The app has apparently irked various interest groups, who I suppose think that gathering crime-rate statistics and making them available them to the public gives high-crime areas a bad name, or something.

In the article, we read:

Sarah E. Chinn, author of ‘Technology and the Logic of American Racism,’ told AOL the app is ‘pretty appalling.’

‘Of course, an application like this defines crime pretty narrowly, since all crimes happen in all kinds of neighborhoods.’

‘I can’t imagine that there aren’t perpetrators of domestic violence, petty and insignificant drug possession, fraud, theft, and rape in every area.’

That’s just fantastic, and highly original, too. Just to be clear, because this is such a piercing insight that you might not get it right away: if you were to imagine that a neighborhood with, say, fifty street assaults a week is somehow a more dangerous place for a stroll than a neighborhood with five such crimes per decade, you’re thinking too narrowly. Instead, the right way to understand crime rates, in light of Ms. Chinn’s intellectual breakthrough, is to assign them only two possible values: 0 or 1. And since “all crimes happen in all kinds of neighborhoods” *, we can narrow the range even further: everyplace just gets a 1! Done.

(Somebody should tell Microsoft this, by the way — because as a professional software engineer, I can tell you it will make coding this app one hell of a lot easier. Fewer bugs, too, I’ll wager.)

So there you have it — a breathtaking unification, a Great Leap Forward in what was until now a dauntingly complex field of study: all crime happens equally, everywhere. Move over, James Clerk Maxwell!

Read the rest here.

* I’ll confess that I’m having trouble remembering the last time there was, for example, a gang-related drive-by shooting in Wellfleet, MA (pop. 2750), but just to be sociable I’ll defer to Ms. Chinn as to whether “all crimes happen in all kinds of neighborhoods”. She is, after all, a published author.

Read it here.

One thing we Windows programmers sometimes need to do is to generate C++ files representing the classes exported by a type library. Visual Studio 2010 has a tool for doing this, called the MFC Class Wizard. (You launch it from the menu bar: Project -> Class Wizard…)

When you use the Class Wizard to create these files, it does two things. First, it renames the exported classes according to the MFC naming convention, by dropping any ‘I’ or ‘_’ prefix and replacing it with a ‘C’. (E.g., an exported class called IBaseClass will be called CBaseClass in the output file.)

The other thing it does is to generate a separate header file for each exported class — so that two exported classes IBaseClass and IUtilityClass will end up in two files, CBaseClass.h and CUtilityClass.h.

But what if you want to keep the class names the same, and merge all the declarations and definitions into a single header file? You have to go through the classes one at a time, in each case explicitly changing the auto-generated class name back to the original class name, and replacing the auto-generated file name with name of the single file you want as the output. (The Wizard is smart enough to merge the code, Dieu merci, but you still have to tell it specifically what to do every time, one class at a time.)

Yesterday I needed to generate a wrapper file for the Outlook Redemption type library, which exposes zillions of classes and methods. I was retrofitting the wrapper classes into some legacy code, created long ago, so I wanted all the class names to match the names in the type library — and I wanted it all in a single header file. To munch through these classes one at a time would have taken me many, many hours, and would have been inexpressibly tedious. I knew that if I could somehow get the Wizard to skip the automatic renaming of the classes, and to generate the same output-file name each time, it would do the whole conversion in just a minute or two. But where was this configured? I looked online for a while, but couldn’t find what I needed. So I dug into the Visual Studio installation directory, and finally found what I was looking for: an HTML file that defines both the Wizard’s UI and the Javascript that does the actual work. A few quick hacks, and the problem was solved.

The file is here:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\VCWizards\CodeWiz\MFC\Typelib\HTML\1033\default.htm.

All of this auto-generation work is done in the function AddClass, which starts at line 527.

