Shift to WordPress

Tonight I finally took the whole two minutes, if even that, required to get MacJournal working with my WordPress blog. I have been providing identical content in both places, but it's a waste of time to continue doing so, which is why I will let this blog stagnate.

Converting QTVR to Flash with Pano2VR

One of my hobbies is shooting interactive panoramic photographs. Since I first set it up, my personal website has had a couple full-screen QuickTime VR panoramas available for viewing. Despite having popularized interactive photography, Apple long ago stopped developing it, which has allowed others to appear and push ahead, most notably Adobe with its Flash technology. While not a professional (or even all that skillful) a "panographer," I understand to some degree the appeal of Flash in comparison to QuickTime:

1. Almost every computer comes with a Flash plugin for the provided browsers, but QuickTime requires everyone but Apple owners to download and install a fairly large program. Naturally not everyone does, which means Flash panoramas can probably reach more eyeballs.


2. Adobe has continued to develop its technology but Apple hasn't. QuickTime VR still looks better, I think, but the difference is closing.


3. Flash tools are constantly being developed. Yet as far as I know, the best QuickTime media authoring tool is/was LiveStage Pro; however, the program's development apparently ended a while back when it was still QuickTime 6.


4. The two main tools I have used for working with QTVR panoramas, after stitching them, are CubicConverter and CubicConnector. Both are great programs but a bit old: They neither handle 16-bit images nor allow non-ASCII language input (no Japanese-language hotspots).

1. What I'm driving at is that I have concluded that my panoramas should be offered in Flash format as well. Thankfully a wonderful tool called Pano2VR exists to make Flash output and conversion a snap. The latest beta (v6) can read QuickTime VR files very well. In addition to reading the graphic file, it recognizes information about initial view, zoom limits, and even hotspot data. However, I've experienced a few crashes when the program has tried to open up the imported hotspot data, yet that's to be expected with a beta release. All things considered, Pano2VR simplifies things greatly and offers a number of options I haven't had the time or interest to explore. I would hate to go back to recreating otherwise identical QTVR and Flash panoramas with identical hotspots entirely by hand.

How Long Would You Wait?

Tokyo is a densely populated area. Perhaps many have seen pictures of the station platform attendants shoving people into already crammed train cars during rush hour—an ugly experience, I assure you. One result of all the people here is that one must get used to long lines. My Tokyo students often say, for example, that they'll wait up to 20 minutes for good ramen; they'll usually wait the same amount of time on a late friend. However, when new things open, people will wait seemingly forever and not go insane.

An example:
In Iruma City (入間市), a large mall with a Caustic nearby or attached opened about a week ago. Today is a national holiday, so many people are going shopping. National TV reported that people seeking to beat the lines were arriving as early as 4:30 in the morning, even though the shops don't open until 9 or so. Aerial footage of the massive lines of cars essentially parked in wait along the access "expressways" was rather impressive. To go just 300m was reported as taking between 20 minutes and an hour; many husbands in line were letting wives and children get out and walk up to the mall while the husband waited to park. Interviews with the people living in and around the mall were interesting as well, because some of them claimed that the mall's opening has meant they themselves can't easily drive to or from home unless they are willing to brave massive waits.

Long lines are not for me.

A Japanese and a Japanese Cultural Point

This morning I'm watching a program in which a former sumo wrestlers goes strolling about 大井町 (possibly pronounced as "Oh-i-machi"). In addition to visiting a kaleidoscope maker and an oyster restaurant, he happens across a guy, late middle-age, who's a professional scissors sharpener. The man has a small van in which the back is full of cabinets and tools, including a large rotary whetstone. His main clientele are barbers around the city, but he gets all sorts of sharpening requests. I find it fascinating that he can make a living by driving around to sharpen scissors.

One advertisement during the program was for a cemetery near Sekiuchi Station, Yokohama. An urban cemetery, it's a high-rise building with tons of small storage spaces, like small bus station lockers, for funerary urns. This particular ad showed an attarctive elderly woman coming to pray at her husband's urn. The camera switches back and forth between close-ups of her and of his headstone; when it's the headstone, there's a voice-over of the husband talking contentedly from beyond the grave, pleased with his resting place. If I understood the ad and the cemetery's layout correctly, each floor is basically a hallway lined with secure lockers (opened with special electronic cards) for urns, with an elevator and headstone at each end; you take your loved one's urn and place it in front of the headstone, which you at least rinse off as well, and commune. The cost: ¥760,000, about $7500.

