csammisrun

It’s been some months since I started a Dungeons & Dragons campaign with people in R&D at Perceptive. Everyone in the group has been getting into it and we’re having a great time.

My last post on this subject was about a homemade battle grid. I talked about the potentially high price tag of playing D&D with all the Wizards of the Coast-made accessories and such, and it certainly hasn’t gotten any cheaper since I wrote that. Instead of a potentially vast collection of little plastic miniatures to represent foes in the game I’ve been using a large number of 1″ glass beads that I got at a Michael’s craft store for seven dollars. This works out well for straightforward enemies but it doesn’t really give the players a sense of “oh shit!” when going up against a large or otherwise interesting creature. When the group faced a young dragon, I made one out of origami. It went over very well but there were two general problems with the idea: first, it pushed my origami skills to the limit and second, there aren’t easy-to-follow origami instructions for making most other creatures (like aboleths for example).

Then Courtney got a block of Sculpey and went to town.

Why, what’s in this box?

Shiyali (Courtney’s dwarven wizard character) and all her effects - a Flaming Sphere, a Cloud of Daggers, a Pinioning Vortex, and two Rolling Thunder tiles. The grid that the figures are standing on is 1″ by 1″ squares.

Shiyali from the side, featuring her orange mouse Gerard.

Courtney hasn’t only been making figures for her character. She’s also been making some minis for some of the more interesting combat encounters that we face. We haven’t actually had the encounter that will feature the following monsters, but they’re so damn cool I can’t not blog about them

A beholder and two dimensional mauraders.

Shiyali ruins the beholder’s day by conjuring a Flaming Sphere between it and its guards.

In the beginning of March my company hosted a chili cook-off for charity. I figured that it was a good cause (anti-cancer), so I might as well enter. There was only this one little problem…I’d never cooked chili in my life. Also I do not own a slow cooker. Whoops.

Even though I don’t know the first thing about chili, Courtney and I do know some things about cooking in general. We adapted a loose-meat sandwich recipe from 660 Curries into a concotion that I called “Chris’s Indian Chili” (thank god it wasn’t a creative writing-off). My entry didn’t win but nearly everyone who tasted it complimented me on it. Several people asked for the recipe and at long last here it is:

Chris’s Indian Chili (serves 2)

Ingredients

• 12 oz ground beef (we used 93% lean)
• 1 28 oz can of diced tomatoes
• 1 1/2 cups chopped red onion
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 3 lengthwise slices of fresh ginger, about 2″ by 1″ by 1/8″, finely chopped
• 2 fresh green chilis, finely chopped (we used serrano and kept the seeds in)
• 3 tbl tomato paste
• 2 tsp garam masala
• 1 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 1/2 tsp cumin seed
• 3 tbl cilantro, chopped
• 2 tbl canola oil
• 3/4 c water
• Freshly chopped scallions for garnish

Directions

1. In a large skillet, heat oil over medium heat. Add cumin seeds and roast for 10-15 seconds. Add onion, garlic, ginger, and chiles; stir-fry for 3-5 minutes.
2. Add tomato paste, garam masala, and salt. Reduce heat to medium-low and heat, stirring occasionally, for 3-5 minutes.
3. Add ground beef and cilantro, cook 5-10 minutes.
4. Stir in water and tomatoes (with the juice from the can), cover and simmer for one hour.
5. Uncover and cook for another 30 minutes. Garnish with scallions and enjoy.

—-
Right now you may be saying to your computer in the ever-present hope that I’ll hear you: “Chris, I think a chili recipe that serves two would make for a fine dinner, but a cookoff? How much more would a person have to make?” Six times more. Six. Twelve chilis, six cans of tomatos, four and a half pounds of beef. Take my word for it this was a sight to behold.

Oh wait you don’t have to take my word for it

All of the veggies and spices that go into a whole ton of chili

This is the biggest stock pot I have and it was still too small by a little bit

So…much…meat…

[half of] the end result

Hello anyone who is still looking at my blog! Sorry about the four-month posting hiatus, I’ve been somewhat busy with life lately.

When I was in college I played Dungeons and Dragons with a group of friends (forestalling the inevitable question: no we weren’t the group who dressed up as their players and acted out battles). It was a great time, but when I moved to Kansas I never found anyone who was interested in playing. A few months ago I started to gauge interest in the idea of a D&D group at Perceptive. There were a few people who wanted to play or learn but no one wanted to run the game. Well fine then. I AM STEPPING UP.

When a person gets into D&D the first thing they may notice is the price tag. The core rulebook? $30. A set of dice? $5. A miniature representing a character? I haven’t looked lately but as the game leader I would theoretically require many of them. The cost only goes up. I have three core rulebooks, something like six sets of dice, and a wedding in eight months that is exhausting pretty much all of my cash monies. How does a fellow in such a situation run a potentially expensive game?