The per-class filename generation is done at line 590:

Files_Array[oGeneratedClasses.options.length-1] = strClass + “.h”;

To force the Wizard to merge all the classes into the single file ‘YourFileName.h’, just change this to:

Files_Array[oGeneratedClasses.options.length-1] = “YourFileName.h”;

To prevent the renaming of the generated classes, look at these lines, starting at 559:

var strInterfaceName = oInterfaces.options[i].value;
var strClass;
if( strInterfaceName.charAt(0) == ‘_’ || strInterfaceName.charAt(0) == ‘I’ || strInterfaceName.charAt(0) ==’i')
       strClass = “C” + strInterfaceName.substr(1);
else
       strClass = “C” + strInterfaceName;

if (IsInGeneratedList(strInterfaceName))
…

Change this to:

var strInterfaceName = oInterfaces.options[i].value;
var strClass = strInterfaceName;

if (IsInGeneratedList(strInterfaceName))
…

And that’s it! Don’t forget to put it all back, or at least to change the hard-coded filename next time you want to use it. (What would be even better would be to add some new code to expose all of these as options accessible directly from the UI, but I haven’t bothered.)

I hope this saves somebody out there a little time someday.

It’s a place where your refrigerator could be connected to the Internet, so it could order groceries when they ran low. Your dinner plate could post to a social network what you’re eating. Your robot could go to the office while you stay home in your pajamas. And you could, perhaps, take an elevator to outer space.

These are just a few of the dreams being chased at Google X, the clandestine lab where Google is tackling a list of 100 shoot-for-the-stars ideas. In interviews, a dozen people discussed the list; some work at the lab or elsewhere at Google, and some have been briefed on the project. But none would speak for attribution because Google is so secretive about the effort that many employees do not even know the lab exists.

I’d be mighty curious to know what they’ve got in the pipeline. Might have to call upon some of our deep-cover operatives…

Learn more here.

Apparently, though, Siri is having trouble adjusting to life in my ancestral homeland. Story here.

We read:

When tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the 1950s and 1960s, technological progress has fallen short in many domains. Consider the most literal instance of non-acceleration: We are no longer moving faster. The centuries-long acceleration of travel speeds — from ever-faster sailing ships in the 16th through 18th centuries, to the advent of ever-faster railroads in the 19th century, and ever-faster cars and airplanes in the 20th century — reversed with the decommissioning of the Concorde in 2003, to say nothing of the nightmarish delays caused by strikingly low-tech post-9/11 airport-security systems. Today’s advocates of space jets, lunar vacations, and the manned exploration of the solar system appear to hail from another planet. A faded 1964 Popular Science cover story — “Who’ll Fly You at 2,000 m.p.h.?” — barely recalls the dreams of a bygone age.

The official explanation for the slowdown in travel centers on the high cost of fuel, which points to the much larger failure in energy innovation. Real oil prices today exceed those of the Carter catastrophe of 1979–80. Nixon’s 1974 call for full energy independence by 1980 has given way to Obama’s 2011 call for one-third oil independence by 2020. Even before Fukushima, the nuclear industry and its 1954 promise of “electrical energy too cheap to meter” had long since been defeated by environmentalism and nuclear-proliferation concerns. One cannot in good conscience encourage an undergraduate in 2011 to study nuclear engineering as a career. “Clean tech” has become a euphemism for “energy too expensive to afford,” and in Silicon Valley it has also become an increasingly toxic term for near-certain ways to lose money. Without dramatic breakthroughs, the alternative to more-expensive oil may turn out to be not cleaner and much-more-expensive wind, algae, or solar, but rather less-expensive and dirtier coal.

