Evgueni’s weblog

I’m just back from a trip to US where I had the chance to attend LinuxWorld in San Francisco. I greatly enjoyed a presentation on Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. Great topic and a good place to do it since while we are preoccupied with Open Source we tend to neglect that there’s some thing which is even more important than Open Source and this is Open Content. In the healthcare-related software development area where I sit, opening the content might be far more important than providing free and customizable software applications. The creative commons idea is great. I should probably add “some rights reserved” to the music I publish on this site as a sign of support to this idea.

However, free culture is a big step beyond free content and honestly a tricky thing to leave totally uncontrolled. I grew up in a world, where culture was openly controlled and saw what came in place when this control was removed - not a pretty picture, actually a “mass culture” with very little real value. I guess we need to do some thinking here and I’m afraid I do not have an answer.

The new CD of good friend has been released. James Vernon is great piano player and this time in a marvelous piano trio setup. Jim has put a lot of energy in this disk called “HOUSE OF JAZZ”. I heard it last January at his place in Dallas, TX and to my ears it was ready to be released, but his group kept on working on it to make the best out of the recorded material. It is as he says himself “a synthesis of modern jazz and modern classical sources”. The 7/8 measure of “Cerebral Hemorrhage” is something that even relates to the folk music of my country.

I truely recommend his disk - it is simply great jazz. It is available online at CD BABY and the songs can be listened to on the trio’s web site as well. I’m happy for Jim and his wife Geraldine that they suceeded to get this beautiful thing out. I hope to see them soon and congratulate them in person. Good work, guys.

We just returned back from a short trip to California. We did a great drive from San Francisco (actually started from Palo Alto) down to San Diego on the famous “Highway 1″. The nature, wild life and all that we tried to capture on a few pictures, posted on this server, but it is worth seeing it live. We both liked San Diego very much - it was a surprise to me, but I can easily name it as one of the most beautiful US cities. The combination of nature and civilzation is really unique. I do not know many places where one can walk to the international airport of the city from its downtown area. On my return I actually checked in to LA and then walked back into the city with my boarding pass to have a last stroll before leaving. Is not this great?

I have just read the last book of Kurt Vonnegut - “Man Without A Country”. It is the same old Vonnegut reacting on the recent events in 2004, although as he says there’s nothing so new about our race that has not happened since Prometheus has stolen the fire from the gods and gave it to the humans. The book is short but it synthesizes his views on humanity, socialism, atheism, meaning of life and the likes, that are present in all his other books.

At one point it reminded me about the movie I saw the other day - “Match Point”, the most recent one of Woody Allen. It is a great movie, by the way, perhaps the best one I’ve seen this year. When Vonnegut writes about the rulers of today (presidents, dictators, “guessers”, whatever) I thought of the main character in “Match Point” and how greatly he differs from Dostoyevski’s Raskolnikov. While Raskolnokov went insane after killing the old lady, for Chris (a typical guesser by Vonnegut) killing a loved one and his own baby is just a “collateral damage”!

During the movie I thought “have we all got so inhumane that Raskolnikov’s crime is a just a joke by today’s standards?”. Vonneguts gives a this answer as far as I can tell: “there’s nothing recent about it - it has always been like that”. I’m not sure. There’s surely one thing that differs our world from all previous ones (especially after the collapse of the socialist/communist experiment in the Soviet Union and Eastern/Central Europe), and this is “profit”. The difference is that today we do not leave this world in the hands of humans, but rather in the hands of the anonymous profit. Profit is something measured today, this is why we do not care about the real future.

One of the thinks I liked too - the comparison of today’s world with Poland under occupation.

I’ve started to play with Google Maps API and have created a small page with some locations of interest to me here. Google Maps have some AJAX capabilities that I wanted to experiment with but have not done it yet.

I had the idea to place on a map some of the locations where I have taken the landscape photos in my “Landscapes” album in my gallery. However, from what I know so far, Coppermine is not a very easy gallery to customize, especially if you use it to hold more than pictures - e.g. video and audio files. Seems tough even to modify some of the links within the generated pages. I wanted to have the “home” referring to the top page of my site and after a few minutes going through the php files I gave up - it is not structured in a very intuitive manner.

I have put several photos from our vacation in Sharm El-Sheikh in my gallery here. The last two dives I did were with a an instructor that has a camera, so we did some underwater photos too. Some of them are in my gallery and they are all from Ras Mohammed - Yolanda Reef, Shark Reef and Ras Ghozlani.

Here’s the list of the dives I did (not impressive for a pro, but great for me):

I had my first real tennis lesson today. I would have never thought that one hour of “playing” will make me so tired. I was exhausted, so this is indeed a fantastic way to keep your weight in control without restricting yourself from the good thinks in life, such as beer.

