Calvin Hsia's WebLog : Miscellaneous

Unorthodox chopsticks

Calvin_Hsia — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 12:48:00 GMT

Several years ago, my wife and I were walking through a local shopping mall. At the time, there was some sort of Asian festival. At a display booth there was a table upon which were two trays, side by side. One was empty, and the other had many beans. The sign challenged visitors to see how many beans could be moved to the empty tray with chopsticks in one minute. A piece of paper indicated the top score so far: something like 10. I imagined how somebody could have spent 6 seconds per bean…

My wife, being quite adept with the tool, was able to get a respectable number of beans across, despite the difficulty of picking up a single slippery bean.

Then she challenged me, having used chopsticks all my life, to see if I could beat her score.

To her chagrin, I deftly wielded the sticks, one in each hand, horizontally in parallel to scoop up dozens of beans at a time, crushing the day’s high score. Of course this wasn’t the normal way most people use chopsticks, but then, it easily was the best solution to the problem at hand.

(I’m sure some of you are thinking that a better solution be to pick up the full tray and pour the beans onto the empty tray, but how hard would it be to lift the tray with chopsticks?)

At a recent social gathering, we were divided into groups to solve some word puzzles: given a fairly long word, how many words can be formed from the letters of the original word before the timer rang.

Many people would write out the given word as soon as the timer started like so:

E S T A B L I S H M E N T

so that others in the group could think up words.

When it was my turn to write the word, I wrote it like this:

E S T A

B L I S H

M E N T

This gave our group 2 dimensions along which to see letter combinations to form words.

My kids had a toy recently, and it had a box into which we had to insert batteries. The box had very tiny Philips screws on it, and my kids tried various small screwdrivers, even my set of jeweler’s drivers. I could get the screws to turn, but they never came out. It turns out that the screws were decorative: just pull the top off the box<sigh>.

(In the old days, no battery operated toys protected their owners from the hazardous battery voltages. Nowadays, probably due to some lawsuit, every compartment seems to need to protect kids from 1.5 volts)

I spend much of my time solving problems. Sometimes I get so involved in a problem I get stuck. Perhaps then, it is a good time to take a break, rethink the approach, use the tools a little differently or even just kick the tires. Often talking about it with someone else can give useful insights. Doing the unorthodox or unthinkable might just solve the problem!

Customer site visit: 3-D printer company

Calvin_Hsia — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 08:02:00 GMT

I spent a few hours at a local company called 2Bot (http://www.2bot.com/) which makes a 3-D printer that you can attach to your computer via USB port. Yep, I said 3 dimensional: you can feed it an architectural drawing of a building or landscape, and it actually can carve it out of a block of foam. Along with architectural sites and maps, they had carved the head of the Statue of Liberty, people's faces and Mt. Rushmore. Very impressive!

You could use it to design a part for manufacturing, produce a 3 dimensional model of a CAT scan that you can actually hold, or conceptual models for evaluation. I wish I had one when I was trying to design my windsurfer tailfin many moons ago.

For years, machine shops have had NC machines (Numerical Control) where a drill press, for example, could be fed a series of coordinates and could automatically drill holes into a board in a predetermined pattern.

The 2bot is a much more advanced NC machine: it can move a cutting head in 3 dimensions to cut material. It has several embedded processors talking over a mini network controlling the positioning motors.

After getting a tour of the factory and learning about how the physical and electronic architecture was designed and manufactured (It uses TMS 320 Digital Signal Processing chips, which I originally used back in the early 80's!), I talked with the software department. The software allows the end user to choose an input, such as a photograph, architectural drawing, or even Google KML. The user can then manipulate the object visually and determine how best to "print" it. The program then sends commands over USB to the 2Bot which then creates the target product.

They were using Visual Studio 2005 and VB.Net and were very pleased with the productivity that .Net brought them.

