http://www.sivas.com/aleene/ looking down at the my world. en arnaud@sivas.com 2012-02-05T15:39:54+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/CS193p_Github/ I created a github account to store my cs193p assignment results. My first repository Calculator is to the store all the work on the calculator. This covers assignment 1 to 3. I intend to commit all small changes to the application closely following the parts of the assignment and documenting the hints from the assignment and the courses. Unfortunately I have to redo my assignements again to create the required commits.   Computing, cs193p Arnaud Leene 2012-02-05T15:39:54+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/CS193p_Delegation_concepts/ Delegation is a rather difficult concept to understand. In order to get a better idea what it is I made a drawing. Suppose we have three object: a square, a circle and a pentagram. The square has four white holes in itself (an oval, a 4-pointer star (not quite white), a 5-pointed star and a hexagram). It announces to the world that another object can fill these holes (the lines protruding the square). In fact it needs two other objects: one for the blue holes and one for the red holes. The circle object announces that it will help the square object with its blue holes. And the pentagram object says it will help with the red holes. Thus the circle object fills the blue oval hole of the square object. And the pentagram object fills the red pentagram hole and the 5-pointed star hole of the square object. The four pointed star has not been filled as it was optional (not quite white). With this it is possible to explain the various delegation concepts: delegator - the square object is the object that delegates; delegatee - the round and the pentagram objects adopt the delegation responsibilities; delegate property - the square wants to know who his delegatees are. This is specified in his delegator properties (the two extrusions on the square). One of the extrusions is filled by the circle, the other by the pentagram; protocol- the set of holes in a specific colour define a protocol. The small square on the edge of the circles says that the circle adopts the blue protocol as defined by the square. The same goes for the red protocol on the pentagram; These leads to the five steps defined in course 7(?). Two steps are definition and three steps are adoption: Protocol - define the methods for a protocol; Delegator - define who needs to delegator a protocol; Adoption - a class (delegatee) should declare it adopts a certain protocol; Implementation - the delegatee should implement the methods required in the protocol by the delegator; delegator properties - the delegator properties that point to its delegatees should be set; Computing, cs193p Arnaud Leene 2012-02-04T11:47:58+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/CS193p_Assignment_4/ I started working on Assignment 4 of the CS193 fall 2011 course. Flickr API - I got the Flickr API working and am able to access the top locations and photos per locations. I did have a bit of trouble figuring out the data structure that Flickr is giving. I got mixed up in Array’s and Dictionaries. Why does the flickrFetch API give an NSArray and not an NSDictionary? Storyboard - I had a lot of trouble getting a good storyboard. However after seeing Lecture 10, I decided to delete everything and restart from scratch. Just as Paul Hegarty did during the Lecture. And then everything went pretty smooth; Place Photolist - Getting the Photlist for a specifc place working got me bogged down for a while. Until I realised that I did not check the Segue identifier in the right way. I used ‘==’ and not ‘isEqual:’. After that it worked well; Spinner - I copied the Spinner idea from teh Lecture, but nothing happens. Do not know why; Description dictionary - I was not able to get the information on the description through the ‘description._content’-key. So I had to take the long way to retrieve it; Title and description length - the lenghts of these two items is much longer than the screen width. What is the best way to present them? Photo location list segue - I do not understand how this segue works. You do not have to set something up. Just add the segue to a table view controller seem to be enough to have it respond to a row selection? From where should I setup the segue? The window? the table? the cell? The window as anchor works with a performSegue: in didSelectRow:, but why?) Titles - I have been playing with the window titles a bit in order to display city name and or photo title. I would like to limit the number of characters and append a ‘...’ at the end. If I use a minimum size that is to large I get an error message. So I must take into account the maximum allowed length. Still have to work on that; Photo display - I got the photo displaying working, but I am not able to set it to fill with UIContentMode. Do not know what is wrong; iPad - I had to rewatch the course on the iPad to see how it worked again. Setting up the storyboard was reasonable straightforward. I had to remember to setup the photoViewController as detailedView. And to not use segue to present photo’s. It seems to be working. I have now to address the details;   Computing, cs193p Arnaud Leene 2012-01-31T18:04:25+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/CS193p_Post_Assignment_3_thoughts/ I finished assignment 3 now, apart from the content scaling thing. In course 9 the TableViewController was introduced. I added the instructions as given during the course. It all worked like a charm. I did however a few things a bit different: all buttons were added to the toolbar in the iPad storyboard. Paul Hegarty was not able to all the relevant things in the course, so extra code was posted on the website. I folded all the posted code into my code. I used a slightly different approach to the iPhone storyboard: I added a toolbar at the bottom of the GraphView and put the formula, switch and add to favorites in there. I am however left with one problem: the swipe gesture does not work. I still have to find a way to debug this. At the moment I am lost. It seems that the swipe-gesture is not recognized.   