Curious, I asked my wife how long the resting time really was. I thought I had read that similar cemeteries in very upscale urban areas had become so expensive that the cemetery was contractual—X years and your bones are out, unless you renew—or required annual fees, like a condo. She said that relocation of remains is unlikely in such cases, because it requires family consent down to three generations: If you're packed into an urn today but the need to toss your remains comes up, it legally cannot be done without family permission, which would almost assuredly not be given, until your children's children's children have passed away. I don't recall how things work is you have no descendants.

One colleague I have claims that if he turns 80, he's going swimming out into the ocean and not coming back. Me, I'd rather hang on but I'm not too picky about what happens after that. If I'm a property owner, bury me there if legally possible (or do it illegally); otherwise, scatter my ashes, perhaps near where I was born.

John Coleman Weathers Warm-mongers

Today I happened across this video of an interview with John Coleman, who helped develop "The Weather Channel." I don't know anything about the source, The New American, but the video is interesting. Whether you believe global warming—or, more recently, "climate change" (the climate, of course, in perpetual change)—spells imminent doom, this man is interesting to listen to. His decades as a TV meteorologist have honed his presentation skills and authoritative delivery. In short, I like what he says and how he says it, and I believe he's more right than wrong.

Personally, I think the money going to and slated for global warming strategies and defenses would be far better used on immediate problems, like providing clean water in developing countries and fighting malaria (with DDT again, among other things). That is, I believe, the position that Bjørn Lomborg holds. I don't trust politicians (or many other interest groups) to be honest or wise in what they say and legislate, but I do trust them to finagle more money out of me—"We need more taxes from you to fight global warming, to produce more research confirming it, to hire more bureaucrats to do something about it!"—and pass more laws restricting my freedoms in the name of the terror of the day.

Lei Day and Crash Footage

1) My wife told me this morning that, in Hawaii, May Day is called Lei Day. Naturally people exchange leis, which is better than exchanging words or violence, about the cause du jour. Strange evolution from a pagan holiday with a very long history.

2) This morning one of the new shows we watched had a segment on in-car crash cameras, which many taxi companies now use. I missed whether the cams are legally required. There were about a dozen clips of people doing dumb and careless things: running red lights, not looking, driving on the wrong side of the road, making too wide U-turns, riding scooters at night with lights off, and pedestrians darting into four-lane traffic (when a pedestrian bridge is but half a block away).

Watching the clips, I started to get a bit uneasy realizing how quickly and unavoidably things happen. Footage of motorcyclists get smashed hard and flying over the handlebars was particularly scary, since I used to motorcycle very frequently. My father's warning--"On a motorcycle, remember that everyone is trying to kill you"--is useful, but it can't protect you from everything.

Many of the in-car cameras also include microphones, which was occasionally entertaining. Some people scream until impact, some people yell in anger before and/or after the fact, and some people remain silent. Yet none of clips featured swearing, not even bleeped out. Is it because Japanese simply swear less (I think so) or because the clips were screened beforehand (surely they were)?

A Japanese Human-Powered Railroad

Today some Japanese trivia program on TV announced that there used to be a human-powered railroad in Japan. It, uh, ran from Meiji 38 (1906) to Taishou 2 (1914), if I caught the years' numbers correctly; however, I failed to catch where the railroad was. One or two people pushed a small narrow-guage rail car that seated perhaps 12. Fascinating.

Human-powered things take me back to a Chinese geography class I took in university. The professor, Charles Greer, dropped all manner of trivia about how much of China was then (1980s and early '90s) being driven by human power, especially the mega-construction stuff like roads and dams. He claimed that nearly limitless labor was one of China's greatest resources, so the government made serious use of it.

Called rickshaws in English, the human-drawn passenger vehicle you're probably envisioning is called a jinrikisha in Japanese, and it's characters couldn't be more direct: 人力車, "person/people," "power," and "vehicle." The Japanese railroad was a jinshatetsudou, 人車鉄道, "person-vehicle-iron-road."

Atlas of Strange Maps

I'm something of a map geek. In fact, my undergraduate degree was in cartography because I was fascinated by how physical spaces can be described. Thus I am quite pleased to find the Atlas of Strange Maps.

Macintosh OS X 10.5 Upgrade

Now
Currently installing the upgrade. I hope it goes well.

[Posted with hblogger 2.0 http://www.normsoft.com/hblogger/]

Update
Leopard is installed. Took about 45 minutes after taking much time to confirm the integrity of the installation DVD. Had to update six Apple items after the update. Went through most of my applications to check them. So far everything seems to work fairly well.

