind of mass-market “self-help” product line. Its primary proponent, from the distant vantage point
whence I occasionally catch a glimpse of the fight, starts to seem like the angry Vice President
of Communications for Science, Incorporated, whose office issues angry memos denouncing the insubordinate “screechy monkeys” who insist on deviating from the approved language when discussing Science, inc.’s Mission Statement. The fact that science is a conversation among people rather than a corporation probably explains why so much of the response has been not “Oh, crap, we’d better behave ourselves or we’ll get in trouble” but “Who the heck are you, and why are you telling me what I can say and how I can say it?” And that, I think, is all that needs to be said. (Anyone who stumbles upon my little blog and disagrees is welcome to say so in the comments.)
Actually, it’s probably more than needs to be said, and I wouldn’t have even mentioned it except that the problem of trying to apply this sort of approved “Command and Control” approach towards information in the Internet age reminded me of something else. The Cluetrain Manifesto was published so long ago that AOL was still considered a successful and valuable operation at the time, but it still seems to be relevant. (It’s free to read online – follow the link if you want to do so). At its core, its central thesis seems to be that the “Command and Control” approach to information management favored by corporate and political entities is effectively broken now because of the two-way communication made possible by a ubiquitous internet. In essence, “the market” is no longer made of isolated individuals passively sitting on the couch “consuming” the approved messages coming through the television, but a “conversation” of people who can easily tell the difference between a corporate “message” and authentic human conversation. Here’s a relevant passage:
“Imagine for a moment: millions of people sitting in their shuttered homes at night, bathed in that ghostly blue television aura. They’re passive, yeah, but more than that: they’re isolated from each other.
Now imagine another magic wire strung from house to house, hooking all these poor bastards up. They’re still watching the same old crap. Then, during the touching love scene, some joker lobs an off-color aside — and everybody hears it. Whoa! What was that? People are rolling on the floor laughing. And it begins to happen so often, it gets abbreviated: ROTFL. The audience is suddenly connected to itself.
What was once The Show, the hypnotic focus and tee-vee advertising carrier wave, becomes in the context of the Internet a sort of reverse new-media McGuffin — an excuse to get together rather than an excuse not to. Think of Joel and the ‘bots on Mystery Science Theater 3000. The point is not to watch the film, but to outdo each other making fun of it.”
And now we take one more step towards on-topicness: One current set of the metaphorical wires described in that passage is Twitter. Twitter is kind of like a gigantic lobby at a convention center where some huge conference is going on. The lobby is filled with little groups of people, collectively discussing with each other all kinds of little thoughts, observations, and events that each person there has encountered. You can easily wander through the lobby for hours, listening for snippets of conversation that relate to your own interests. Sure, being a raw, natural, human group of discussions, Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of Everything is Crap”) is in full effect. Sometimes literally: On Twitter I’m tracking the term “brewing” which seems to pick up more metaphorical uses of the word than literal, and a recent “Tweet” that popped up was somebody commenting that someone didn’t flush the toilet (“someone’s been brewing up a 1.6 gallon pot of turd stew.”)
So why bother? Because I think the remaining 10% has enough potential value to make a little mental effort to sift through the stream of messages worthwhile. I’d say a majority of the messages that come through are related to events happening at that moment. Twitter seems to get a lot of use as a back-channel for commenting on things that are happening, and for organizing impromptu gatherings. In most of these cases I think location information would be a valuable addition…and now I’m finally back to “on-topic”.
I think it’d be exceedingly nifty to be able to map Twitter messages in real-time. If I can convince anyone else that my “geostrings” idea is worth using, and then if one were to track “geostr”, any “tweet” with parseable location information would automatically show up. A small tag containing precise location information would make it possible for your computer automatically alert you if a post was describing something anywhere near where you are. Imagine the case of posts like “I just saw a tornado touch down, I’m going down to the basement now”. Or, say, “Who wants to try the homebrew I’m about to bottle?”