Arnaud Leene 2012-01-31T18:00:37+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/CS193p_fall_2011_resources/ This post gathers interesting resources I found for the fall 2011 course. The official material can be found on the course website at Stanford and on iTunesU. These lectures are based on Xcode 4 and iOS 5, so the older solutions are no longer applicable. There can be some help found in a corresponding Google Group. There are multiple people that I are following the course: DJ Chung - explicit info on assignment 2; Adam Lung I found various solutions on the web, which work as inspiration. Assignment 1 (Simple Calculator) Implementing pi discussion maxkostow - combined code for assignment 1-3; macuenca - assignment 1 only; floating point - some solutions; Assignment 2 (Programmable Calculator): Geekapproach - looks like an interesting solution to evaluate the expression; maxkostow - combined code for assignment 1-3; Assignment 3 (Graphing Calculator): maxkostow - combined code for assignment 1-3; Jeffrey Lam - solution does not seem to use a datasource;   Computing, cs193p Arnaud Leene 2012-01-28T13:51:52+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/CS193p_Assignment_2_thoughts/ In this post I gather some thoughts on the assignment 2: protocols - for the iPad application to work one has to define a protocol in a separate-file. I just followed the directions in the lecture, but I am still at a loss how this works; error handling - in one of the earlier assignments one had to implement some error handling (division by zero). This should also propagate to the Graphing Calculator, which I did not implement; Points vs. pixels - the assignment asks to use this conversion in order to have the app working on retina displays. So I added this scale factor and thus doubled the number of calculations. However it does not seem to make any difference. So I am lost here; drawing mode - I had some problems implementing the drawing mode (line vs points). I added a segmented switch to the iPhone and iPad GraphController views. These call a method drawingModeChanged in the GraphController, which in turn changes the corresponding instance variable in Graph. But I was not sure in what method to set the drawing mode. After some experimenting I found the right one (tell you later which one); Xcode crash - I experienced a heavy Xcode crash. The application would no longer star with my project. I tried to use Time Machine to get a valid version back, but that did not work. So I recreated the project and pulled in the old files one by one. I was able to pull them all in without any problems. So I guess one of the project-files got corrupted; Profile - the final part of this assignment involved optimizing the code for the pinching gesture. I did not finish this, as it seemed to involved a lot of rewriting. I guess that one has to use a CGContextScaleCTM to change the scale; Computing, cs193p Arnaud Leene 2012-01-27T18:38:48+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/IOS_programming/ And again I started learning IOS-programming. The last time I did finish the book by LaMarche for beginners. However I did not feel confident enough to work on my own. I started with the CS193p course that was then available, but got bogged down in mismatching courses and materials. So a new year seem to be a good start to begin. I found out that in the mean time Xcode was heavily changed and IOS moved to version 5. This implied that I really had to start from the beginning. I am now up to course 7 and finished assignment 2.   Computing, cs193p Arnaud Leene 2012-01-27T18:13:17+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/Bundle_time/ It seems that it is the time of the year for all sorts of bundles. The bundle of Productive Macs looks at productivity apps, such as Fantasical, BusyCal, Home Inventory, NotBook, Folder X, LaunchBar, Cashculator and Tags. They offer also some prize. Anyway the bundle is not for me, I have already enough related apps. I like the prizes though, such as Hype. The MacUpdate bundle seems more interesting with TechTool Pro, IconBox, TotalFinder, Postbox 3, FontPack pro Master, Labels&Adresses;, Mac DVDRipper Pro 3, Back in Focus, NeverWinter Nights, Hear, iClip 5 and FolderSynchronizer. I like TechTool as I have not really something comparable. TotalFinder looks interesting. A DVDRipper useful (Handbrake?). Back in Focus and iClip (have an old version). Computing Arnaud Leene 2011-12-15T10:38:48+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/Effect_of_eccentricity/ Simultaneous fitting two transits of an eclipsing binary is not evident. It is not allways clear how the various parameters interact. For SPH10003247 I used this approach: start fitting the secondary (shallowest) transit by changing the relative luminosity of the stars. A luminosity ratio of 0.55 matches the secondary transit. And also the primary transit can be matched (black lines in figure). A further increase (say 0.52) of the luminosity difference will make the secondary transit to shallow. A decrease (0.6) will make the primary transit not deep enough. A shallow secondary transit can also be produced by having a size difference between the two stars. Increasing the size of the secondary star to 1.26, will produce the right secondary depth. However this will not produce the right depth of the primary transit. The advantage of a size ratio is also that we will have a flat transit as we have in the data. Using a luminosity difference seems to be the preferred explanation. The next thing we need to explain is the shape of the bottom of the transits. Unfortunately any change to the size ratio will make the depths shallower, so a correction to the luminosity ratio must be applied as well. Thus we need to increase the size of the secondary star whilst decreasing the luminosity ratio. Unfortunately at a size ratio of 1.15 and brightness ratio of 0.72, the primary transit is no longer deep enough. It is also possible to move in the other direction: decreasing size ratio and increasing the luminosity ratio. It is not possible to go below a luminosity ratio of 0.52. At this ratio the secondary star is fully occulted by the primary, and thus the depth of the secondary transit defines this luminosity ratio. In order to explain the transits, I need to work with a third parameter: the linear limb brightening coefficient. Standard this is set at 0.6, but in practive it can vary wildly depending on the star. By decreasing this factor to 0, I can increase the lumiosity ratio to 0.46 and decrease the size ratio to 0.88. This still does not explain the observations: the secondary transit is to narrow and the primary transit is to shallow. The size ratio must be as small has 0.77 to explain the width of the secondary transit (red lines in figure). Thus my current model does not work to explain these observations. I need to have other parameters that I can tune. There seems to be one assumption to many in my model. This eclipsing binary has an eccenctric orbit as can be seen from the centers of the transits (0.0985 and 0.7561). Thus my assumption of a circular orbit does not hold. There might be a difference in apparent radii due to the orbit. A change from 0.95 to 0.77 is then needed, to explain the observations. The difference in transit timings reveals at least a minimal eccentricity of 0.25, which corresponds to a relative distance variation between the two stars of 1.6. This might thus explain why my circular orbit does not work. So I need to refine my model to incorporate eccentricity. (Literature used Russell (1912) and Sterne (1939). Science Arnaud Leene 2011-11-16T17:52:39+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/Tatooine_star_analysis/ This a very interesting object: a double star with a planet circling around it. The excellent analysis of the previous posters seems to be the best solution. I wondered however if I would be able to expand on that by adding some numbers. Unfortunately most of the published formulae do not work here, as they all assume that the occulted star is stationary, which is certainly not the case here. So I had to invent some stuff to get to an extended explanation. The first step involves the double star. As the transits have equal depth and are close to 50%, so both stars are assumed to be equal in size and the orbital plane (circular) has an inclination angle of 90 degrees. Thus we see the orbit edge on. The orbital period can be determined from two transits (i and i+1 - the two green transits) and is 2.976 days. Normally the width of a transitcan be used to calculate the half-major axis of the orbit. However formula 3 of Seager&Mallen;-Ornelas (2002) assumes however that the occulted star does not move, which it does in this case. Thus the observed width (0.13 days) must be doubled to get the correct one. From this the hal-major axis can be determined as 11.3 stellar radii. To determine the movement of the planet, better timings of the transits are needed. In order to make the three extra transits more clear I subtracted the LC of the double star. This was done by shifting and overlaying an adjacent LC and then subtracting the two. The blue and green lines show where the transits were. The dots shows the results of the subtraction. And you as well that the subtraction did not succeed 100%. Then these three transits were fitted to determine the transit times. The dermined values, such as the width (T) and impact parameter (b) have not much significance, as the formulae assume a static object. Using the start of the ingress of the first transit (day 55023.31) and the end of the egress of the third transit (day 55024.94), we can determined the speed of the planet. The model of the double star indicates where the stars are and by putting the planet next to the star, we set the position of the planet. I used the configuration indicated by @kianjin in his last animation as starting point. This resulted in the following animation, which confirms @kianjin’s results. The first transit happens just as star 1 is turning prograde. The planet starts the transit and then star 1 speeds up and moves out under the planet. Transit 2 is when the planet passes in front of star 2. Star 2 is then retrograde, which results in a small transit width. Transit 3 happens when star 2 is retrograde. Interestingly in the animation a fourth transit happens, when the planet transits star 2 again. This fourth transit really isn’t in the data. I checked whether there isn’t any small grazing one. It turns out that this transit only occurs due to the position of the viewer in this 3D-animation. I am not able to undo this perspective (yet) and hence the animation does not allow to read the transit times. I have a 2D-animation as well, which allows me to put the observer at infinity. In this animation the blue line represents the planet and viewing direction. I can not determine the distance of the planet, as we have no period as yet. To be continued…   Science Arnaud Leene 2011-11-08T14:34:25+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/Transit_fit_evaluation/ This object is known under the identification of Kepler ID 6850504, SPH 21522290 and KOI 70. Four planets have been detected around this planet. This is a good object to check my algorithms against the official ones. The official data of the objects found here are: ID durationdeptht0perioda/R r/R*b (hr)(ppm)(day) KOI 70.01 3.798102771.60910.85404220.0000.0300.49 KOI 70.022.47837567.5013.6961256.2000.0210.85 KOI 70.037.23879397.72977.60900083.3900.0260.198 KOI 70.042.7707468.9306.0985216.0000.0080.40 My data (algorithm 8): ID durationdeptht0perioda/R r/R*b (hr)(ppm)(day) KOI 70.014.69990-10.8545-0.0410.93 KOI 70.022.98368-3.6962-0.0250.95 KOI 70.038.753869-77.60-0.0390.94 KOI 70.042.9383-6.09852-0.0120.94 The periods founds are similar to 4 decimal accuracy. Adding 7 quarters of data leads to a better accuracy of 2 extra decimals. The other basic parameter of a transit is its depth. The depth difference is -4%, -2%, 10% and -10%. I regard this as OK for the data that I have. The other three parameters: r/R*, b and duration are all related, so have to be viewed together. The most remarkable is that my detected radii are systematically to large (37%, 19%, 50% and 50%). But also my values for the impact parameter b are much larger. In fact the radii matches best, where the impact parameters do match (KOI 70.02). Thus the impact parameters seem to be the culprit of this difference. When I use the published impact parameters to calculate the radii, I get much smaller differences (9%, -10%, 12% and 12%). These errors seem reasonable as they are comparable to the related errors in depth. The problem seems to be related to the impact parameter that I determined and the limb darkening model that I used. For small impact parameters ( Science Arnaud Leene 2011-10-30T13:57:38+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/Hunting_planets/ A few ways back I started playing with the Zooniverse websites: doing astronomy at home. I started with hunting for ice planets and then moved to hunting for planet in the Kepler data (planethunters). And I am still working on that. I like this site, as it allows me to download the corrresponding data and playing with it. I downloaded the Plot application and started writing macro’s in perl for my needs. This results in images such as this one: Uploaded with Skitch! This images shows a folded lightcurve, thus showing the passage of planet.   