Surely one should expect a stepwise climb, rather than a smooth upward slope, as new technologies open up previously uninhabited regions of the economic “fitness landscape”. Each major technological innovation — the discovery of oil, say, leading to the internal combustion engine — is as if a new geographical region, previously uninhabited by any species at all, is suddenly thrown open to colonization. At first there is a chaotic flurry of activity, then a process of speciation, competition, and the settling-down of new, stabilizing ecosystems as the various niches in the fitness landscape are found and occupied. (Using this metaphor, one might say that economic growth is analogous to an increase in total biomass.) Eventually the new landscape is thoroughly settled, and populated up to its carrying capacity; I’d expect that this should correspond to a leveling-off of the pace of progress. It’s only when something disruptively new comes along — either a major environmental shift that profoundly reshapes the fitness landscape, or the opening up of yet another unpopulated region through the arrival of some fundamentally new technology like the Internet — that one can expect to see the curve rising sharply again.

The thing about such disruptive changes, though, is that they’re almost impossible to predict. Very few people foresaw the advent of the personal computer, and then the Internet, as economic game-changers; even after the introduction of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s there were few who had any confidence that anybody would ever be able to use it to make money.

Mr. Thiel argues, though, that the rise of computers is something of an outlier, and is canceled out in economic terms by sluggishness elsewhere.

By default, computers have become the single great hope for the technological future. The speedup in information technology contrasts dramatically with the slowdown everywhere else. Moore’s Law, which predicted a doubling of the number of transistors that can be packed onto a computer chip every 18 to 24 months, has remained broadly true for much longer than anyone (including Moore) would have imagined back in 1965. We have moved without rest from mainframes to home computers to the Internet. Cellphones in 2011 contain more computing power than the entire Apollo space program in 1969.

From the perspective of Palo Alto, a return to the party year of 1999 appears almost within reach. All that glitters seems to be golden. Thousands of new Internet startups launch each year, and valuations of Web 2.0 businesses have surged; and not entirely without reason, as maybe two to six per year of these newly minted ventures will break into the billion-dollar-plus valuation zone within five years of their founding. In tandem with this new life for the new economy, Google has led a parallel move towards a near-doubling of wages for the most talented computer engineers, all in just the last three years. Beyond the dollars, one must look no farther than The Social Network to see the ways in which Facebook and its 750 million users have captured the new zeitgeist.

The economic decoupling of computers from everything else leads to more questions than answers, and barely hints at the strange future where today’s trends simply continue. Would supercomputers become powerful engines for the miraculous creation of wholly new forms of economic value, or would they simply become powerful weapons for reshuffling existing structures — for Nature, red in tooth and claw? More simply, how does one measure the difference between progress and mere change?

…

If meaningful scientific and technological progress occurs, then we reasonably would expect greater economic prosperity (though this may be offset by other factors). And also in reverse: If economic gains, as measured by certain key indicators, have been limited or nonexistent, then perhaps so has scientific and technological progress. Therefore, to the extent that economic growth is easier to quantify than scientific or technological progress, economic numbers will contain indirect but important clues to our larger investigation.

The single most important economic development in recent times has been the broad stagnation of real wages and incomes since 1973, the year when oil prices quadrupled. To a first approximation, the progress in computers and the failure in energy appear to have roughly canceled each other out. Like Alice in the Red Queen’s race, we (and our computers) have been forced to run faster and faster to stay in the same place.

Mr. Thiel argues also that our lack of a foreseeable path upward in technology is at the root of our present credit crisis:

Like technology, credit also makes claims on the future. “I will gladly pay you a dollar on Tuesday for a hamburger today” works only if a dollar gets earned by Tuesday. A credit crisis happens when earnings disappoint and the present does not live up to past expectations of the future.

The current crisis of housing and financial leverage contains many hidden links to broader questions concerning long-term progress in science and technology. On one hand, the lack of easy progress makes leverage more dangerous, because when something goes wrong, macroeconomic growth cannot offer a salve; time will not cure liquidity or solvency problems in a world where little grows or improves with time. On the other hand, the lack of easy progress also makes leverage far more tempting, as unleveraged real returns fall below the expectations of pension funds and other investors.

