ISO meeting day 3, and more rain

The ISO meeting today was mostly administrative cleanup, going through action items and minutes, but there were two technical discussion on potential new standards that we may want to develop, based on submissions from the Italian and Spanish national standards bodies. The Italian one is the tripod strength one they proposed a couple of meetings ago, and which we need to figure out how to handle. The Spanish proposal is for a standard for machine vision cameras, and we decided that sounds like something we should be doing, so we’re encouraging that too. The side benefits of these are the hope that Italy and Spain will join out committee as full members, and hopefully host meetings in their countries some time in the future.

We had a lot of rain overnight. I mentioned last night that we’d had 20 mm of rain. By morning that total had increased to over 50 mm. And we had another 15 mm during the day today. I took Scully out for a brief walk during a break in the ISO meeting, when I thought the rain had eased off for a while, but we got caught in a heavy shower. There was news about flash flooding across Sydney and a lot of trees down, cutting roads and power lines.

But the good news is that today was much cooler than the run of very warm days we’ve been having. They haven’t been hot – it has most definitely not been a hot summer, but it’s been hovering around 30°C every day for weeks now. So today’s 22°C was a welcome respite.

New content today:

ISO meeting day 2, and a big storm

Day 2 of the ISO Photography standards meeting was all technical discussions. We talked about standards for measuring low light performance, specifying camera-related vocabulary definitions, defining transformation maps for converting between standard and high dynamic range images, updating definitions of camera technical specification to handle new technologies, measuring the information-theoretic capacity of camera images and systems, and measuring autofocus performance.

One of the interesting quotes from the discussion concerned the autofocus standard. The authors wanted to allow measurement of autofocus under conditions that simulate being held by hand – with the camera shaking and wobbling due to hand unsteadiness. In a formal testing situation, you need to simulate this with a robotic device that is programmed to shake the camera in the same manner as a human hand. Another expert said that it seemed weird to have this, rather than just using a tripod to hold the camera, since we already have a different standard for measuring imaging performance when hand-held. The author responded that (my paraphrasing): Almost 100% of photos taken are hand-held, so requiring a tripod for a performance test is somewhat perverse.

Another interesting concern that was raised came about because of the recent explosion in AI algorithms. Someone pointed out that we have standards for measuring image quality that work by having the camera take a photo of a standardised test chart, and then comparing the quality of the image to an ideal reproduction of the chart, noting where the image from the camera is degraded. This reflects the real world performance, since photos of scenes will be degraded in the same way. But someone pointed out that digital cameras are increasingly using image processing to improve image quality, and soon no doubt they’ll be using AI algorithms. And if an AI algorithm knows the standard test chart it can recognise when you try to take a photo of one… and output an image which is a perfect reproduction of the test chart. So when you take a photo of a test chart, the measured “camera performance” will be absolutely perfect, but this will not reflect the camera’s actual performance when photographing a scene.

This is something we actually have to think about, to try to design a performance test that can’t be cheated in this way. There are options, such as randomising the test charts or procedurally generating them, but this all requires very careful design and testing. So we have plenty of work ahead of us in the next few years!

Tonight while teaching my new ethics class on Exploration, there was a big thunderstorm. Lots of lightning and heavy rain and wind. We had 20 mm of rain in a couple of hours, and no doubt there’ll have been some flash flooding and probably some trees down across the city. No problem here, thankfully.

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ISO meeting day 1, and a new semester of Data Engineering

Last night when I wrote my blog entry, I thought I’d be getting up at 06:30 to start the day with the ISO Photography Standards meeting at 07:00. It’s in Tokyo, and that’s 2 hours different in time zone to Sydney… however just before bed I suddenly realised I’d done the time conversion wrong! The 9am start in Tokyo was actually 11am in Sydney not 7am!

This meant two things: (1) I didn’t have to get up so early and rush through breakfast. (2) With the finishing time also 4 hours later than I’d thought, the meeting now ended at 7pm, rather than 3pm. But the Data Engineering course I am teaching started at 3pm, in at the university. I’d planned to miss just the last hour of the ISO meeting and head in on the train at 2pm. But now that meant I’d be missing the last five hours of the ISO meeting!