On the second day, the 25th, I had a bit of trouble getting my printer to work (it's jake now). I've been annoyed to find that FreePOPs 2.6 quit downloading my Hotmail and Yahoo! accounts; I did find a fix for Hotmail, but Yahoo! download quits just before it counts the number of messages to download. I can now run Hydra and give iBank 3 a try, however.

My current assessment of Leopard from two days of basic operation: I'm glad my employer paid for the upgrade because I am currently unable to see why it's worth it. It's not a bad OS but it's a bit flaky (certain programs, like MissingSync for Palm, seem to crash much more frequently).

Time-Lapse Messier Marathon

A brief time-lapse movie of the 2008 Iran Messier Marathon, where astronomy buffs try to: "Complet[e] the marathon requires viewing all 110 objects in 18th century French astronomer Charles Messier's catalog in one glorious dusk-to-dawn observing run." The Marathon seems to have been supported by The World At Night.

DNC Seeks to Give Colombia a Necktie

Politics isn't something I normally wish to discuss, but I will make a rare exception here for the Colombia Free Trade Agreement that the DNC, through the current Speaker of the House Representative Pelosi, has apparently torpedoed. I'm unhappy with the outcome because I have almost always been a "free minds, free markets" person; moreover, I think it's a pointless slap in the face of Colombia, a country I have never visited yet I have had dealings—all positive—with Colombians who were foreign students in the US or in the US military. When I've had a choice between similar products from Colombia and elsewhere, I've usually opted for Colombian for various reasons:

1. one, as noted above, I've had good experiences with Colombians


2. the Colombian juices, sauces, preserves, dried fruits, coffees, and blazer I have bought have always been excellent


3. considering the coca-related troubles in Colombia, for which America's oppressive unconstitutional drug laws have much to answer, I've long been happy to help Colombians directly by buying their goods


4. I'm always happy to encourage business in developing countries

While the mere mention of the institute's name might cause some readers to go into convulsions of rage, Cato has put out an article on the DNC and the Colombia FTA that is an instructive, if maddening, example of mean-spirited, mendacious, and self-serving politics. By refusing the Colombia FTA, Pelosi and others are needlessly perpetuating economic barriers against the Colombian people, snubbing an ally (and, by extension, an entire continent), reneging on a basic founding principle, and keeping markets shut to US goods, including union-made ones. In this case, the Colombian necktie seems to have been self-inflicted, thus making it all the more humiliating.

I recall when Bill Clinton actively supported free trade, but laissez-faire is ruefully not a big part of today's DNC, in particular.

Japanese Word of the Day

Today while searching in PAdict for a certain Japanese word by its pronunciation, I got a list of homophones, the first of which was 光頭, koutou, "light (e.g., sunlight)" and "head," which together mean "bald-headed." Although it seems to be a very old-fashioned word probably no longer used, I got a good chuckle out of that since it hits the nail on the, uh, head. I like its nuance better than that of "chrome dome."

In case you were wondering, the koutou I had been seeking was 高騰, which means a "sudden price jump."

Some Thai Students Say

The other day, while in Starbucks—I should have gone to a competitor—two foreign students sat down beside me, both eyeballing me a bit. After my wife appeared, I asked them where they were from: Thailand. I had guessed Burma, which they both found very funny for some reason, because the two languages sound similar and one of the two guys looked Burmese. We ended up talking with them for at least two hours, even though one of them had planned on doing some work on a paper in English. They were quite interesting; eventually there were five Thais sitting near us. One was a doctoral student on a Japanese government scholarship; another, a U. of Pittsburgh graduate, was here on vacation; the others were on Thai scholarships. Among many things we learned from them were that:

1. Thai private universities are quite lower in status that public ones.


2. Thais generally don't care about ethnic differences and think of themselves as Thais first, although one of them acknowledged that the Muslims in Thailand's south tend to view "Thainess" differently.


3. Originally from Thailand, Red Bull is a very low-status drink wholly associated with truck drivers, so the Thais students find it very funny that Red Bull has become a fashionable, if not elitist, beverage in the West.


4. While Western chain restaurants in Thailand do of course alter tastes for the Thai palate, they haven't offered Thai food, such as coconut curry at KFC, unlike in Japan. Many years ago McDonald's tried selling Japanese curry and rice, but it failed. Very Japanized versions of things, however, can and do sell quite well.