We discussed several issues about their software design process:

Use some sort of source control system. If you find that something is broken, it would be nice to be able to figure out when it broke (use prior archived versions of the built code), then track down the change made that day. Even for small shops, it's nice to go back to prior versions to see how something was coded.
I gave several performance tips, such as turning off the Just My Code and using dynamic breakpoints to see call stacks when your application is slow. Use Task Manager, select columns to see what the process is doing while it's slow. (How does Task Manager determine if an Application is Not Responding?)
Debugging tips, such as using the Microsoft Public Symbol Server to see what your application process is actually doing.
We talked about threading and how using a background thread (sample code: Webcrawl a blog to retrieve all entries locally: RSS on steroids) can be helpful for maintaining a responsive User Interface.
Code documentation with the XML Documentation feature can be very useful. For example, VB Intellisense will show your XML Doc method summaries in dropdowns to help you write code.
We talked about using native libraries (they use a couple) and how error handling is handled.
Version control, setup issues, customer support via Remote Assistance,

We each had kids and I mentioned how the Turtle Graphics Logo Program can be fun for teaching kids how to program.

Some of our kids play chess and we talked about using Digital Signal Processing and FFTs, and how they're related: Eliminating Fire Alarm sound at Chess Tournament Awards Ceremony

It's refreshing to see how software development tools can be so helpful in production scenarios. Nowadays, it seems imperative that any modern product has software in it, and the features of the product are mainly driven by its software.

New printers are far more capable: Canon iP4300

Calvin_Hsia — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Our several year old ink jet printer died the other day. It was an Epson Stylus Pro 5000. I knew it was on its way out, so I had been researching printers a little recently. I knew that printer quality and features had been growing substantially in recent years.

I found a review by M. David Stone of the Canon iP4300 InkJet printer and was intrigued, but a little skeptical. Upon seeing it at the local office supply store, I wasn’t impressed. How good can a $100 printer be?

I told my wife I was considering it, and upon learning the price she immediately said not to get it: she wanted a really good quality printer.

Here are some features I really like

2 paper trays. I can keep photo paper in the cassette, and plain paper in the auto sheet feed. When I choose a paper type, the paper source is chosen automatically.
Automatic switching of paper trays based on paper type
Automatic power on when a print job is requested.
Automatic power off after n minutes of inactivity
Quiet operation (our old printer was as big as a tank and sounded like one too.)
The photo printing seemed very high quality and very fast.

Sure, the light plastic frame didn’t seem as solid as the Epson, but it functions well. I easily added the Canon as a shared printer to the several home computers on our home network.

One bug I found: the printer driver itself has a print preview feature (in addition to any preview that client application software might have), but it seemed to be disabled from any shared printer. I pushed the “Help” button on that dialog, which only described that the button would allow a preview. How do I figure out what makes the button disabled?

Another bug: the automatic paper tray switching based on paper type seemed only to work on the machine the printer was attached to. On other network machines, I had to choose the paper source manually.

Our old printer had a feature that would mirror an image, for iron on transfer sheets. I couldn’t find such a feature on the Canon, but then realized that choosing “T-Shirt transfers” would do it.

I took some Fox program code and printed it out in color. It looked really good.

I logged onto my home web server from my office at Microsoft, chose a photo, printed it. I got a warning picture indicating that the paper output tray needed to be opened (kids). So when I got home, I opened the tray and the picture printed.

The printer cost less than the accessories that I bought along with the printer: more ink cartridges and a USB cable, but it was still a small fraction of the price of our old printer.

Microsoft Sudoku article

Calvin_Hsia — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 01:28:00 GMT

Several months ago, I wrote The mechanics of Sudoku and Sudoku puzzles screen capture. As a result, Stephen Toub emailed me and asked if I’d like to beta test his Tablet PC version of Sudoku.

He sent me several versions over the next few months to test-drive. It was fully functional from when I began, and I’ve seen many iterations of UI design, puzzle generation, and features come and go.

He emailed me that it’s finally been released, including source code in C#:

Microsoft Sudoku: Optimizing UMPC Applications for Touch and Ink

It’s a pretty cool app, which you can modify at will to your liking. In fact, Stephen already showed one way to modify the skins in his blog.

Currently, it runs only on TabletPC, although with the source code, you can modify it to run on other platforms.

Imagine running it on your phone! I already have a pretty good chess program running on my phone!