Ugh… this was a bit of a mess, but there’s nothing I could do about it. I joined the ISO meeting at 11:00 and had to make apologies that I’d be leaving after just 3 hours. I was there for the opening administrative session, but missed most of the technical discussion sessions in the afternoon. It’s a shame, but couldn’t be helped.

Today was the very first day of the university semester. The class began at 3pm, and I noticed the students all sat clustered very close together in the large lecture room. And 5 minutes before the starting time, before the lecturer had even said anything, a deathly hush fell over the room as they all waited for the lecture to being. This is a first year course, so today was the first day of university for all of these students. And the lecturer said it was quite possibly the very first university lecture for many of them. Ah, that initial naiveté! It’ll wear off quickly, probably.

The lecture was good and the students were all listening and concentrating. It was introductory material for the course, the assessment methods, a demo of the Matlab software package which we’ll be using during the course, and the material I wrote on ethics of data science for last year’s course revamp. We finished a little early. One disadvantage of the course running 3-6pm is that it ends in peak hour, so the trains heading home are crowded. So I sat with the lecturer for a bit and we caught up on news since we’d last seen each other at the end of last year’s Image Processing course, before we headed for the trains.

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Galettes for lunch

Today we had a family lunch at another branch of the French crepe place that we go to for dinner sometimes. We drove over and sat at an outdoor table that we’d booked. Fortunately the weather was cooler than yesterday and overcast, so we weren’t exposed to the sunshine. The savoury galettes and sweet crepes at this place are great, and we all had a galette, followed by most of us enjoying a sweet crepe for dessert.

After this my wife and I went to a nearby shoe store to get some new sports shoes. My running shoes are starting to get a bit worn out, so I plan to use the new shoes for that, and keep the old ones for a while just for walking around in. My wife also got new shoes for similar reasons, though she does aerobics and not running.

Most of the time at home today I worked on my next class lesson for ethics, on the topic of Exploration. I wanted to get this done today, because I’ll be busy with ISO Photography meetings Monday to Wednesday, and will have less time to do other things like this. And since it starts at 7am tomorrow, I’m going to get an early night tonight…

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Summer heat and storms

Yesterday was online board games night with my friends. We played a bunch of the usual games, and I did very badly at 7 Wonders and 6 Nimmt, but was on the winning team for Codenames. Before games, I went out for dinner at the local pizza place with my wife and Scully. I ordered one particular pizza, but got served a different one – but it was actually the second option that I was tossing up between, so it was no big deal and I just ate it.

In the morning I picked up grocery shopping. I order online for in-store pickup, so I can choose my own fresh fruit and vegetables. When I got home, I discovered that they’d packed two dozen eggs for me, when I was sure I’d ordered only one. But I checked the order history, and yeah, there were two dozen eggs listed. So I must have mis-clicked when assembling the order. Oh well, at least eggs last a long time, so we’ll use them all before they go off.

And then I had four ethics classes, which ate up most of the day. After the first one I picked up Scully from my wife’s work and we went to the Italian bakery for lunch. I had a slice of mushroom pizza (so pizza for lunch and dinner!), and they had a special flaky pastry which was filled with pistachio custard, strawberry jam, and chocolate. It was delicious.

Yesterday was hot and humid, and so was today. But we had relief this evening when a big thunderstorm front came through. We’re still in the tail end of, it with a lot of lightning and thunder, but the rain wasn’t particularly heavy. We did have very strong winds for a while – the evening news said winds up to 90 km/h had been recorded in some suburbs. A lot of places have had power outages, over 50,000 residences. Probably from downed trees.

I did 2.5k runs yesterday and today, as early in the morning as I could manage, but it was still warm and humid and my times were slow. And I’ve been working on comics, trying to build up some buffer because of the ISO Photography Standards meeting which I will be attending Monday-Wednesday this coming week. I’m attending virtually; it’s in Japan so it’s not too far from my time zone, and it’ll be running 7am to 3pm, although Monday I need to miss the final session to travel to university for the start of the Data Engineering course I’m tutoring. It’s going to be a very busy week!