Homebrew! Courtney and I just finished making a very nice homemade battle grid, which for the uninitiated is the board on which miniatures are placed and terrain is drawn to represent battles.

We bought a 22×28 poster frame with glass and removed the glass. Courtney marked off 1″ intervals and drew lines with a black paint pen. My job in all this was to hold the yardstick.

Lines are drawn the other direction for the 1″x1″ grids used in D&D.

For the next step, we set up our spray-painting station in the garage. Unused cardboard is something of a rarity in our house so my oil change mat got re-purposed.

The glass is laid out, painted-on side up. Rather than lay out a piece of colored paper between the glass and the backing board, we opted to paint onto the glass directly.

First of four coats of Rustoleum’s Ivory Silk (read: yellowish white).

Four coats later, the board is looking great and our brain cells would dying in droves if it weren’t for frequent breaks outdoors.

The end result is an off-white board with black lines that works great with dry-erase markers!

Extremely nerdy post ahoy!

The new version of the .NET Framework will be coming out relatively soon, and I spied this little gem on the BCL Team Blog: ObservableCollection<T> is moving into System.dll so implementers can avoid a dependency on WPF.

That would have been nice about a year and a half ago

Courtney and I are getting married on October 9, 2010. Mark your calendars!

Way back in April I talked about a new programming project: extracting and analyzing text from the Codex Seraphinianus. It’s been several months since any updates. Progress has been really sporadic (life happens), but I can now present the next step in my silly past-time.

In my last post I mentioned that the pixel connection algorithm wasn’t perfectly suited to isolating words. One of the problems was that the scan quality produced a lot of “broken” text - cursive lines don’t quite line up and sometimes a single word is carved up into multiple regions. I’ve implemented morphological functions to “close” words and produce better connections, but I haven’t taken the time to sit down and tune the process so that it doesn’t accidentally turn fine loops into dense blocks of black. The other big problem was that the process didn’t group diacritics with the modified word, and it is the solution to this that I’d like to share.

First, let’s understand how the connected components algorithm outputs its information. It starts with an image that looks like this:

The algorithm starts at the upper-left and works down and right, numbering the regions as it encounters them (usually, more on this later):

The challenge now is to attach the diacritic, region 2, to the larger word represented by region 1. To do this, each region gets a bounding rectangle…

…and the following algorithm is applied to all N regions:

for each region X between 1 .. N:
  for each region Y between X + 1 .. N:
    if region Y is fully contained by region X:
      region X consumes region Y

In the example image, region 2 is indeed fully contained by region 1, so it becomes part of region 1. This is good for the Codex script, most diacritics appear close to the letter it modifies and usually within the boundaries of the full word. Applying this procedure to the first page of the Codex yields some pretty good results.

Click for full-size

Still not perfect, though. You can see that there are some diacritics that are clearly fully contained by the parent word, but they aren’t consumed by the word.

It turns out that there are some pathological cases in region numbering. The connected region algorithm does not always correct number regions in a top-down and left-right manner, so the enclosure algorithm listed above doesn’t catch everything. Let’s say that the example image is one of these cases:

Now region 1 doesn’t enclose region 2, and since the algorithm only counts up (for efficiency’s sake), the diacritic isn’t grouped in with the word.

It’s not a great situation, but there’s a fix. Rather than mess around with the connection algorithm and trying to figure out the numbering sequence and where it breaks down - even for a small image, the numbers start getting pretty hard to keep track of in one’s head or on paper - I added an extra step when the bounding rectangles are calculated. Working again in a top-down/left-right fashion, I simply renumber the bounding rectangles as they’re encountered. This fixes the misnumbered cases and doesn’t add complexity for the normal cases, and the result is much better:

Click for full-size

We’re still not at 100% diacritic capture - if you look closely, there are three diacritics that aren’t included with the word that they’re intended to be included with (left of the first word, right of the fourth word, right of the last word). This isn’t another pathological case or anything, those marks actually do not fall completely within the bounding rectangle of their word. Oh well. It’s time to move on to other things - frankly, if I get to the point where I’m statistically identifying language features and a couple missing diacritics make a huge difference, I can go back and tweak things then

Damn squirrels, eating all the good ones before we thought to put up a net…

…because I have a fiancée!

Courtney’s ring - green sapphire, 3/4 carat brilliant round, in a white gold setting.

More pictures on Flickr.

We got new living room furniture!

Bookcase, coffee table, loveseat. The big bushy plant on the left of the bookcase is a prayer plant, the smaller one is a dwarf umbrella tree.

The loveseat and dining room table. Also pictured: French horn and spider plant.

The couch and a small palm tree (I think) on the wall facing the bookcase.

Our new vacuum (thanks Bed Bath and Beyond gift card contributors!) and one of the reasons for it.

I was working on some database stuff today when I had the greatest (read: dorkiest) idea for an avatar / custom text combo:
 
 

Chris
A Big Nerd
Posts: too many
 

I smoke two JOINs in the morning