Phone number and wife haven't changed in 11 years

Calvin_Hsia — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 20:54:00 GMT

There’s a sporting goods store that I’ve visited on occasion over the last 11 years. It’s a membership cooperative, which mails a percentage rebate check back to customers annually. I signed up as a member 11 years ago, which meant yet another card to keep in my wallet. For convenience, the store could recall my membership via my phone number, so the card eventually lost its wallet position.

Over the years, outdoor recreation lost its priority to parenthood, so the store visits and the purchase volume was quite low. On those rare occasions, upon request for my membership number, I’d give my phone number. At some point the search for my membership failed, but I couldn’t be bothered to pursue the issue for the $10 annual purchase.

A few weeks ago, while preparing to bring my family for a ski trip, there was a fairly large purchase and I pursued the matter. I went to customer service and gave information like my address and phone number, wife’s name, etc. I have had only one address, one phone number, and one wife for the 11 years I’ve lived in Washington, so I thought any database program worth its salt would succeed. I’ve only visited their one store (it moved once in 11 years), but I’ve never purchased items in other store branches. In addition, our last name isn’t the most common: surely my account could be found for the several hundred dollars I was spending there.

To further my chagrin, my wife had gone to the store the week before and purchased something. The sales clerk then apparently somehow found our membership account, confirming its existence.

After a few minutes of failure, another sales person, apparently with more experience, offered her assistance. She asked my phone number yet again, typed in a few keys, and instantly found my record!

I asked what her secret was: she used my same phone number but with the older area code: The entry had the 206 area code, but that changed to 425 on September 1, 2000. In this case, evidently experience does help: about 6 years of it! I asked her to change my phone number area code, so this problem won’t occur again for a while.

In any case, it seems to me that searching for my customer record via various attributes should have been less painful.

What's the greatest invention of all time?

Calvin_Hsia — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 04:58:00 GMT

I read this from Raymond, which prompted this post.

To qualify for greatness, an invention would have to affect the most people and benefit humankind in a big way

When pondering this question, I’ve heard things like:

Wheel
Transistor
Computer
Printing Press
Vaccines
In4ternal combustion engine
Cars
Planes
Sandwich
Language
Internet
Tablet PC

Two things that are rarely mentioned come to mind: phonetics and the decimal representation of numbers.

By phonetics I mean that there is a simple relationship between the written and oral representations of a word or concept. Phonetics allows humans to communicate simply through the span of generations. People can learn from the accumulated knowledge of predecessors.

By decimal representation I mean the 1’s, 10’s, 100’s decimal number system that we use today (including understanding and using zero). Imagine mathematics and science without decimal numbers, or even with Roman numerals. Of course, I’d prefer base 8 rather than base 10, so things like ½, ¼, 1/8, etc. would be simpler. Imagine drill bits: which is bigger: 5/64^th or 3/32^nd ?

Then again, wouldn’t it be nice to have 10 days in a week, 10 months in a year, 10 hours in a day, 10 seconds in a minute? And the US would be using the metric system.

I don’t know to whom to attribute these two “inventions”, but I think they are of such immense importance to humans that they should not be forgotten

Are water and salt the only inorganics we consume?

Calvin_Hsia — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 09:04:00 GMT

Of all the naturally occurring foods/drinks that humans normally ingest, is it true that all but two of them contain carbon? In any case, these 2 are very common. Maybe there’s a candy bar I don’t know about that doesn’t have carbon<g>. (Of course I mean pure H2O and pure NaCl.).

I suppose that there are mineral pills that may not contain carbon (like calcium pills?). Some may argue that pure water or salt don’t exist in nature. Others may argue (complain?) that they just ate inorganic turkey.

Quiz: Infinite Continued fractions

Calvin_Hsia — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 19:27:00 GMT

At the SouthWest Fox speaker dinner we were talking about continued (or infinite) fractions.

I posed this question:

What does this expression evaluate to?

1 + 1

_________

1 + 1

________

1 + 1

_______

1 + 1

______

1 + 1

…

Clue: It’s adding some positive value to 1, so it must be larger than one. The thing it’s adding is the reciprocal of some number larger than 1 so….

Do you know everything about Factorials?

Calvin_Hsia — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 20:02:00 GMT

When I was in 7^th grade at Amity Junior High School in Orange Connecticut, I gave a presentation on Factorial numbers.