We’ve just come back with Eli from the scuba diving course when we did our first two dives in the Red Sea. I’ve got my PADI Scuba Diver License but I did not continue to get the Open Water Diver one because Eli was not feeling comfortable diving. Diving is really a great experience. The feeling of being down there at the mere 15m to some real diver measures, is opening a new world. This is probably the only kind-of-natural way on earth to escape from the grip of the gravitation and feel as if you are floating in space - and what a space it is. It’s a pity that I could not take pictures as the variety of corals and fish in the Red Sea is truly amazing. We saw a turtle resting on the surface, but the photo I took of it turned to be blurry - the creature was probably a meter long. The Ras Mohammed peninsula and the area around it where we dived is a natural reservation park and I hope that we human would preserve the living creatures here - they are so precious.

Sharm el-Sheikh is really a diver’s paradise, as it is also a great place to rest. Our hotel “Magic Life” seems to be one of the best in the region and is the nicest resort I’ve ever been too. Egyptian beer is good, local red wine is more or less ok if you do not have any expectation, but white and rose wines are worth avoiding (perhaps the problem is that people tend to mix it with water, which if not mineral is undrinkable). All is inclusive ands it is really all - diving practice in the pool, tennis lessons for various skill levels, horse riding, mountain biking, aerobics, etc. There’s a private quay that is only available for the hotel guests and the fish and corals to be seen when snorkeling are numerous - parrot-fish, napoleon-fish, various angel-fishes, just name it - it’s there.

The question I posed before is explained with “length contraction”, which occurs in the direction of the motion, so the normally oriented clock is not affected by it, while any orientation that has a non zero length projection of the photon path on the axis of motion will have to have the length contraction taken into account:

This time, imagine the light clock lying on its side (in other words, Fig. 1 rotated by 90 degrees counter-clockwise). Now the motion of the light pulse is back and forth in the same direction that the whole clock is moving. What happens this time? Well, as the light pulse leaves one mirror and heads toward the other, that mirror advances forward to meet it. This trip is shorter than when the clock is stationary. On the way back, though, the light pulse is chasing a retreating mirror, and the trip takes longer than it would in a stationary situation. This round trip period, T'’, is longer than T’ by the factor 1/γ. (This is similar to the case where an airplane traveling across the Atlantic with a steady headwind against it, and then returning with the same wind at its back, will take a longer time for the round trip than if there were no wind at all. I leave the simple math here as an exercise for the reader.)

Now if this were all there is to the story, the amount of time dilation would depend on the orientation of the clock relative to the direction of motion, but then this would violate the Principle of Relativity. What prevents this violation is a shortening of lengths along the direction of motion. The distance between the two mirrors would thus contract by the factor 1/γ, reducing T'’ to the correct value T’ as it should be. So, lengths are observed to contract along the direction of motion by a factor of 1/γ. Again, this only becomes noticeable at very high speeds, approaching c.

I liked “The Fabric of the Cosmos” so much that started reading “The Elegant Universe” by Brian Greene. I’ve pause now at chapter two where he explains the time dilation with the light clock placed on a moving platform from the viewpoint of a static observer. This is I guess the classical explanation given by Einstein, which is well synthesised here. The computation of the time dilation is indeed straight-forward as it is based on simple geometry, but it is based on the fact that the photon’s direction of movement is perpendicular to the direction of the movement of the platform - this is how the light clock is positioned. Were we to place the light clock in such a way so that the photon’s path is on the same axis as the platform movement, then we will find that there’s no time dilation at all because the sum of the forward and the backwards photon movements between the two mirrors will be same as in a static situation. To clarify the positioning - the direction of movement of the platform is normal to the plane of the mirrors, making the photon motions forward and backward for the observer.

Furthermore, placing the light clock at an arbitrary angle with respect to the direction of motion will yeild other formulas for the time dilation. Is this a paradox or I am missing something?

Firefox cannot play AVI files encoded with WMV3 FOURCC, such as the video clips I have recently put in my gallery here. Firefox needs a fix in the pluginreg.dat file, which is normally located here in Windows XP: %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox. For other system, check the knowledge base here: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder.