This analysis suggests an explanation for the strange way the technology bubble of the 1990s gave rise to the real-estate bubble of the 2000s. After betting heavily on technology growth that did not materialize, investors tried to achieve the needed double-digit returns through massive leverage in seemingly safe real-estate investments. This did not work either, because a major reason for the bubble in real estate turned out to be the same as the reason for the bubble in technology: a mistaken but nearly universal background assumption about easy progress. Without fundamental gains in productivity (presumably driven by technology), real-estate values could not go up forever. Leverage is not a substitute for scientific progress.

This is a good point, I think. Nevertheless, whether Mr. Thiel’s pessimism is fully justified ultimately depends on the actual future of technological progress, and if there’s one thing that we know about predicting the future of technology, it’s that you can’t. Is the current plateau (assuming that we actually standing on one) due to our having finally run up against inherent limitations in what is actually possible? Is there no more undiscovered geography out there? Perhaps, but there is ample reason to doubt it. Such an attitude was common in the late 19th century. In 1875 or so, for example, Heinrich Hertz wrote:

Sometimes I really regret that I did not live in those times when there was still so much that was new; to be sure enough much is yet unknown, but I do not think that it will be possible to discover anything easily nowadays that would lead us to revise our entire outlook as radically as was possible in the days when telescopes and microscopes were still new.

In 1894, Albert Michelson said;

The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote…. Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.

And here’s Lord Kelvin, from 1900:

There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.

Finally, as someone who reads several daily science and technology newsletters, I think it’s hard not to be struck by what certainly appears to be briskly accelerating progress in many fields, notably materials science, nanotech, biotech, and neurotech. How this will play out in what appears to be the advancing senescence of Western civilization, though, is anybody’s guess.

You can read Mr. Thiel’s essay here.

Scientists at the EPFL have already developed brain-machine interface (BMI) systems that allow wheelchair users to manoeuvre their chairs by thought transference. Their next step will be finding a way to incorporate that technology into the way motorists interact with their cars.

If the endeavour proves successful, the vehicles of the future may be able to prepare themselves for a left or right turn – choosing the correct speed and positioning – by gauging that their drivers are thinking about making such a turn.

As a software engineer, I’m conditioned to imagine all the ways a system can fail. Here’s one they might not have thought of:

A lifelong Republican is driving down a busy two-lane highway one day in early November, and suddenly resolves to vote for the Democratic candidate. Six people are killed as he swerves into oncoming traffic.

But it’s too good not to share, so here it is. I hope some of you out there enjoy it.

More than 30 years after they left Earth, NASA’s twin Voyager probes are now at the edge of the solar system. Not only that, they’re still working. And with each passing day they are beaming back a message that, to scientists, is both unsettling and thrilling.

The message is, “Expect the unexpected.”

“It’s uncanny,” says Ed Stone of Caltech, Voyager Project Scientist since 1972. “Voyager 1 and 2 have a knack for making discoveries.”
Today, April 28, 2011, NASA held a live briefing to reflect on what the Voyager mission has accomplished–and to preview what lies ahead as the probes prepare to enter the realm of the Milky Way itself.

My favorite thing about the Voyager probes is the golden phonograph records they carry.

More here.

Here.

The platform that has emerged as the industry standard for digital recording is a package called Pro Tools, and recently I decided to set it up on my home computer. It was tricky to get it all working (Pro Tools is notoriously finnicky even under the best conditions, and these weren’t they), and so I thought I would put up a fairly technical post about what I had to to to get it running, for the benefit of others who might be scouring the Interweb looking for help and advice.

So, a warning to my customary readers: this is a post that you are probably going to find awfully dull.

My goal was to get Pro Tools up and running on my laptop, which is a Hewlett-Packard dv7t-3100. The machine has a dual-core Intel i5 CPU, running at 2.27 GHz. It has 6GB of RAM, and a capacious 7200rpm internal hard drive. I’m running 64-bit Windows 7 Home 6.01.7600. It’s a pretty beefy laptop, and I figured it would be equal to the task.