Example code in Javascript and PHP for picking out and parsing geostrings to follow soon. I’ll get back to yeast again shortly thereafter, though.
Wow – Celestron takes 8 business days to get me a terse one-sentence answer. BigC responds in one. Impressive. Apparently their technical people are all at trade-shows at the moment so my bigger question will have to wait until they get back, but they were at least able to answer my question about their “tabletop” digital microscopes magnification (answer: the “600x” really is optical magnification, not digital.)
Another digital microscopy WANT/DO NOT WANT post to follow when I get the followup reply. Meanwhile, after hearing about it on the This Week in Tech podcast for a while, I finally talked myself into signing up to play with the coincidentally named Twitter system.
It sounds like a really stupid idea – “Oh, goodie, now I can broadcast ‘text messages’ no more than 140 characters long about trivial events in my life to the whole world! Whoopee!” “Wow! I can find out when random strangers are drinking coffee AS IT HAPPENS!” Thrills! Excitement! Adventure!…
On the other hand, having the messaging system watch for particular words might be a handy way of monitoring current events. Plus, there seems to be a lot of potential for fun, off-the-wall uses, even if many of them are kind of silly.
It DOES seem like kind of an ideal context to play with that “geostrings” concept I’ve been toying with. A terse, easily-machine-parsed format for geotag data that can fit into a “twitter” post and still leave room for a sentence or two to go with the geographic information seems like it might be useful. If you’re so incredibly bored that you want to see some examples, you can check out my own Twitter posts, several of which I’ve embedded geostrings into.
Back in Idaho for the moment. The trip was somewhat exhausting, but I thought a followup to The previous post on the Celestron LDM microscope was in order, as I finally got a reply back after almost two weeks.
(20080329:Quick update. I am surprised to see this post is getting more interest that I’d anticipated. I’ve added a brief summary to the end of the post to help clarify my opinion since it seems people may be interested.)
I had asked them if it was possible to replace the objective lenses (so as to be able to use an oil-immersion lens to get 1000X magnification – pretty much a neccessity for decent bacteriological work – such as examining yogurt cultures) and whether the camera could be swapped for a regular eyepiece. Larger yeast cells used in brewing might be okay in 400X, but even there it’d be nice to be able to zoom in adequately to get better detail – like watching conjugation or budding of yeast cells.
The answer:
“The answer is ‘no’ to both because of the sizes, etc. are specific to this unit.”
Email ID: ZZR-372549
Department: Technical Support
Priority:
Status: Closed
I guess there’s no point in asking about getting a darkfield condenser for it. On the plus side, they did actually give me a reply at least.
I’ve got to say I’m seriously disappointed that Celestron has evidently intentionally engineered this microscope product (and their other offerings as well, perhaps?) to Not Play Well With Others. Why else go to the trouble and additional expense of coming up with your own special specifications for the parts when standard parts are readily available?
This seems especially absurd in a product aimed at science enthusiasts, who strike me as very likely to be strongly aligned with the “Maker” attitude…at least if they’re any good at Science Enthusiasm. I think the “if you can’t open it, you don’t own it” concept meshes very well with the investigative attitude necessary for science. So, we want “internet”, and they give us “AOL” instead. A sad, sad fate for an otherwise great concept, and on this basis I must render a verdict of “Do Not Want”.
Find me a version of this product – from any vendor – which can accept standard oculars and objective lenses and I’ll sell blood plasma and beg on the street to raise money for it. (If nothing else, it’d give me an excuse to finally start up the “science begging” blog-post series I’ve been threatening for a while now…) Of course, it’d be nice to have an ordinary “real” microscope, too…this blog still doesn’t have enough pictures.
(P.S. Dear Celestron: although I doubt anybody at Celestron will ever even see my obscure blog, and in that respect my previous post’s comment about sending me one to review was just a joke. Despite this, I was sincere, so in the unlikely event that someone out there sees this post and has the authority and inclination to do so, feel free to send me one to review anyway. And a pony.)