You need to edit the file and replace the section about Windows Media Player Plug-in

    Windows Media Player Plug-in Dynamic Link Library|$
    9
    0|application/asx|Media Files|*|$
    1|video/x-ms-asf-plugin|Media Files|*|$
    2|application/x-mplayer2|Media Files|*|$
    3|video/x-ms-asf|Media Files|asf,asx,*|$
    4|video/x-ms-wm|Media Files|wm,*|$
    5|audio/x-ms-wma|Media Files|wma,*|$
    6|audio/x-ms-wax|Media Files|wax,*|$
    7|video/x-ms-wmv|Media Files|wmv,*|$
    8|video/x-ms-wvx|Media Files|wvx,*|$

with this one - actually adding the x-msvideo and increasing the number of plugins from 9 to 10:

    Windows Media Player Plug-in Dynamic Link Library|$
    10
    0|application/asx|Media Files|*|$
    1|video/x-ms-asf-plugin|Media Files|*|$
    2|application/x-mplayer2|Media Files|*|$
    3|video/x-ms-asf|Media Files|asf,asx,*|$
    4|video/x-ms-wm|Media Files|wm,*|$
    5|audio/x-ms-wma|Media Files|wma,*|$
    6|audio/x-ms-wax|Media Files|wax,*|$
    7|video/x-ms-wmv|Media Files|wmv,*|$
    8|video/x-ms-wvx|Media Files|wvx,*|$
    9|video/x-msvideo|Media Files|avi,*|$

My friend Dicken sent me the MOV file that was made during our summer (actually September) stay in Zlatna Ribka this year. It was Yuri that made the clip. I played a lot with the original file to shrink the size down from the original 62MB. It turned out that the best codec was WMV3 in AVI, which had better quality than DivX, xVid and the likesm and at the same time had a reasonable size. I made two versions one with 60% and the other with 80% quality preservation, both looking very agreeable (12.8MB & 29.5MB respectively) and placed them here. However, it was more to preserve the impression…

Officially released on September 15th, the new book of Kurt Vonnegut “A Man Without a Country” is something I’ve expected from Vonnegut for quite a while. Even as he claims he is slow in writing and with his 82 years of age, the events of the last years were calling for the old genius to speak up from his ivory tower some words of wisdom. I’m looking forward to this book, really - my daughter promised to send me a copy from US next month as she knows Vonnegut is one of the few writers I read with pleasure (I still keep reading over and over again his old books). Actually I have not found a better writer to name as a favourite since my high school years, which is as far back in time as the yearly 70-ties.

So far I have only been able to read comments on his last book, but I’m sure he hits the point. Here is a quote from one of the comments and reviews I found - as published in the Chicago Tribune:

He’s direct in saying what he thinks about the president and his pals (”George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, . . . plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, . . . the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences”), Americans’ dependence on oil (”We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial”), the war in Iraq, (”our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on”), the damage we’ve done to the environment (”we . . . have now all but destroyed this once salubrious planet as a life-support system”), and the future of our country (”there is not a chance in hell” it can become “the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of”).

This is a CD that a close friend of mine - Svetlozar Siarov (a piano tuner and a great piano specialist - see his website) gave to me the other day, knowing I love J.S.Bach and telling me I will surely enjoy it. And it is absolutely true. Fazil Say is doing a great interpretation of a few very different pieces of J.S.Bach including a transcription of the Chaconne for Violin. It is a great CD and I dare say this young Turkish player stands right next to the great interpreters of Bach on the piano - Glenn Gould, Martha Argerich & Maria Joao Pires. He plays other good music too that I have not had the chance to listen to yet, but his Bach work is worth listening to. He has discovered a very soft side of the famous Prelude in C from the Well-tempered clavier. Here’s the full content of the CD.

• French Suite N.6 BWV 817 in E major
• Italian Concerto BWV 971 in F major
• Prelude and Fugue BWV 543 in A minor
• Chaconne in D minor (F. Busoni)
• Prelude and Fugue BWV 846 in C major

I strongly recommend it!

“The Fabric of the Cosmos” is a real “wow”-book. Just read the last page. It is a great summary of modern physics’ attempts to solve the most complex of all problems, though only theoretically at this point. It is a great food for thought and indeed challenges the foundations of our knowledge.

I had most uneasy feeling with the idea of the limit of partitioning space and time (at the Planck length and time), which contradicts with my natural sense that we are living in a continuum. The proposal that ours is a discrete space in effect means that our spacetime has an aleph-null cardinality - the one of denumerable infinite sets. Sounds weird to me, but this only calls for better understanding of the theoretical argumentation, which Greene kept on a fairly high general level. However, both superstring theory and loop quantum gravity theory (LQG) have theoretical evidence that this is the case!

A good article on loop quantum gravity theory can be found here.

The Bring On The Night movie, filmed in 1986 to document the birth of the Blue Turtles Band featuring a set of great jazz musician and getting Sting on the road of musical experiments in fusing jazz, rock, pop, folk that not only changed his career, but established him as the most important songwriter today. The movie is great and the musicians remarkable. I kept as a treasure a tape I had of the Bring on the Night double LP and somehow miss the Moon Over Bourbon Street original versionwhich was on the LP, but not included in the DVD. However Branford Marsalis has many other great solos in the filmed concert and rehearsals.