Science Arnaud Leene 2011-09-13T18:20:48+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/Visiting_Copernic/ Last tuesday I visited the Copernic observatory. Every tuesday in july and august they have an open evening when people from the public can use the telescopes and get some xplanation about the heavens. It was some time ago I went, so it ws very to see that they now have a 52 cm reflector. I used it to look at some open clusters and a globular cluster. Also M51 was nice, but even with such a telescope there is just some fluff. The small telescope was used to look at the the Dumbbell nebula and some close binaries (epsilon Lyrae and gamma (arrow)). I tried gamma later at home and was able to distinguish the two stars at 8 arcsec separation. I did not try epsilon lyrae as it was in the zenith, which is very awkward with my telescope. Now I have to return to view the comet.   Science Arnaud Leene 2011-08-25T15:51:22+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/Moving_to_Lion/ Now that a new version of MacOSX is coming, I have to wonder whether I want to upgrade again. This is unfortunately just a theoretical question as I’m still on PowerPC and I was left behind on Leopard. I use this article by Alex Layne (hmm Leene?) as a guidance to have a look at Lion. Mission Control / Exposé - I am a big user of Exposé, so I would probably like the subtle changes in Lion. Mission Control / Dashboard - I use it everyday to check the weather, the activity browser or access the dictionary, but that is it. I never add new widgets. So the addition to Mission Control is not a big deal for me. MissionControl / Spaces - another feature that I use a lot. I do not get the impression that the changes impact my usage. MissionControl Launchpad - I do not see that I will use this. Normally I start apps through the Dock or through Spotlight. If I do not remember the name of an app I descend into Finder. Here Launchpad could be a replacement. It reminds me as Finder with an icon view. I guess it comes all down to gesture support, which I do not have anyway. I do not see how the integration into Mission Control works out. Just a question of gestures as well? Autosave, versions - sounds like a very interesting development. There were already some applications (Sandvox comes to mind) that had this idea implemented and I liked that. Resume - sounds like a good idea as well. An application like Omniweb had this already. All in all this does not sound like an impressive update. The OS just evolves slowly. I will keep up, but I am not under pressure to update.   Computing Arnaud Leene 2011-07-13T09:16:22+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/Learning_iOS/ I restarted my activity learing iOS. I bought the book “Beginning iPhone 3 development” by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche. This is much easier to follow than the CS193 course. I might pick-up that course once I got some more experience. Current book is mainly geared towards learning the interface libraries for iOS (iPhone). And I miss the library changes for the iPad. I follow the corresponding forum for the book and created a FAQ for each chapter. So I can more easily see what kind of changes and suggestions have been made. I am now at Chapter 9, so I am progressing well. Every day I work for several hours. Still some pages to go. I already notice however that I miss some Objective-C basics. So I might also get a more basic book, before I start on my won project.   Computing Arnaud Leene 2010-11-15T10:36:17+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/Financial_App_requirements/ After trying several financial applications, I realised that I should formulate my requirements more formally. Several applications seemed to fit my needs, but failed after using them for a while. So with this post I will define my requirements. I might edit this post when I get more details. Import - this is one of the most important requirements. The applications should be able to import the files, that I get from my banks. Thus it should be able read OFX-files, which I get from Credit Agricole. It should be able to read CSV-files, which I get from the ING Bank. Latter demand seems to be a bit to much. I can convert CSV-files to QIF-format with QIF-Master, so as a third option QIF is really required. Control over number and date format is desirable (although fiddling with the international settings can help); Create/Edit - it should be easy to create and edit new transactions. I prefer inline editing; Export - the application should be able to export all data, either into OFX, QIF or CSV. As I have multiple accounts in a single set, I like to export as a single file. QIF seems to support only a single account per file. It seems that I must have control over the date and number formats, both for exporting and importing. Several apps introduced errors here; Document-based - I am not sure whether I use the correct terminology here. I want to save multiple sets of financial accounts as separate documents. I have to manage four different of such sets. Hiding those all those sets in a single document can be very difficult when creating reports; Filter - I would like to easily zoom in on a set of transactions by specifying a string. This can be to search for a certain amount or transaction made by a person. This is a like search, but then easier; Splits - support for splits is desirable. I do not have much experience yet with it, but I found it already useful, just for noting down some details; Categories - I would like to set a category (or tag) for each transaction, so that I can see what happens per category. I would also like to have subcategories, although there might be a way around it; Reporting - this requirement is the most difficult as it has many subsets that I need; Time-ranges - I would like to see what happens in certain times ranges, i.e. per month, per year (this, previous) or a range specified by me. I need the monthly reporting for a specific category for my taxes; Across accounts - I like to see what happens to all transactions (or in specific categories) summed over all accounts. Many applications do not support this kind of summation; MacOSX adherence - an application should adhere to MacOSX-standards as much as possible. Clear ports will only annoy me. Computing Arnaud Leene 2010-09-15T20:30:08+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/WebCam_Monitor/ One of the first experiments is to seen what can be done with the camera through the WebCam Monitor application. The application allows you to record audio and/or video through the menu-bar of the application Also the size of the video can be set in the menu (full, half, quarter size). This menu must also be used to record the video. My settings here are to disable audio and to use full size. An addition