SUMMARY (in my opinion):
Good:
Bad:
My recommendations for Celestron or other microscope manufacturers (should any of them care about the opinion of some nerd on some obscure blog like this one):
My parents, apparently comfortable with being microbiology “enablers“, ran into a digital microscope (pictured at right) that they pointed me to. It looks pretty nifty for the price, except for one issue: it only comes with three objectives, topping out at 40X. I can find marketing materials for this microscope, but no technical information beyond what’s on the company’s website (click image to reach that). Therefore, I can’t tell if the objectives are replaceable or not. If they are, the idea of picking up an inexpensive surplus 100X oil-immersion lens and ending up with a decent microscope with which to watch the Yeast Porn and such – on a nice digital screen, no less, rather than squinting into an eyepiece – has a certain appeal to it. The fact that the digital camera takes the pictures itself and only needs a computer connection to transfer files – and not even then if you use an SD card – means that I wouldn’t have to worry about ending up with something that requires Microsoft® Windows® just to look at some microbes (or post glamour shots of them to this blog).
However, I don’t think trying to view conjugating yeast cells or, say, Lactobacillus or Gluconobacter/Acetobacter bacterial cells at 400X would be very rewarding, so an oil-immersion lens is a necessity. And don’t let the “up to 1600 Power with Digital Zoom” thing fool you – it just makes the picture bigger and blockier, not actually more detailed.
So….do I WANT, or not? I sent off an email to Celestron asking about whether I could swap out objective lenses on this model or not. I got back the form “we got your email” email – we’ll see if I get a real reply from them or not. If so, I’ll update this post.
Speaking of which – still no reply from Bristol Brewing Company. Guess they’re either just not “nerd-friendly”, or the person who handles email queries is on vacation or something.
P.S. Dear Celestron – if you were to send me an evaluation model, I’d be happy to review it here on my blog for the thousands hundreds dozens pairs of people who read my elegant prose incoherent babbling…
Incidentally, did you know it’s a long way from southeastern Idaho to southeastern Texas? I made the drive last week, and I’ll be making the drive back as soon as I can get some things FINALLY done around here. On the upside, it’s kind of a fun, if long, drive other than Wyoming’s tendency towards having ridiculously high winds and roads paved with what appears to be a mixture of wet ice and motor oil. I made it down here though, but I’ve already been delayed about a week due to some issues getting inspection arranged on the home we’re trying to buy out here. But you didn’t come here to read me whining about that, did you?
On the way down, I did manage to stop at one of the two Colorado breweries mentioned in the “Wildbrews” book. New Belgium Brewing Company just happened to be only a couple of blocks away from my route through Fort Collins, so I took the opportunity to stop by and check them out.
If you’re familiar with them at all, it’s probably for their “Fat Tire” amber ale which I have seen in stores around the country, but I didn’t care about that. What I cared about is that they actually let their microbiologist (and, it turns out, their other employees too) play, and they have experimental “sour” beers in the same general style as Belgian lambics. Pictured at left is their famous one – “La Folie” (“the folly”). Well, the label on the tap for it, anyway. I’m not certain if cultures other than the standard canned strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae are used in the initial ferment, but they then move the brew over to barrels that were previously used to age wine, and which no doubt contain a variety of traces of live lactic acid bacteria, other yeasts, and the like (their website also suggests they directly inoculate the beer with lactic acid bacteria as well). The brew sits in the barrel for up to 3 years. The result is nicely carbonated, and tastes almost sweet to me due to the pleasant tartness of the lactic acid. This particular brew is mentioned in the book. Seeing my obvious enthusiasm for the style, I was also allowed to taste a more recent concoction. “Eric’s Ale” was a lighter sour brew made with peaches which I absolutely loved. I really wish they’d had it in bottles for me to buy, but neither it nor “La Folie” were available in portable form, as far as I could tell. Guess I’ll just have to make my own. Once I finally manage to sit in one place long enough to try, dangit.
