7/25/11

An open letter to Google.

  Here we are, only a little more than a week after I've deleted my facebook, and I can't help but feel the temptation to go back and stop the process. Only my lingering anger, and the time I invested in getting my data out are keeping me from doing it.
  At the heart of why I'm writing this (still pointless) apostrophe to you. At stake here is your cleanup of Google+ accounts with false names. I wish there was some sort of official statement I could link to instead of that article, but I can't find one. Basically, those users who either have used pseudonyms on Google+, or have multiple Google accounts, seem to be at risk of being locked out of (in some cases at least, though accounts vary) the rest of their Google account. I admit, this is especially disturbing to me because I technically fall into both categories (if you're from Google, please read on as I explain why I believe this is a technicality.).

7/19/11

3D Scanning, the Bowyer-Watson Algorithm, and Real Time (maybe) Delaunay triangulation.

 
  Wasn't that a mouthful! I'm taking another look at my 3D scanner. I really haven't talked about this scanner very much on this blog, so I've posted a video of it I made earlier this fall as part of my MIT application above. I'll move a good deal of the content from that portion of my application onto this blog over time, so long as it doesn't become too obsolete.

7/15/11

Why I'm leaving: An open letter to facebook

Dear facebook,
A few years ago, in a fit of rebellious teenage rage, I joined facebook. I knew my parents didn't want me to have an account. I knew "all" my friends already did. I wanted to fit in.
 Since then the idea of social networking has grown on me; I've come to know and love my facebook profile and it's not an easy decision to leave. What's triggered my decision to jump ship is simple: you won't give me my contact data back. I wanted some numbers to put on my phone and some gmail addresses. Your APIs wouldn't give them to me.

7/8/11

Fear my pixelated magic!

I got bored with my header, and decided to make a new one. Made with GIMP (From scratch!), uploaded to Dropbox, done. I wish I'd been able to give my ninja alter ego a slightly better left foot, but overall I'm happy with how it turned out.
I've also changed titles and dates over to a visually-consistent font with the font-family command. At the moment, this won't show up on firefox because my font files are hosted on dropbox and firefox won't show externally loaded fonts. I'll be tinkering around with this a little more.

Up, Up and Away

   It's over. The last launch has happened roughly on schedule (somewhat surprisingly, given the weather), and Atlantis is in orbit. The shuttle is something I grew up with. I had shuttle shaped toys throughout childhood. A picture of an old discovery launch taken by my mom hung on my wall until very recently. The shuttle is a symbol of what humanity can do when we work together towards a higher goal in the same way the ISS is. I can only hope  the event we've seen is, ultimately, a step forward, not a step back. I'm all for commercialization of space flight, but I hope that we're not sacrificing our capability to put humans into space for nothing. Here's to a safe final flight for Atlantis.

7/6/11

Ordinals...


Said Conrad Cornelius O'Donald O'Dell,
My very young friend who is learning to spell,
"The A is for Ape. And the B is for Bear.
The C is for Camel. The H is for Hare.
The M is for Mouse. And the R is for Rat.
I know all the twenty-six letters like that...
... through to Z is for Zebra. I know them all well.
So now I know everything anyone knows
From beginning to end. From the start to the close.
Because Z is as far as the alphabet goes."

How to liberate your phone book from facebook

This is a quickly written, hacky script for personal use. For the time being, this script will only work on 99 friends at a time (Amusingly, facebook thinks there are 100 on the first page, but you're welcome to count. There are 99. Buggy programming FTW!). I'm playing with a workaround, but don't hold your breath. In the meantime, you can do the following to take your friend's phone numbers back into your own care: