Stereotype on women and men.

Two funny videos from YouTube.

Depending on which side you are, either of them may annoy you. Both are following social stereotype that women are not good at driving and men are blind on sex.

Women parking:
http://youtu.be/rn0e6xA5G_8

Pepsi-Max:
http://youtu.be/3N1aOZTTA-c

If you aren't annoyed, imagine that those movie clips are mentioned not for fun but for despising.

When people stick on a stereotype, their perspective becomes less-sensitive.
Even when a woman have never had a car accident, she is already considered as a troublesome driver. Same thing applies to men: a man who cares the value of family is considered as a play boy.

There may exist some sort of statistics that support the idea that women are bad at driving.
Those postulated conclusions may or may not help politicians to deal with car accidents caused by women. But when it comes to an individual case, we cannot just assume a woman is bad at driving.
Notice that the statistics or any evidences that support the behavior of groups cannot be directly applied to individual of the group. You can measure the speed and direction of an object, but it doesn't tell either of speed nor direction of each quantum in the object.

Photoshop CS5 Magic: "Content-aware" feature

I am very surprised by finding what PhotoShop latest version can do. The most interesting feature was "Content-awareness".
You can see the overview video here:
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/photoshop-cs5-feature-tour/photoshop-cs5-overview/

A shorter version is here:
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/photoshop-cs5-feature-tour/terry-whites-top-5-photoshop-cs5-features/

I have seen the same functionality from SIGGRAPH papers in 2007, 2008 and 2009, but I haven't seen a practical software to do them. Now Photoshop integrated it and ready to use.

Beside content-awareness feature, 3D features are also impressive.

New microphone and voice recognition

I got a new microphone from Woot. The product name is "Eye-ball" with USB 2.0. This has a HD quality web-cam that I can hide.To test the microphone, I was tampering my Windows7 and I found Voice Recognition feature.
I knew WindowsXP had it as well, but this version seems improved in that it had more interfaces for controlling Windows system and Mouse device.

As a bottom line, I can say "press control c" "press a" to control Keyboard.
I can also say "mousegrid" to control Mouse, then it will show a big grid that covers whole screen with numbers that indicate where to click. I can then say the numbers and a smaller grid will appear with numbers. When I narrowed down enough, I can say "click 4".
Unfortunately "dictation" feature doesn't seem to work well for me. Possibly because of my poor English or it isn't working well yet.

And I also found that the when the voice recognition system is parsing sound, my Firefox is unresponsive for a second; my computer is a good one tho.

I think this is very useful when I watch some movie without Keyboard or Mouse. I don't need to bother Jumi-Mouse on iPhone anymore.

Ponyo

I watched Ponyo, one of Japanimation made by Ghibri studio.

** This article has many spoilers **
I like to share why I found the animation was so interesting.

Ponyo and ponyo-shaped-friends are analogy to a baby and sperms, respectively. Ponyo passes through a dark tunnel and gets into a transparent egg shaped room, which implies that a baby is carried to a mom's egg.

Not everything are exactly mapped to the process of delivering a baby but some are added to make the analogy complete and some are exaggerated.

The animation shows that Ponyo's visiting is causing a lot of troubles: the moon is falling down, ships are missing, and an entire city is submerged. This is very exaggerated but probably almost same level of troubles will be expected in a family once a baby is delivered or being delivered.
The protagonist boy was too smart to be 5 years old boy. Five years old is obviously too early to take a responsibility of having a baby but who on the Earth will be fully ready to have a baby.

By showing ancient fish, it reminded that human species is also from sea and shares many parts on DNA. Who would easily connect dots between delivering a baby with ancient fish.

Ponyo was crossing the line between the world of magic and that of real. I thought this point of view was very romantic.

I didn't find any political factors in this animation but there was a number "1907" on a door. I am guessing that there might be some events in the year.

Ganglion Cyst

I went to a hospital and a Doctor told me that I have a Ganglion Cyst:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganglion_cyst

It is a special case of Cyst and he also told me that it may go away or pop; I don't know what "pop" would mean tho.
I feel little bit of pressure on my hand and arm but not a big deal.
Hopefully it goes away soon.

3D Mouse

After asking around several people, I finally decided to get one, 3D mouse.
http://www.3dconnexion.com/products/spacenavigator.html
Since our project is done at this moment, I will have some time to study others and I am thinking of learning Maya.

If some one is already expert and used to the legacy way of navigating 3D modeling tools, they may not need such a fancy toy. But I am not comfortable navigating 3D space with a mouse yet, so I am expecting high... high... :)

Photoshop free video tutorial

It seems like Adobe provides free video tutorial for their products:
http://tv.adobe.com/channel/how-to/

I haven't seen them yet but I will soon.

Optomologist

I have visited an office of Optomologist or optometry.
It is only because I wanted to have a new glasses. If I am in Korea, I can just go to a glasses shop and get one; they will measure my eye sights as well. I wasn't sure what the procedure of buying a glasses in USA, so I went to Optomologist. After all, I had an interesting experience.

The office had several huge devices that measure something on my eyes. One was for taking picture of back side of my eyes, retina. Another one was for measuring my peripheral sights. Another one was to measure pressure inside of my eyes; that's what I heard anyway.

The cost of most of them were covered by my Vision insurance that my company pays for me. Otherwise, it could cost about 150 dollars. I know that although it seems free because of the insurance, after all I must be paying for them somehow, so I didn't feel much good about those expensive and inefficient process to get a glasses. Although having a new experience was enjoyable, I will prefer to avoid them next time; if I can...I haven't bought my glasses yet, which was the point of all. The office didn't have much variety of glasses in my favor. I will pick one later.

Power XCell 8i as a PCI card

I went to an IBM web-page and I found that there is an PCI card that has one PPU and eight SPUs. What a surprise...
More details are here:
http://www.matrix-vision.com/products/cell/mvxcell8i.php?lang=en

However, it doesn't seem cheap. I cannot just click and buy one.

Toshiba's notebooks, G55, G50, F10, have four SPUs

Today I was surprised by finding that some of Notebooks (and super-computers) has SPUs that are used in PlayStation3. Unfortunately I cannot buy any of them at this time of writing and I don't know why they don't sell them anymore.
Little more details are here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpursEngine

Those notebooks has 4 of SPUs whereas PlayStations3 has 8. So it is little simplified and smaller version of it. I also heard that it comes with some kind of manuals for SPU programmers, which is very interesting.

I have also found that F10 had some defects on chips, so probably G50 and G55 should be available still...

Interesting book finding: Cuda by example.

I feel like the world is moving so fast and I am fall behind.

I have kept reading a book, Mastering Unreal Technology Volume 1, for a few months. Since the book has about 1,000 pages, it is taking so long time for me to finish it.

Today I found an interesting book where I was reading my book: Cuda by example. I always had questions how to start learning Cuda and didn't have chance to get involved in much. Now the world has a book about it.In computer technology, publishing a book about a software isn't happening often. One of the reasons is that those software or technologies changes faster so that any books or documents doesn't catch it up enough.

Because of the reason, it always implies that if I see a book about something, I am already late to catch it up. It makes me blame myself.

I haven't even started reading books in my posses: "Cell programming" and "Advanced lighting and materials with shaders".

I wish I can make some time to catch them up after this project is done.