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New content today:

Game design lesson 2

Today I got my contract for the new semester of tutoring at the University of Technology Sydney. This is the same Data Engineering course that I did last year, and helped the lecturer to redesign. He’s running it again unchanged this year after positive student feedback. It starts on Monday next week. When I started this tutoring job a couple of years ago, I had to print out my contract, sign it, scan it, and email it back in. Then last year I did digital signatures, pasting in a graphic of my signature to the PDF. This year they’ve enabled online contract signing, and all I had to do was click through a few “agree” buttons.

This morning I had the first older students’ ethics class with this week’s new topic: Debt. There was a new student, taking the class up to the maximum of 4, which meant we didn’t get through even nearly all of the material I’d prepared. There was a lot of discussion and it was really good. At one point when one boy was answering a question, I heard someone else interject a different opinion, but I didn’t recognise who it was, so I asked, “Who was that?” And the boy talking said it was his mother! She was in the room with him and overhearing the lesson and felt she needed to add something!

The other thing I did today was the second lesson of the game design class with the girl who started last week. It was supposed to be yesterday, but she didn’t show up, and when I contacted the mother about it, she was very apologetic and agreed to do a make-up class today (which I’d suggested). So the girl appeared and we did the lesson on brainstorming. It was really good, with one exercise asking her to name as many uses as she could for a handful of mud in one minute. She came up with 4 or 5. Then I explained how to brainstorm and free your brain up to come up with ideas, and had her try again, and she came up with 30 or so! I was typing them out because she’d broken her hand and couldn’t write, and I couldn’t keep up, she was saying them so fast. So that was a success.

For lunch today I walked with Scully up to the station and the little cafe there where I tried the satay chicken skewers a few weeks ago. This time I tried the beef rendang. Unfortunately it wasn’t as good as the satay… I don’t think I’d have it again. But I’m still to try some of the other dishes.

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A busy morning, a hot run

This morning I had an online meeting (via MS Teams) for ISO Photography Standards – specifically an ad-hoc technical meeting for investigating accuracy standards for depth measurement cameras. This is one of the new projects we’re working on and we’re in the experimental phase, gathering information to try to develop standards for measuring depth and resolution accuracy of such cameras. Unfortunately I can’t contribute with any actual experimental lab-work, but I’m in the ad-hoc group (essentially a technical subcommittee) because I have experience with and interest in these devices. The meeting was 08:30-09:30 my time, so convenient, but it ate up some of the morning.

After that my wife suggested we go for a long walk to the Naremburn bakery for morning tea. Sure! So we did that, taking Scully for a walk. They had a nice looking pastry filled with custard and sultanas, topped with flaked almonds, so I tried that.

When we got home (and this is a 4.5 km walk), I immediately changed and went out for a run. An I decided to do a long one, 5k! It was approaching noon by now, but I wanted to get it done then rather than later in the afternoon when it would just be hotter. It was an exhausting run.

I had to be home and showered and have lunch before my second game design class at 2pm – but the student didn’t show up. I’m going to have to contact the parent and arrange some make-up class time.

Then this evening was three more ethics/critical thinking classes on the UFOs topic. Two of them were good, with the kids demonstrating good critical thinking skills. But the first one I had three kids and they were all bouncing alien theories off each other the whole time, for every question! It was… well, interesting. At least I hope they had fun!

New content today:

Getting into Obsidian

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I’d downloaded Obsidian and wanted to try it to see if it could replace Microsoft’s OneNote as my main note-keeping application. I started using it today, and I’m liking it so far.

I created a single vault which I’m planning to use for all my stuff – after doing a bit of searching and reading on the merits of one vault versus multiple vaults. I started making notes and folders and organising things, and it’s all very intuitive and suits my preferred means of organising things in hierarchical folders. I’ve started transferring some things from OneNote, and the folder structure works well. I haven’t done any linking yet, and have just started to apply a few tags, neither of which are available in OneNote (at least on MacOS – I seem to recall using links to other OneNote pages in Windows many years ago). I think they’ll be useful, but I need to get used to them and look for places to apply them to take advantage of their organisational capabilities.