I went out and bought a Digidesign Digi 003 Rack+ Music Workstation Production System. This is a rack-mountable digital audio interface that provides various inputs and outputs, does analog-to-digital conversion, and serves as the playback engine for Pro Tools. It comes bundled with Pro Tools LE software, version 8.0.3, and an assortment of extra software goodies: loops and samples, virtual instruments, and so on. (We will hereinafter refer to this piece of hardware as “the Rack”.)

The Rack wants to connect to the host computer by Firewire, a high-speed data-cabling protocol known in more technical circles as IEEE 1934. My first worry was that my machine only has a single 4-pin “iLink” Firewire port, while the Rack uses the 6-pin “Firewire 400″ connector. The Pro Tools manual suggested that if I bought a 6-pin to 4-pin conversion cable, I’d be OK. So I did.

I connected the Rack, but as per the directions in the setup manual I did not power it on yet. I installed the Pro Tools 8.0.3 software, and powered up the Rack when prompted. The installation seemed to go well, but when I launched Pro Tools an error dialog popped up announcing a “DAE error -6006″.

I looked around online and found that there was an 8.0.4 update to Pro Tools 8.0.3 that I ought to have installed first. (It’s here.) The instructions for the update said that to get it all working right I should NOT power up the Rack when prompted during the version 8.0.3 installation, but should, rather, complete the 8.0.3 setup, and only connect the Rack during the 8.0.4 upgrade. So I went back, uninstalled everything, then followed the new instructions.

Still no luck. After more snooping around I realized that I was missing a vital component: a certified external hard drive. (Apparently Pro Tools isn’t happy just working with the system drive.) So the next day I went out and bought a half-terabyte Glyph drive down at Tekserve, on 23rd Street.

The Glyph drive has a variety of ports, including a 6-pin Firewire 400 connector and two 9-pin Firewire 800 sockets. My problem now was that I had two devices to hook up, but only had the single 4-pin port on my machine — but I had read somewhere that I could “daisy-chain” the devices together by connecting the Glyph to my laptop, and then connecting the Rack to the Glyph. So I got a 9-pin to 4-pin cable to connect the Glyph to my machine, and a standard Firewire 400 6-pin to 6-pin cable to connect the Rack to the Glyph.

This time it worked. I was able to launch Pro Tools, the software located the peripheral devices, and I was able to create a session and open up some virtual instruments.

When I listened to the audio, however, it was awful — crackling and distorted. I decided that the problem had to be the crummy little 4-pin Firewire port that all this massive signal-processing was being crammed though, and started looking into how I could work around it.

Fortunately I did find a solution. My machine has an ExpressCard slot, and by looking at some of the online forums I found that users were recommending ExpressCard FireWire adapters made by a company called SIIG. I tried to find one for sale here in town, but couldn’t, so I ordered one online, here. The one I ordered was an 800MHz model that had both a 6-pin connector for the Rack, and a 9-pin connector for the Glyph.

When the card arrived, I installed the accompanying driver software, and plugged it in. Now I was able to give both the Rack and the Glyph separate, high-speed data connections. I fired up Pro Tools again, and this time it worked; the software found the peripherals just fine through the SIIG card, and the audio problems were gone. I hooked up a little MIDI keyboard to the Rack, plugged in some speakers, and I was off to the races.

So there you have it: Pro Tools LE 8.0.4, up and running on an HP laptop. I’ve only done rudimentary stuff on the system so far — small sessions with a few virtual instruments and almost no audio plugins — so I haven’t really seen what it’s going to perform like when I have lots of tracks, virtual instruments, effects, etc. all running at once. But as things stand, Pro Tools seems happy, my CPU isn’t even breaking a sweat, and I am going to savor this little victory.

Now, here’s an update on how it did what it did.

This is some serious programming, folks. An expert cited in the article linked above described it as “like the arrival of an F-35 into a World War I battlefield”.

(I guess they’re still working on the Sukhoi T-50 version.)