Here’s some interesting code:

FOR i = 1 TO 80

?i,Factorial(i),SQRT(2*PI()*i)*(i/EXP(1))^i

ENDFOR

PROCEDURE Factorial(n)

IF n=1

RETURN n

ENDIF

RETURN n*Factorial(n-1)

What do the base of natural logs (exp(1) = 2.718281828…), PI (3.14159…) and the square root of 2 have to do with Factorial ?

(In case you were wondering, I did not include the transcendental math in my 7^th grade presentation)

I don’t know everything about the fascinating Factorials!

Optimization question from a reader

Calvin_Hsia — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 21:18:00 GMT

I received a question:

…I've always been curious about code like this:

IF wParam=ASC("a")
wParam=ASC("b")
ENDIF

Is it more appropriate to think of ASC("a") as the Fox equivalent of a C 'a', or is it an actual function call every time through?

It’s easy to test this.

Try running this code:

num=1e7 && 1e7 is 10 * 1e6 (3,6,9 are thousand, million, billion) = 10 * 1 million

wParam=ASC("a")

ns=SECONDS()

FOR i = 1 TO num

IF wParam=ASC("a")

wParam=ASC("b")

ENDIF

ENDFOR

nd1=SECONDS()-ns

?nd1

ns=SECONDS()

FOR i = 1 TO num

IF wParam=97

wParam=98

ENDIF

ENDFOR

nd2=SECONDS()-ns

?nd2,100*(nd1-nd2)/nd2

On my machine, the 2^nd loop is 20-25% faster.

Of course an optimizing compiler could transform the 1^st loop to the 2^nd. In fact, a really good optimizing compiler would remove the loop completely!

In C and C++, the literal ‘a’ is exactly equal to 97, even at runtime, whereas the literal “a” (notice the single vs double quotes) is a string represented as a 2 byte array of 97 followed by a terminating 0.

The ASC() function takes any string expression as a parameter, including possibly a function call, so it cannot be optimized out in general.

Balloons and Planes: cabin pressure

Calvin_Hsia — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 21:16:00 GMT

Next time you’re on a plane (or a submarine!), take along some scotch tape and a balloon.

While you’re on the ground, waiting for take-off, inflate the balloon. Wrap the balloon with the tape around the equator and note how the tape constricts the balloon’s size (like a belt on your pants).

Tape the contraption to the overhead bins above and observe as your plane takes off and gains altitude.

Q. What happens?

A. Your fellow passengers give you strange looks!

That was the worst natural disaster to hit the US

Calvin_Hsia — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 21:03:00 GMT

A coworker’s family was hit hard by Katrina. She’s collecting donations in our cafeteria today and tomorrow. Don’t be surprised if you see more Foxpro conference bags/backpacks/t-shirts in Mississippi!

Here’s her blog post about it:

Save Waveland, MS annihilated by Katrina! I’m driving home with supplies. See how you can help. And, if you have not made contact with family or close friends, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

I remember going to a Fox conference with my wife, mother-in-law and 3 year old daughter in New Orleans in May 2000. I just queried my Visual Foxpro picture database for the keyword “Orleans” and found 66 pictures from that trip.

On the way to New Orleans, our stopover at Denver’s new airport was memorable. Our flight was delayed and circling Denver until my daughter was airsick and vomited all over my wife. We had just enough time to buy new clothes at an airport boutique (since our bags were unavailable). One would suspect a collaboration between the air traffic controllers and airport boutique stores!

I remember seeing the New Orleans Convention Center from a taxi under a highway overpass.

In New Orleans we had dinner at the Commander’s Palace where we were required to wear dinner jackets despite the 90 degree heat. We were waiting in the lobby and saw some restaurant reviews on the wall. We were discussing the reviews and apparently the powers-that-be overheard us and thought perhaps we were “anonymous” restaurant critics, so we were given the royal treatment! I have a photo of the Maitre’d bringing balloons for my daughter. We were given a grand tour of the kitchen.

I believe the New Orleans conference was the launch of VFP 7.0.