there is a preferences window with multiple sub-screens. The first screen is the Adjustments-screen, which allows to change the hue, saturation, brightness, contrast and sharpness. The problem is to know what these sliders do as there is no documentation. Normally hue and saturation refer to colors on a color wheel. I would not want to fiddle with these settings and take what I get as raw input. Brightness is related to the amount of white versus black. As I want to detect weak object, a large brightness seems logic without overexposing the image. I guess that contrast relates to the difference between dark and light. This seems import to see the weaker objects. I am not sure what sharpness exactly is. It gives the impression of smoothing over multiple pixels. I guess I have to experiment with these sliders to see what they do exactly and what are my best settings. I have the impression that this screen relates to the software of the WebCam Monitor application. The second screen is the Compression screen. For some reason this screen a bit damaged. I might have to do a reinstall. This screen seems to relate to the output. Whether the video is compressed and how. In fact I do not want any compression and I need only a few frames per second. The third screen is called the SN9C102 screen, so I guess this is the interface with the chip itself. This seems to be the more interesting screen, but still it is unclear what it does. Gamma is about the color, but what is the best setting? Exposure time sounds interesting, but what does it do in context to movie frames. Anyway more seems better. White Balance must be set thuis that there is no difference between colors. Gain must be low for bright objects and high for weak objects. The video format chosen will be close to native, thus CIF (352x288). I have also the possibility to chose VGA or Mpeg, but I rather take the most raw data. I do not know what Flicker frequency does. Rotate 180 is checked as the telescope creates upside-down images. The SN9C102 Digital Zoom setting is simple. I do not want any. Finally there is the sources screen. I set this one to the TAS5110D WebCam/Camera setting. The macam #0 does not seem to work. In conclusion there are many unknowns and I must experiment. I would like to find a way to calibrate things.   Science Arnaud Leene 2010-09-05T12:14:32+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/Astro_detector/ The first thing for astrophotography is to have a detector. Naturally it is now possible to buy all kinds of official detectors, even for amateurs. It is however more interesting to do some experiments yourself with off the shelf webcams. So that is what I will try to do at first. And maybe I can find some interesting webcams on a local garage sale. I have as additional stumbling block that the webcam must work together with my Mac. And that means that I not only can see the images, but that there is an application that can tweek the webcam. I have three webcams around: the a Logitech QCVC-USB-1 (QuickCam VC), a Trust (can not find it) and an Macally IceCam. I never managed to get the Trust one working and the Logitech webcam stopped working after my transition to MacOSX. For Trust and my Logitech there are no official drivers.  There are two driver sites for MacOSX available: macam and ioxperts. The macam-driver does result in an image with the QuickCam, but nothing can be recognized. I think it some digitisation issue. So that leaves me with the IceCam by Macally. This camera is recognized by MacOSX as Product ID:0x6007 and Vendor ID:0x0c45 (Sonix Technology Co., Ltd.). According to the website it is a CMOS camera with a resolution of 352x288, so some 100k pixels. And it takes movies up to 30 fps in CIF. The Icecam comes with an application called Webcam Monitor (version unclear, latest update 2/16/2008). This application says that it is connected with a TAS5110D webcam created by Taiwan Advanced Sensor. And I gather that this is the CMOS-chip itself. This one is connected to an USB-controller called SN9C101 created by Sonix. Unfortunately I can not find any datasheet on the sensor and the manual does not offer more info. I would like to know the sensitivity and the dimensions of the pixels. Similar detectors have sizes of 2,6 by 2,1 mm2 with pixel sizes of 7,25x7,25 µm2 Science Arnaud Leene 2010-09-05T10:51:46+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/Astronomy/ Recently I did a presentation for people in town on astronomy. This was during “the night of the stars”, which is organised yearly in France. Some 30 people came and it was highly entertaining. And very successfull. This event got me interested in astronomy again. The first thing I did was to buy a book, so my knowledge is up to date. I noticed some errors in my older books and science did advance a bit since then. Now I am chugging daily through the book. I want to do a bit more hoewever. SO I got my old telescope out and I will start some experimenting with astrophotography. Stay posted for my experiences in this. And look at my delicous astronomy or astrophotography pages for interesting links.   Science Arnaud Leene 2010-08-29T20:02:47+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/Cha_Ching_again/ And again I have to look at my personal finance software. Midnight Software, the maker of ChaChing, has been acquired by Intuit. And the latest version of ChaChing was still not workable enough for me. So time to abandon ship and look for something else again. So I am updating my earlier list. This time I created a list of requirements in order to take a more logic approach. As I have a lot of trouble exporting from ChaChing, it seems that no other app can read their export-file, I decided to start over again with a clean slate at the beginning of the year. I started looking at the staff picks on the Apple website. I created a set of QIF in order to test the various applications. -1 CheckBook Pro is way to simple for my needs. I especially need some reporting options. -1 Fortora Fresh Finance did look to simple, did not even download it. -1 GnuCash is totally incompliant with MacOSX -> big fail. +1 iBank - I was able to import my QIF-files successfully. And the across accounts reporting works as well. Clean application. I like it; 0 iCash is very nice. I think it handles all my needs. It has a more accountancy approach to personal finance, which I am not familiar with. The way accounts must be used as categories seems cumbersome. Unfortunately is not a great MacOSX-compatible application; +2 iCompta - this application seems to fulfill my needs. I like the filter function, so I can see only the transactions I want to see; -1 MoneyDance does not appeal to me. It looks not very nice; 0 MoneyWell is very nice as well, it seems to offer a bit more than I need. But it has the advantage of being file based. I have to manage three totally separate finances. Latest version does not want to start anymore; 0 Money works pretty well and offers a good export file. I think I could live with this app; -1 MyMoney is not an Apple-like app, so I do not bother to look into it; -1 Prospects looks very nice. Unfortunately the reporting is to limited; -1 Squirrel - is not document based, so it can not handle my different finance sets. It did import my QIF’s well. For the rest it seems very nice, but I did not investigate to deeply; -1 Stash seems to work pretty well. Unfortunately I miss reporting summed over accounts per categories; Its seems that iCompta comes on top. I Bought this application. Now onto migration. Computing Arnaud Leene 2010-08-11T12:36:59+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/Strong_SRT_6420_fail/ Last week I bought a new satellite receiver: the Strong SRT 6420. I chose this receiver as it has an integrated ViaAccess card reader, to that I could decode the french TNT channels that are broadcast by satellite. I found a good priced one at Transplanet. Ordering and delivery was swift. Installation was pretty smooth. Took a while to find out that I had to put the smart card in upside-down, but then it found the TNT-channels pretty quickly. I had to do an extra step to find the other FTA channels, but that work as well. But then I noticed that I missed the dutch radio channels on the same transponder as the dutch TV-channel BVN. So why? I checked the list of found channels against what is listed on Lyngsat. I discovered that I miss some TV-channels as well. It seems that I miss the channels on transponder 103 (12460H). On this transponder one finds channels such as 123TV, Das Vierte and JambaTV. I have the impression that Strong just did sloppy work and forgot some channels. There is no other reason that I see. I did ask the Strong email help-desk, but that did not offer any help, other than that it was designed for the free channels. So why does it support nearly all of them? Arnaud Leene 2010-07-11T15:31:16+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/CS193p_spring_versus_winter/ I am afraid that I mixed up the spring and winter courses of #cs193p. I expected the two courses to be very similar, unfortunately they turned out to be very different in their assignments. As I understand it, the spring courses were not recorded and will not be published on iTunes. So I guess I will revert to the winter course. Probably I will do however the assignments of both courses in order to gain some more experiences. Computing Arnaud Leene 2010-06-05T15:23:40+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/CS193p_assignment/ Wll, I nearly finished my assignment 2. I still need to clean up and do the extra bonus stuff. This assignment was already much more difficult. I had trouble getting into the task, as I did not understand it at first. In hindsight I am not sure why. I guess the description is rather difficult. But in the end I got the app running and it seems to work. My main trouble was the memory management. It turned out that I used allocation methods that implied autoreleased objects. So I lost my objects after an event loop. Once I discovered this, I had solved the assignment. At the moment I do not find my code very clean, so I will go through it once more and see whether I can streamline it a bit more. I will change normal declarations to properties (as also required for the bonus). And I still have to set up the delegates methods for the bonus points. I also need to think a bit more about the resilience against entering faulty expressions. But then it will be done. I learned a lot from this assignment. It is surely not for the beginning programmer though.   Computing Arnaud Leene 2010-05-19T12:27:34+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/CS193p_assignment_1/ I re-started learning Objective-C again. Last time was some 8 years back, so I really must restart. I am following the CS193p by Stanford as it is published in iTunes. I downloaded everything that I could find around this theme. So I also have some code examples available. I finished the assignment 1A and 1B, the Calculator. Assignment 1A was pretty simple, as one only had to follow the text. Assignment 1B was already a bit more difficult, but I did not encounter any problems. I also did all the extras. Now I only wonder whether my solution is any good. Unfortunately I was not able to find any code samples for comparison. Onto the next assignment.   Computing Arnaud Leene 2010-05-15T14:13:55+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/Learning_iPhoneOS_development/ A week ago I started learning iPhoneOS development. For the moment I am just using the free development tools from Apple. So I can not yet load apps onto an iPhone itself. Before I apply for a developer code, I like to see how for I get. I started a bit coding with the MacOSX development book by Garfinkel, but that book seems very outdated. So I might buy a new book. I think I wait for the book by Hillegass, when that comes out at the end of this month. For the moment I am using the Stanford CS193P iTunes University podcast. I already watched the first two podcasts already. Before I continue I want to finish the first assignment on the Calculator. I am on the last assigments. So now I am trying to figure out how UISwitch works. I am still looking for a final code example, so that I can compare my implementation with other ones.   