Time for some movie reviews

Posted on 13 July, 2007 by steevithak

Spider Man 3. Very bad. Worst of the series. The first Spider Man was mildly entertaining, though it suffered from an embarrassingly stupid villain. Spider Man 2 was entertaining primarily by way of being so bad it was unintentionally funny. The third one was just bad. You’ll find yourself checking your watch every half hour, wondering how much longer it can go on. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Pretty bad but better than Spider Man 3. The best actor by far was the Silver Surfer, generated by computer and voiced by Laurence Fishburne. In a bizarre casting anomaly, Jessica Alba was cast as Sue Storm. She was both unconvincing in the role and unattractive as a blonde. Might be worthwhile to see if you’re a comic book fan but wait for it to turn up on TV (shouldn’t take long).

Live Free or Die Hard. Best Die Hard movie since the first one. Much better than the third one. Also, the co-star is Justin Long aka the Hi, I’m a Mac guy. I was surprised the Hi, I’m Windows guy didn’t get a cameo somewhere in the movie. Speaking of cameos, Kevin Smith turned up as a “hacker” (in the Hollywood sense). Like most movies, the computer-related aspects of the movie were pretty silly but not as bad as many movies. Oh yeah, Tim Russ (Tuvok from Star Trek: Voyager) has a brief cameo too. There was a lot of violence but it was much less graphic than previous Die Hard movies. Probably worth seeing at the theater. At least you won’t be looking at your watch during this one.

Transformers. About like you’d expect. On the upside it’s slightly better than most of the comic book movies like Spider Man and Fantastic Four. It was reasonably entertaining. On the downside, parts of it were like watching a string of toy commercials interspersed with car commercials. It’s riddled with plot holes, bad directing, confusing editing, inconsistent pacing, and hokey writing.

The action sequences in Transformers are mostly incomprehensible because all you can see are close-ups of flashing metal flying by at high speed while the camera shakes uncontrollably. Presumably they thought this style added realism or minimized the need for high quality CG. Imagine the fight sequences from The Matrix if all you could see were close-up blurred shots of arms and legs with no indication of what was happening, who was winning, or even who was fighting who. Pretty soon, you just lose interest because you have no idea what’s going on.

The special effects guys also seemed to misunderstand the whole point of shape-shifting robots. Rather than robots that were able to disguise themselves externally as Earth vehicles, they rendered the transformers as alien robots constructed from old car parts. So, Optimus Prime in robot form looks like a welded together kinetic art piece made from hubcaps, drive shafts, and chrome wheel rims. Many of the fight scenes between the robots look pretty much like a tornado in a junk yard with random car parts flying all over the place.

Despite all the above complaints, Transformers is intended to sell toys to a 10 year old audience and probably does a pretty good job of it. Besides, it’s a movie full of giant space robots, so have some fun and go see it already!

The Quiet Earth. Okay, this actually came out in 1985. I saw it at the theater back then. It’s a very low budget movie from New Zealand. I was thinking about it a while back and after much searching I managed to rediscover the title and track down a DVD. I’ve been meaning to mention it and what better time than now. The story concerns a man who wakes up one morning to find he’s apparently the last living human on Earth. Nearly everyone else has vanished completely and those who haven’t are dead. He eventually meets two other people and together they discover what happened to the rest of the world, why they survived, and that they have to stop it from happening again or they’ll vanish too. There are no super heroes, computer generated special effects, giant robots, or evil alien entities. It doesn’t move nearly as fast as any of the new movies, so it’s not suitable for the modern movie viewer with a 5 second attention span. But I enjoyed it and recommend to anyone who might happen across the DVD.

International Space Development Conference

Posted on 27 May, 2007 by steevithak

As I write this, I’m sitting at the DPRG’s booth at the International Space Development Conference. The ISDC asked us to be an affiliate and demo some robots. In the next booth is a group of high-powered rocketry people who have some rockets about 15 feet tall. John Carmack’s Pixel lauch vehicle, built by his Armadillo Aerospace group, is sitting on the floor about 20 feet in front of me. Carmack and his engineers were here yestereday. I’ve also spotted a few other interesting people wandering around; Ben Bova and Buzz Aldrin. Larry Niven was supposed to be here somewhere but I haven’t seen him yet.

There are also loads of non-profit space colonization groups here. I remember 20 years ago at science fiction conventions seeing groups like the L-5 society asking for donations so they could colonize space. I optimisitcally became a member of several groups. Eventually I realized they weren’t really doing anything. After all these years, they still haven’t gotten any further than sitting at tables and telling people about how great it would be to colonize space. The names have changed. Apparently, the L-5 Society is defunct now. In it’s place we have groups like the Mars Foundation and some Moon Society. I talked to the people at a few of these and they seem to have the same strategy of achieving their goal by talking about it endlessly. It’s kind of depressing. They all seem to ignore the basic problem that it’s expensive to get into space to do all this colonizing. If they spent a little time working on that, they might get somewhere.