Remove double spaces from pasted code samples in blog

Calvin_Hsia — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 09:54:00 GMT

If you highlight a recent code sample from my blog and paste it into VFP, you might see the code double spaced. This can be annoying, especially if there are line continuation characters:

x= "This is a " +;

"continued line"

I’ve found that to avoid this, I can paste into a new Outlook message (which I have configured to use MSWord as my email editor), then click on (or alt-shift-F10) the little smart tag icon to alter the paste format to “Match Destination Formatting”, then copy/paste into VFP, the extra lines are removed.

The host blogging software changed a few months ago, so the HTML for older posts may behave differently with regard to double-spacing.

New MSN Search Toolbar allows Tabbed Browsing

Calvin_Hsia — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 22:52:00 GMT

Several months ago, I saw an article about the FireFox browser, and how it could do “Tabbed browsing”. One of the main things I disliked about Internet Explorer was that in order to see multiple web pages, you have to have multiple windows. Alt-Tab to switch between windows was cumbersome. I tried FireFox and really liked the tabbed browsing. In fact, I installed it on several of my machines. Firefox had several security flaws and updates (as well as IE). After a few weeks, I found that it lacked in other areas, so I gradually stopped using it. I read somewhere that MSN Search was coming out with a new toolbar that would allow Tabbed Browsing, and I saw that it was available here. I installed it and I really like the IE Tabbed browsing feature. I just turned off the Google toolbar, which used Alt-G to get to the search textbox, and now I use Alt-M to get to the MSN search textbox.

Just a few years ago, if you opened multiple Word or Excel documents, or even Outlook email messages, they would all show up as a single “Word” icon in the taskbar and the Alt-Tab dialog I liked this “Multiple Document Interface” . With Word 2003, the default behavior shows each window as a separate item in the Alt-Tab display. You can choose Tools->View and uncheck the “Windows in Taskbar” option to change this behavior. Word documents will then show in one Alt-Tab icon, and the Word Window menu (or Ctrl-F6) allows you to navigate between the open items, including any Outlook email messages currently being composed. (I like to use Word as my Outlook email editor, as well as my blog composition editor)

New Tablet PC hard disk and using RIS

Calvin_Hsia — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 07:08:00 GMT

My 3 year old Acer TravelMate 100 TabletPC hard disk (20G) was dying. It has served me well as a portable machine. I love the tablet features and the small size. It was one of the original prototype tablets that I started using about 6 months before TabletPCs were available publicly. Recently, the disk was periodically resetting itself, possibly due to sector failures. I tried using chkdsk /f to map out failed sectors (I’m not sure if it can deal with hard sector failure), but it didn’t seem to help much.

About 23 years ago I wrote a program that would read the File Allocation Table (FAT) of a floppy or hard disk. It could read the directory structures and display the fragmentation. I think it was dBase III that had a copy protection scheme that would record on which sectors it was installed and only work if it lived on those sectors. I didn’t like this scheme because it didn’t allow me to defragment my disk, so I used my program to help get around it.

So I bought a 60 gig replacement online for about $90. “Hitachi Travelstar 4K80 - 60GB 2.5", 4200RPM IC25N060ATMR04 - 08K0634”

I was a little worried that the disk may not be physically or electronically compatible. Physically they looked the same, although one was Hitachi and the other IBM. I understand that most notebooks can use any generic notebook hard disk. The rotation speed was the same, but the capacity was tripled. Removing the old was fairly simple: make sure it was shut down and unplugged, remove the battery, remove a single screw, and pull the drive out. There was a thin metal sheath around the IBM that I just removed (1 more screw) and put on the new Hitachi. There was also a connector adapter that converted the male 44 pin connector to female, which was easily transferred. After reversing the steps, I turned on the machine, went into BIOS setup and was immediately relieved to see that the drive was recognized by the BIOS. I changed the boot sequence to network and installed Windows XP Tablet PC edition over our corporate network using RIS (Remote OS Installation). Wow, that is *so* much more convenient than using floppies or CDs! I just answered a few questions and let it go. After about an hour, Windows and Office were set up for me. I visited the Acer web site to download a couple drivers and things seem to be working just fine!

I’m not sure if RIS is available outside Microsoft (I believe it’s internal only, although I believe SMS can help similarly: can somebody confirm? Thanks) but it’s a *very* convenient way to set up a machine.