Computing Arnaud Leene 2010-05-07T14:34:28+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/iPad_as_laptop_replacement/ After seeing all the information on the iPad I started wondering whether the iPad could replace my laptop (which is slowly failing me). This is a functional, situational and practical question. First the situational question. At the moment I use may laptop sitting in the kitchen. The laptop is on the table, I am behind the table in front of the fire place. I should use an iPad in the same location. This does not seem ideal, although I might put a reclining chair in my kitchen. I guess I would like to have a stand. In the evening I would love to use the iPad on my couch. the iPad surely seems capable enough. The speed seems great. People start to complain already about some missing things, but these seem non-issues for me. The video camera would be a nice addition, but I can do without (as I do now). No multitasking might be an important point, but I am not sure it is a real issue. Notifications will be enough for me. No flash is OK, I hate flash. I installed ClickToFlash to get rid of it on many sites. It is amazing what people use flash for. GPS is an interesting point. I see GPS as something useful while on the street and in the wild. So the question is where would you use this thing? The no HD output seems an extremely silly remark. This is not a video server! All in all, it seems very useful for me from a hardware point of view. And I am very curious whether the Bluetooth can be used for all kinds of interesting peripherals. It seems that the iPad will be used to connect to projector, so that is covered. I am worried about the screen size though. Ten inch is really small. I find my 14 inch laptop screen already to small. But I might be confusing usage situations here. The iPad is not really for working! The most important thing are however the apps. So the question is: is there an app in my dock that can not be replaced with an iPad app? Well, in my dock I have: Finder, OmniWeb, Safari, NetNewsWire, Mail, AddressBook, MarsEdit, iCal, iTunes, iPhoto, SandVox, Vidalia, Nambu, Billings and EverNote. Occasionally I use Mellel, Pages, Keynote, Last.fm, Calculator, ChaChing, NoteTaker, Preview, MacGourmet and various other small stuff. If I look at my dock apps, I seem to be well covered by iPad support. How can I manage my files however? It seems there is a solution as a wide variety of attachments possible in Mail on iPad. OmniWeb is not there, but I can do well with Safari. Sandvox not available on the iPad would be a big pain. I need this app. Vidalia is not on the iPad, but that does not matter. For my occasional apps there would be no problem either. Mellel would be a pity, but I can convert to Pages. NoteTaker (Aquaminds) will be on the iPad. So from an application point of view I seem to be covered. Another problem is multiple users. On my laptop I have now multiple users defined, which are all used. I am afraid the iPad is a personal thing. This implies that I would need multiple iPad’s. Bit expensive, but will give an interesting household. The question that remains is a practical one. Is the manipulation of the various files easy enough? Is the on screen keyboard good enough for inputting messages such as this one? Unfortunately we still need Mac for docking the iPad for backup and synchronisation. So I still must have a Mac around the house. I guess I have to get one in order to find out whether the iPad can be a replacement in practice.     Arnaud Leene 2010-01-28T07:24:41+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/iLap_day/ Today Apple will reveal it’s long awaited and discussed tablet. I hope the product will live up to the incredible hype. I have no idea what will come, but let me ponder it a bit. The first thought is situational. At what times and places do we need another product? The first place was behind a desk with the desktop. For that you had to sit down on a chair behind a table. Very useful if you needed also other stuff around you (papers, mouses, screens, etc.). When moving around and being on the road we got the laptop, or better portable (desktop). The idea was that you put it on your lap to use the product. However I guess that most people still used in combination with a chair and table. Using it on our lap was a good possibility on an airport, in a train, etc, but it was not really optimal. For walking about and accessing information we got the smart phones. These are also great for using while sitting in trains and busses. No longer a need for laptops in those environments. The smart phone, or handtop, is really for using while standing up. But couldn’t we do better? Are we really happy with what we use when sitting on our couches and rocking chairs? We can use a portable here or use a handtop. But is still remains awkward. Here, on the couch, is where I see a new possibility for Apple. A real laptop. This should be very similar to a newspaper, magazine or book. Such a product should have a very simple interface that can only be used by the hand, or maybe two hands from time to time. For me it is clear that this can not be MacOSX, but should be a variant of the iPhoneOS. It should have very view buttons (on/off, sound). A camera is not a real requirement, but a useful add on for videophone. A size of 10 inch is nice to have on your lap, but it might be larger as well. But not smaller as it would be closer to an iPod Touch/iPhone. Wireless and 3G is required in order to use it on your lap when not at home. Software would be similar to the iPhone, but with special applications for magazines, newspapers, LP’s, etc. Games would be an interesting category as well. Those can be the same as on the iPhone, but should really use the screen estate. One can image many classic board games on such a system. And naturally there is the iLapAppStore to feed all this. So no MS Word, no Excel, no office whatever app, no terminal, etc. That is just not the purpose of the iLap. Now hoping that the pricing is reasonable.   Computing Arnaud Leene 2010-01-27T07:25:27+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/App_Store_Control/ And again the App Store evaluation process is under heavy attack. Fact and are really mixed and it is unclear what is real. The first thing to know is how good or bad the situation is. There is no real analysis. And there is only anecdotal evidence of bad experiences. How many false negatives and false positives are there? And how bad/good does that look on 100.000 apps approved? How many apps do we miss that we really need? Or are all bases covered? Does the user really care or is it all just a philosophical discussion? People are also watching at alternatives, but that road is quickly discounted. The first question one has to answer is whether there needs to be an evaluation process at all. Why can’t it be as open as a standard computing platform, such as the Mac. Apple’s take on this is that a Telephone Platform is something different than a computing platform. I have mixed feelings about this. I really want my phone to work in ALL circumstances. In fact I got rid of my Internet phone options as provided by several ISPs, to turn back to plain old telephony, in order to get better reliability. The same will hold for my phone, so no App should interfere with it. So not multiple apps running simultaneously either. Or make an exception for the phone app. The same is true for the quality of the network. One wants that it works. And for the moment this might require restrictions on apps (think tethering) in