Random software and robot news

Posted on 24 May, 2007 by steevithak

I’ve been doing a little more C programming lately. On the embedded level, I’m porting some odometery and waypoint navigation code written by David P. Anderson for use on my own robot. This is part of a larger project to put together a GPL’d library of mobile robot code. Don’t expect to see it anytime soon but we are making progress.

I’m also trying to squeeze in time to keep up the work on mod_virgule. I’ve made a lot of progress over the last few months, benefiting both robots.net and Advogato. The ToDo list seems endless but next up is some code refactoring and work on the data schemas used for the XML database and HTML entry forms. This work will hopefully allow me to fix a long standing bug in the HTML forms and make the field layouts a little more flexible.

Stories of Coincidental Electricity

Posted on 23 April, 2007 by steevithak

The annual Tanner Electronics Robot Show was on Saturday, April 14. The DPRG held their annual robot talent contest concurrently. So, not suprisingly, I was planning on working late the preceding Friday to get my new little robot, Robozoa, into shape. This mostly involved finishing some hardware-related things like wiring from the H-Bridges to the motors and from the motor encoders to the microcontroller. This sort of work is better done at the DPRG Lab where there are plenty of tools and test equipment to make it easy.

The weather prediction was for rain in the evening, so my plan was to head up to the DPRG immediately after work. Not suprisingly, a last-minute work-related emergency held me up for a couple of hours. By the time I was finally able to leave, a torrential rain had started. When a break in the rain materialized, I ran out to my car; only to get a phone call before I was out of the parking lot. The call was from Susan, who was holed up at home in a bathroom with the three cats because the TV had just announced a tornado was headed her way. She said the tornado watch area extended to the downtown area where I was, so I decided I’d be better off inside the office than in my car until things calmed down.

I ran back through the now heavy rain into the office. As I dried off, I clicked up a few weather radar sites. Sure enough, there were some nasty looking thunderstorms headed my way. They passed over Irving, where Susan was, without any serious damage resulting (it’s now unclear whether the reported tornado really touched down or not). The worst of storms were now north of Dallas in the Garland area, where the DPRG Lab is located. I decided to settle in and do what work I could on the robot at the office. I finally left about 1am by which time the rain had stopped. I was a little annoyed that this series of events had kept me from making it to the DPRG where I could have worked more efficiently.

The next morning, I showed up at the Tanner’s event. The previous night’s storm had brought with it a freak, one-day cold front. Despite the cold, a fair number of humans and robots showed up to participate. But, more interestingly, several people said they’d seen the DPRG’s building in Garland on the news. There were firetrucks in the parking lot. Apparently it was hit by lightning. Eric Sumner, Ed Paradis, and I decided to drive up to Garland and check out the damage.

From what we could tell, the lightning hit the transformer immediately behind the DPRG building. It largely destroyed the power line between the transformer and the building, reducing it to a series of short fragments. The power meter was completely destroyed. The charred metal casing of the meter was still on the wall, surrounded by blackened bricks. The transparent housing and meter electronics, or the remains of them, were found on the ground. The meter had contained several boards with surface mount components. The lightning blast had desoldered all the components and completely vaporized many of them. Inside the building, the main breaker box was also a charred mess but it appears the breakers vaporized so quickly that it limited the damage to the downstream breaker boxes.

By Tuesday power had been restored and we were able to evaluate the damage. Remarkably, the only losses discovered were a single surge protector and one very old dot matrix printer. Aside from those two casualties, test equipment, networking gear, computers, all seemed to have survived no worse for the wear. All thing considered, I’m glad I wasn’t around Friday night when it hit.

Robots parts, Free3D.org, and Movie Reviews

Posted on 24 July, 2006 by steevithak

I received my laser cut acrylic parts back from Pololu the other day. They came out perfectly. The hardest part of the whole thing was creating the CAD file. There are simply no remotely usable Free (as in speech) CAD programs out there. I finally picked up a copy of Design Cad 14 for Windows on eBay for $10. I tried to run it under Wine but Wine’s OpenGL support doesn’t play nice with Mesa OpenGL emulation. You have to have actual hardware OpenGL support to have any hope of running an OpenGL program under Wine. So I ended up using Susan’s XP box. Anyway, the parts came out great. I highly recommend Pololu if anyone needs inexpensive laser cut parts.

As a side effect of the OpenGL hardware support vs. emulation problem. I got involved in a couple of usenet discussions about the poor state of OpenGL and general 3D acceleration support in the Free Software world. There are a few cards with rudimentary 3D acceleration support but getting information on what’s supported and how fast it is can be a pain. So I threw together a little website with some links to info and some crude (very crude) glxgears benchmarks on existing hardware. The site is www.free3d.org.

Susan and I saw Superman Returns. It was okay but nothing special. Just another comic book movie with the same characters and plot you’ve seen a million times before. We also saw A Scanner Darkly – very good, definitely a thumbs up from me. It was nice to see a Philip K. Dick story make it to the screen in a form that at least resembles the original instead of being turned into an action movie.

I also picked up the Time Tunnel DVDs. I don’t know when I’ll ever possibly have time to watch them all. We looked at the first couple. I remember loving the show when I was a kid. They’re still fun to watch but they seem pretty silly compared to modern science fiction.