I bought also the DVD with the concert on the night after September 11, 2001. This one has two parts - a documentary (again done perfectly) and the concert itself. It is all made of familiar songs but most of them arranged in a sometimes very different and creative manner. It is great to see such a large band organized and performing in such a brilliant way without overdoing things. Christian McBride’s playing is remarkable and he’s kind of taking the role Brandford had in the Blue Turtles Band. Some great trumpet solos too. The version of “Shape of My Heart” is truely beautiful - no wonder Sting added this version to his last album Sacred Love.

Yes, I’m not a very fast reader, but I do not want to rush through the book although in some places it has too lengthy and redundant explanations. Just finished chapter 9 and had a few thoughts, probably inspired by the Higgs field explanations.

Actually two things: the first is about constant vs. accelerated motion. One is supposed not to interact with the Higgs field and its “particles” in a constant motion. Although I’ll continue to wonder what is it that chages the behaviour of the world so dramatically when you include acceleration, it is not exactly about this - it is about the fact that we are inclined to study acceleration only with respect to space. Acceleration is mathematically breaking the linearity of motion and I wondered whether it will not have a similar effect to both space and time (I realize spacetime is a single entity). Just as constant motion makes you cut an inclined slice through the spacetime loaf (which is still a linear plane), would not accelerated motion make you cut a nonlinear slice (e.g. a parabolic shape). Would not there be situation in which time might “move” in a non-linear way too. Time does not really move, but in our perception of measuring time there is a certain element of linearity. I was looking at the diagram at the end of chapter 9 and was thinking “Did a second very shortly after the big bang lasted as long as a second lasts now?”. Or are these our local measurements? In the previous chapter it was shown that a second is second everywhere in the universe, leading to a paradox that with the expansion of space and the limit of the speed of light, there is a speed of matter that is faster than light. I would have prefered more discussions around this.

The second thing is something I wondered about when it came to introducing Higgs particles. Is it not the error that we are making by assuming that everything has a particle-like structure including all the forces? In a world of continuum, is the source of most paradoxes, such as the Achilles & the Turtoise basicly in quantification of the continuum? This simply questions the nature of particles - those could as well be our experimentally demonstratable quantifications of otherwise continuous matter.

Just returned from Sozopol and have put some of the photos in my gallery here. I had a great time in Sozopol and Zlatna Ribka with all my friends there although it was a very short one. It was a difficult switch from a sunny Black Sea day that I took off from to the pouring rain and thunderstorm evening in Brussels that I landed to. I’m waiting on my friends to send me some of the pictrures they took that I can add then here - I remember at least one nice clip that was taken from Juri while we were playing a song with Diken.

I’ve put my Collectorz music catalog in a database, so that I can search, sort and keep the info about my music collection better exposed on this site. Database is a big word as I’ve only used a single table and the rest is the standard export to html of Collectorz of the details of each album. In any case this was my first php script to do the pagination and also sorting and searching of the resultset.

While I was doing this, I thought that programs like Collectorz, which let you organzie your data should be mandated by some law to store the data in a standard format - after all this is my data (I own it and I should postulate how I like it to be stored). I also have the full right to get access to it even if the program that I used to enter it is not usable any more. Same thing is for contacts (databases of addresses) - today we keep things in MS Outlook, Palm Desktop, Lotus Notes, Opera, etc. and have little chance to exchange them around, not to speak about being able to get the data out of them without using the same program. If you do not have independent access to your data, you have to rely on export capabilities, which are always primitive (actually very primitive - look at Collectorz) and this very much on purpose.

This reminds me of Rational Rose, which used a LISP-like syntax to store the model in a text file and we used to fix it manually often when Rose could not cope well with model merges. Then in XDE IBM/Rational introduced XML, but a great deal of it was serialized binary objects, that you could not touch. So you can abuse standards too…

This is a great message that Deyan Shishkov - Diken posted yesterday in another forum that I quote here (sorry it is in Bulgarian):

Може би най-големия маратон на живо свирене направихме с Никос на Аполония преди може би 6-7 години. Спомням си че свирихме около 6 часа без прекъсване (предимно фламенкадийски неща) на центъра на Созопол на акустични китари (доста изтощително беше…). Бяха се събрали страшно много хора и на майтап сложихме кутия за монети. Накрая бяхме доста скапани, но еуфорията на публиката, а и нашата беше пълна (за голяма изненада финансовия резултат също беше добър). Това беше една от вечерите, които ще помня винаги…

More about Diken here.