order to reduce the load on the network. Most mobile operators have already enough trouble meeting this new demand. The iPhone and iPod Touch seems to be used by any age group. I have seen kids walking around with an iPhone. Some would like to limit the access their kids have to some content. That is were rating systems can help. So if you have a rating for an app, then you can automaticly restrict access to those apps. Unfortunately someone has to rate the app then. And/or someone has to check the rates provided by the developers. This requires clear guidelines. Unfortunately this is a process which is subjective and will lead to false positives and false negatives. Another point where one can complain about. And there is the trademark issue. Is Apple protecting itself here? Why do they need to check on this? Why is that differnet for this platform? The false negative apps are the shaking baby app, the app that nicked phone numbers, etc. And there are the false positives, where it is unclear why they are rejected. Airfoil Speakers is one of those. And then there is the process itself. I see two subjects here. Turn-around time - it seems that it can take a long time before a submitted app is approved. Although I have not seen any good statistics on this. And with 10.000 apps per week submitted, it is inevitable that some apps take longer time to be evaluated. Statistics at work here. You might complain and Apple might throw more people at the process, but your are still talking a Poisson process here. It would be nice however if Apple showed some statistics though. And developers just need to take these turn around times into account. However Apple should create a separate process for handling bug fixes. This would guarantee some quality level of apps already in the store. Communication - there seems to be a lack of good communication once an app is rejected. Why is an app rejected? What can a developer do? And again how bad or good is it in reality. Do we see only anecdotal evidence? Are some developers treated differently? One can image that Apple automates the work for cheap apps or less well known developers in order to reduce costs. Maybe they should create a paid program for developers who want better respons. So for the time being only the road through the appstore is an option. And I discount the jailbroken road, as this has its own problems. In the end it is all about quality for the end-user. And Apple does quarantee some extra level of guarantee in this way. And I highly appreciate this quality. PS All links are just gathered from my morning fedd update.   Internet Arnaud Leene 2009-11-24T09:59:33+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/Apple_worries/ Jason Calcanis wrote an interesting piece on Apple, which summaries many complaints I read against Apple for a while. To some things I agree, but others I don’t. He says that the iTunes ecoSystem destroys MP3 player innovation. Apple should allow other MP3-players to link up to iTunes. I do not agree that there is a lack of innovation. The iPod Touch is a huge innovation. He says that he saw a lot of innovation on MP3 players in Japan. We see the same here in France. Apple is not the only player. So what is the worry? He wants to get into iTunes. So software is key? Or is it the iTunes store? There are other stores, such as Amazon, which is doing pretty well it seems. So is it iTunes? So iTunes is like the Windows monopoly? Any MP3-player ships it’s own player, so what is the monopoly? iPod’s to expensive? Buy an alternative. It is not as if you are forced to buy the iTunes ecosystem. I call this a bullshit argument. However I love to see it opened up, I guess people will continue buying Apple’s products. Monopolistic practices in telecommunications is an interesting argument. What’s new here? This exists already for ages with other phones. So why the complaint now? Just because you are not happy with the ATT/iPhone combo? What a nonsense. This linking between network and phones made GSM popular in Europe. And I know only of France that forbid this linkage. I see this just as an opportunistic argument. Draconian appstore policies is also strange. How many apps are there? About how many apps are there complaints? Some apps had to be rejected over age limits (know your FCC stand on infringements). Now they can open up some more with the age settings for apps. This is one of the first (relatively) open mobile platforms. Never before a phone provider created this. So what are you complaining about? It will only get more open. The argument about other browsers seems valid. However the iPhone is not a standard platform. You should not be running anything from a performance point of view. By the way remember this is still a niche product. There is no monopoly! The same goes for Google Voice. My guess is that it is all about revenues. With Google Voice Apple does not get its share. What is new in the telco-business. The problem is more that people want Apple to be different, open, like Unix. And see where that got us.   Internet Arnaud Leene 2009-08-09T09:01:49+00:00 http://www.sivas.com/aleene/above/site_what_do_i_want/ The first step is to decide what kind of content that I want to publish and whether it is dynamic or static content. Naturally I continue my previous things as much as possible. Blog - the first thing is this blog. This is naturally dynamic content, which implies a Weblog Collection in Sandvox; MicroContent - my blog specific to MicroContent. I do not post much lately, but will likely continue it. This is naturally dynamic content, which implies a Weblog Collection in Sandvox; Software - where I discuss things related to Software on my platform. This is naturally dynamic content, which implies a Weblog Collection in Sandvox; Sundials - this is a collection of items related to sundials that I saw. This is not a blog and there are more ways to sort this collection. As the image is an important part, I used the Sandvox Photo Album collection; Media - is a collection of reviews of books, movies, dvd's, games, etc. I will use the Sandvox weblog collection for this; Recipes - some recipes that we made; Walks - a description of some walks. For the moment a weblog collection is Ok. It is however a much more complex type of information; Français - a started this weblog in french; Links - a list of bookmarks. I use the static Link List page in Sandvox for this; About Me - this is a static page. The Sandvox Rich Text page will do here; So you see there are many collections, which I can turn into 'weblogs' in Expression Engine. Site Arnaud Leene 2009-04-13T09:50:13+00:00