Robonexus 2005 Debriefing

Posted on 16 October, 2005 by steevithak

I’m finally getting caught up on things since returning from Robonexus and one of the last things on my ToDo list is posting something here about the trip.

Before I get to that, I should mention that Susan and I went to the State Fair of Texas this year just prior to my Robonexus trip. Nothing new and amazing to report there but I used the Fair to test out a new camera, the Fuji Finepix A345. The A345 is an inexpensive 4.1 Megapixel pocket camera. I still shoot a lot of 35mm film but didn’t want to lug my Canon T90 and associated gear around Robonexus, so I picked up the Fuji to try out as an alternative. If you’re curious, take a look at a few of the 2005 Texas State Fair photos or the Robonexus photos I shot with it.

Okay, so on to the Robonexus trip itself. Like most trips, it started with the hassle of airport security and placing all my belongings into little plastic bins. I filled one bin with cell phone, camera, keys, change, belt and shoes. It took another for my laptop and a third bin for the laptop case. This was followed by some hopping around on one foot while trying to put on shoes and simulatneously hang to my other stuff so it wouldn’t get stolen.

I’ve been to a lot of places in California but this was my first trip to San Jose. Random San Jose info: It doesn’t look that different from the Dallas area. They’re still using incandescent traffic lights instead of LED lights. The cross walks emit all sorts of weird sounds that are presumably intended to assist the blind. We’ve got nothing like that here in Dallas. The Kinko’s in San Jose have service as bad as those in Dallas.

I ended up in Hotel Montgomery which is within easy walking distance of the convention center so I didn’t need a car. I got in on the first day and picked up two sets of credentials: a press pass as editor of robots.net and an exhibit staff pass for the Dallas Personal Robotics Group. Because the DPRG didn’t really have enough advance notice to prepare anything interesting, we ended up just placing some flyers on our table that described the group. I had the flyers printed down the street at a Kinko’s (see above comment on Kinko’s).

I only had time to sample a few of the talks including Matt Mason’s overview of robotics and AI research at CMU, Michael S. Chester on launching a robotics company, Max Chandler on robotic art, and Stewart Tansley on Microsoft’s plans in the field of robotics. I showed up to hear Phillip Torrone of MAKE but he was a no-show. Most of the talks were interesting but primarily technical in nature. One non-technical talk, Joanne Pransky on The Frankenstein Complex and Its Impact on Robotics, brought up more philosophical subjects such the human reaction to robots with intelligence, emotions, and sentience. The talk left a number of people, including myself, involved in debates with other audience members over the subject. Some people still seem to be made profoundly uncomfortable with the idea that machines made of metal and silicon may one day be as good as us meat-based machines at thinking and feeling. No mob of angry peasants with torches appeared however, so perhaps things have improved since Frankenstein’s time?

Along with several other Dallas attendees, I escaped the conference for a few hours on Friday and drove up to Stanford. Sanjay Dastoor, a DPRG member who is now a student at Stanford, arranged a tour of some of the robot labs for us. We checked out the Stanford quadruped and also got to see some of the Stanford Sprawl robots in action (they’re fast!). After the robot labs, we took a few drive-by photos of the Frank Lloyd Wright Hanna House which is on the Stanford Campus. I also got a chance to check out the San Jose Museum of Art since it was just across the street from the convention center, though I had to do that one by myself. It was worth the visit and I enjoyed the Sandow Birk exhibit in particular. Overall I’d say it rates higher than the Dallas art museums but not as high as the museums in Ft. Worth.

Back at Robonexus, I spent a lot of my time networking. It was good to meet so many people in person who I deal with online regularly including most of the fine folks at Servo Magazine. The conference includes an interesting mix of high-end commercial robotics companies such as iRobot, commercial hobby robotics suppliers such as HiTec, and non-profit organizations such as the Robotics Society of America. There were also demos of many robot contest formats including NATCAR, Botball, FIRST, Robo-Magellan, and the Trinity Fire-Fighting competition. One suprise this year was the arrival of Lindz Lawlor and his Electric Giraffe. The Electric Giraffe is a huge mechanical quadruped equipped with more lights and audio amps than your average dance club. It walked around belting out dance-velocity Kraftwerk tunes. The Electric Giraffe was created for Burning Man, which seems to be a venue increasingly used by robot builders to demonstrate their work. After talking to Lindz and others who’ve been there, I started thinking it sounded like a lot of fun.

I returned to Dallas from Robonexus with two general feelings. The first was that the DPRG needs to go to Robonexus 2006 with more people and plenty of hardware to show off. The second was that the DPRG needs to think about creating something worthy of Burning Man. Interestingly, I’ve discovered that when you mention attending Burning Man, people will either react by saying something like, “What?! Burning Man is jest a bunch of nekkid hippies runnin’ around!” or they’ll say, “I’ve always thought Burning Man looked like fun but I’ve never had a good reason to go”. The DPRG members seem equally divided but I wouldn’t be suprised if we manage to make it out there in the coming years.