It was the Belgian Lambic-style ales that convinced me that I really do like beer after all, so long as it isn’t mass-market commercial swill (“Bladderwash”, as Leon Kania, author of “The Alaskan Bootlegger’s Bible” calls it) nor too strongly hops-flavored.
I did taste their “1554” ale – a “black ale” style that they were able to date back to at least 1554 while doing research on the style in Belgium, and several others whose names I don’t recall at the moment. One brew whose name I don’t remember was spiced with Yerba Mate – a caffeine-containing South American herb also found in Celestial Seasoning’s “Morning Thunder tea. (Ethanol is nice and all, but methylxanthines are my favorite…).
And, no, I didn’t forget their names because of drunkenness. When I say “taste” I mean I had a sip or two of each variety I sampled. They had these nifty little glasses like miniature brandy snifters for tasting. I’ll need to get me a set of those one of these days.
An unrelated bit of spiffiness about the brewery is that they seem to run the place as “green” as possible. They even go so far as to subject their brewing wastes to bacterial fermentation to produce methane, which they use to heat their water. How cool is that?
On a final, still unrelated note: there’s evidently been a fad of people selling things on eBay that have shiny surfaces, such as metal teapots. The trick is to take the picture of the item while naked, and standing such that one’s reflection is just visible in the picture of the item that appears on eBay. You know those classical shiny aluminum “Airstream” camping trailers? They had one out in the parking lot.
Wait…I don’t see myself in that at all. Dagnabbit, standing in that freezing cold wind with everyone staring at me was a waste of time, wasn’t it…
The other “wild brew” place in Colorado is the Bristol Brewing Company in Colorado Springs. Unfortunately, the only indication I can find of their “wild” brews is a “sour beers” class they did as part of their recent “beer college” series, and a “Skull ‘n Bones” (evidently what they were calling their sour-beer series) T-shirt. As there is also no mention of brewery tours, I did send an email off to the person who appeared to be the contact for such questions, but I’ve yet to hear back. I’d love to stop by on the trip back, but the route will add a couple of hours to the overall trip. This would be well worth it if they’re doing tours, or still doing “sour” beers, or if I could even spend a few minutes chatting with their microbiologist. If not, though, I’ll just have to get on with working on it all myself.
Oh, yes, and the place in Austin that I previously mentioned was called “The Bitter End”…and it ended. Apparently a fire destroyed part of it, and now its being demolished to make way for a massive chain-hotel building. How sad.
I also has a bad grammar (curse you, internet!)
It’s slow going trying to get the mess up here in Idaho organized in preparation for the move to Texas, but I did manage to sacrifice a large number of my old books that I no longer need. Trading them in at the local representative of the “Hastings” bookstore chain got me a decent amount of store credit, and I was able to special-order this wine microbiology book I’ve been lusting after for months. It showed up a couple of days ago.
Very interesting so far, but I’m only a little ways into it. I’m still in the theory sections, so I can’t say if it covers yeast-mating or not (see previous two posts on this blog…)
Prior to that, I picked up a book I found at the local brewing-supply place in The Woodlands, Texas. It’s an entire book on the subject of Belgian and “Belgian-style” beers (like Lambic) fermented with “wild” yeasts and bacteria. It’s an excellent mix of history, science, travelogue, and “how-to”. I highly recommend it.
I noted with particularly nerdly glee that there are several breweries here in the U.S. doing non-traditional brewing cultures. At least one was brewing entirely with Brettanomyces yeasts! (Most traditional brewers and vintners shriek in horror at the thought of Brettanomyces in their brew instead of the standard Saccharomyces yeasts, blaming Brettanomyces for – you guessed it – “off-flavors“.)
That is so amazingly spiffy I can hardly stand it. I note that one of them appears to be only a few hours from the area we’re moving to. And two of them are in Colorado, more or less on the road between Idaho and Texas, so on my next trip down which is likely to be as early as next week, I may have to try to arrange to visit at least one of them and see if I can get a tour.
Bad Behavior has blocked 113 access attempts in the last 7 days.