I also turned my vault into a git repository, and pushed it to Github for version-controlled backups. There is an option here to use Obsidian Git, a community plugin which provides Github integration into Obsidian. The issue I have is that I’m not sure exactly what Obsidian Git provides, and if it’s anything I can’t just do on the git command line. Specifically, I was wondering how git would interact with the fact that Obsidian can rename and move files. If I just commit changes in git, will it know that a file has been renamed (thus maintaining its version history), or will it assume the old file was deleted and a new file made with the new name? (A friend of mine tells me that git is smart enough to figure out if a file has been renamed.) Ideally I’d use “git mv”… but if I actually go into the Obsidian vault and do that, will Obsidian know what I’ve done or get confused? Is Obsidian just a viewer/editor layer on top of the vault, and it will show me whatever I do in the vault (using another program like git), or does it need to keep track of changes in there itself? I don’t know.

Ad secondly, does the Obsidian Git plugin just add a bunch of buttons to the Obsidian UI so you can do git operations from the UI rather than from the command line? Or is it actually intercepting Obsidian operations like renaming a note and issuing “git mv” commands and stuff like that? The documentation gives no indication either way. If it’s the former, than I’m just as good using the git command line, since I’m comfortable with that. Anyway, this is a relatively minor issue, which I’m sure will become clearer as I use Obsidian more, and learn by trial and error.

The other thing about today was that it was very rainy. My wife took Scully to work this morning to give me free time to photograph that batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips that I wrote yesterday. After doing that, I went to pick up Scully and go get some lunch, and it was cloudy but I didn’t really expect any rain. However when we got to a shopping area where I planned to grab something to eat, it bucketed down, very heavy rain for about half an hour. I decided to get a table at an Italian place and have pizza for lunch, since it was one of few places where I could sit out of the rain with Scully. It was still raining steadily, though less heavily, when we were done and had to walk back to the car, so we got a bit wet.

And tonight I started the week’s new ethics topic, on UFOs (really more of a critical thinking topic, this one!).

New content today:

Lightning fast comic writing

Today I had one task I really wanted to complete: Write a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips. The current batch runs out this week, so I wanted to be able to photograph a new batch tomorrow morning – which meant writing the whole lot today. Normally it takes me at least a couple of days, sometimes more, to write a batch, as it can be slow work sometimes, with writer’s block and not being able to think of jokes at will. But today I powered through it and … I’ve just finished the batch now, at almost 10pm.

In between I had three ethics classes to teach, Scully to take for walks a few times, dinner to cook, and some sourdough bread to make. Phew.

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Trying Obsidian

Today was fairly mundane: did a 2.5k run, wrote and assembled a Darths & Droids comic strip, worked on brief outlines for future ethics classes (one on Movies for the younger group, and one Colonisation for the older kids), taught three classes.

Last night I started watching Dune (2021). I seldom have time to watch a full movie in one sitting, instead splitting them in half over two nights. And given Dune is a long running time at 2.5 hours, it’s been sitting in my to-watch list for some time now, but I finally decided to tackle it. I’ve never read Dune, or seen the prior movie version, and the only things I knew about it were the name of Paul Atreides, and that there’s a planet with a desert, giant worms, and Spice. So there was a lot of exposition covering stuff that was new to me. In fact, the first half of the movie seemed to be almost entirely exposition and teaching me background stuff that I may need to know when the action actually starts. And then I only found out today when I told my friends that apparently this Dune movie is only the first half of the novel, and a sequel is being made which will cover the second half! Anyway, I’m enjoying it so far.

The other interesting thing I did today was decide to try using Obsidian and see if it’s a good solution for keeping my notes in. I’m currently using Microsoft’s OneNote, which I quite like and have extensive notes in, but Obsidian’s use of plain text files and independence of Microsoft’s cloud sync are appealing, and I understand it also has hyperlinking and some other features that I will find useful.

I’m using OneNote for two very different sorts of notes:

  1. long term notes that I add to and edit occasionally, that I want organised in hierarchies and links, and that I want to have saved safely without necessarily needing the ability to access from mobile;
  2. short term notes such as shopping lists, or lists of things for travel such as hotel addresses, or scripts for comics that I’m working on, which get edited and erased a lot, and which I want to be able to sync and access from mobile (and even by my wife from her phone too, for the case of shopping and travel lists).

I’m thinking I’ll try migrating the former to Obsidian and using Github as a change tracking repository, while leaving the latter in OneNote, which it seems better suited for. I haven’t started doing this yet – I need to play around in Obsidian a bit first and learn how to use it.

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