Month: August 2019
Algorithmic bar stocking
Generally, stocking a bar is a pretty simple affair. You get a big bottle of your basic alcohols (rum, gin, vodka, whiskey, tequila), smaller bottles of some other stuff (vermouth, bitters, etc), and a bunch of mixers.
Given a well-stocked bar, you can make a lot of drinks. However, you can’t make all the drinks, or rather, you shouldn’t. Not all combinations of ingredients will work well together. A rum and Coke is fine. A Coke and Coke won’t impress anyone, and a Midori and Coke would be awful, so the upper bound on the number of drinks you can make with a set of N alcohols is much lower than pure math would suggest.
I’m very gradually building a barbot, which adds a further complication: the robot only has five pumps. So from all the available alcohols, mixers, and so on, I have to choose five (there’s also a practical concern, which is that pumping soda shakes it up badly, but I’m choosing to ignore that for now).
For example, gin, tonic, vodka, orange juice, and cranberry juice would let me make a Vodka and Tonic, G&T, Screwdriver, Gin & Juice, and a Cape Cod. That’s pretty good, with 5 different drinks available from 5 different ingredients (10 if you count “shot of gin”, “glass of orange juice”, and so on as drinks).
But I want to know what the set of five liquors with the most possible mixed drinks is. To that end, I’ve downloaded the complete set of mixed drinks from the webtender, which I plan to use as the data for making my drink set.
The algorithm is another matter.
Color All The FloatCanvas Objects!
I’m drawing stuff over a background image of the ocean, which looks bluish-green. Naturally, bluish-greens and some grays don’t have enough contrast to stand out, so they kind of get lost in the image.
I initially tried calculating luminance from RGB triplets, which does work for readability, but I was using the web readability thresholds for the luminance ratio (4.5 for normal, 7 for high contrast), and it didn’t work very well because my background is sort of middling in luminance, so it punched out most of the middle range of colors, resulting in everything being either dark and similar-looking, or light and similar-looking.
I switched to RGB color distance (which, yes, isn’t perceptually flat, but this isn’t really a color-sensitive application, beyond not making them too similar). In order to figure out where my threshold should be, I wanted to get a list of all the wxPython named colors, and what they looked like, and their distance from “cadetblue”, which is about the same color as the average of my ocean background.
#!/usr/bin/python
# Generate a page that previews all the colors from WX
import wx
app = wx.App(False)
import wx.lib.colourdb as wxColorDB
def get_d(colorname1, colorname2="cadetblue"):
target_color = wx.Colour(colorname1).Get()
source_color = wx.Colour(colorname2).Get()
# Euclidian distance
d = math.sqrt(sum([pow(x[0] - x[1], 2) for x in zip(target_color[:3], source_color)]))
return d
print("<html>")
print(" <body>")
colors = list(set(wxColorDB.getColourList()))
colors.sort(key=lambda c: get_d(c, "white"))
for color in colors:
cRGB = wx.Colour(color).Get()
print(" <div style=\"white-space: nowrap\">")
print(f" <div style=\"display: inline-block; width:300px\">{color}</div>")
print(f" <div style=\"display: inline-block;height:30px;overflow:auto;background-color:rgb({cRGB[0]},{cRGB[1]},{cRGB[2]}); width:100px\"> </div>")
d = get_d(color, "white")
print(f" <div style=\"display: inline-block\">{d}</div>")
print(" </div>")
print(" </body>")
print("</html>")
That script generates an HTML page with the colors in it, ranked by distance from the given color name. I picked white for the version published here, but as you can see, the default is “cadetblue”. If you pick a color name WX doesn’t know, you’re going to have a bad time.
A distance of 80 seemed to work pretty well for me, so as a rule of thumb, 80 units of color distance gets you a distinct color in 8-bit-per-color RGB color space.
There are, of course, some problems to be aware of. For instance, distance folds hue and value together, so getting brighter or darker and remaining the same hue can make up a lot of that 80 units, without necessarily getting good contrast.
Raspbian Still Bad
The command “sudo apt-get install arduino” doesn’t get you the Arduino development environment. Instead, when you try to run it from the command line, you get “Error occured during initialization of VM. Server VM is only supported on ARMv7+ VFP”. I get that cross-compilation can be tricky, but this software didn’t get released, it escaped. Arduino isn’t exactly an obscure package.
To be fair, this isn’t because Arduino is broken. It’s because apt automatically chooses a version of Java that can’t run on the Zero W. So any package that uses Java is probably also broken, but I’m not looking into it, because I’m trying to actually do something with the Raspberry Pi. If I wanted to fuck around with a broken package chain, I’d… have gotten my fill of that like 10-13 years ago, so I guess I’d need a time machine. Really, the Pi Zero W is a lot like a time machine, taking me back to a time when Linux was a project, rather than being something you can use for projects.
If you, for some reason, want to use the Arduino IDE on a Pi Zero W, the incantation is to install Java 8 with ‘sudo apt-get install openjdk-8-jre-headless openjdk-8-jre’ and then use ‘sudo update-alternatives –config java’. Then you”ll be running a 5 year old Java and a 6 year old Arduino IDE, but at least the IDE will start up.
The Year of Linux on the Desktop is “Ha, Get Fucked”
People talk about usability, and in a lot of ways, Ubuntu is pretty close. It certainly beats Windows 10, at least for me, since you’re allowed to know what has gone wrong and fix it, instead of just rebooting whenever your computer gets infested with ghosts. I do complain about Ubuntu, but it’s usually because most things are decent, so the things that are bad are particularly egregious. And, after all, I did get what I paid for.
This time, though, I’m trying to work with a Raspberry Pi Zero W, and Raspbian. It has a little setup walkthrough that clearly took a serious blow to the head at some point, since it asks you to connect to WiFi, and then if you didn’t connect to a network, still asks if you want to download software. From what, I might ask, since there’s not a network connection?
Of course, the reason I didn’t connect to the network is that it’s hidden. Not a problem, I have the SSID on paper here… and no way to tell it to the Pi. There’s a network configurator, but it only lets you deal with unhidden networks, not enter your own SSIDs. Maybe this was done because “SSID” is one of those worrying “techie” terms, and this is supposed to be for somewhat less technical users? Protip: it’s not. It ships as a bare board in an antistatic bag, for fuck’s sake. Maybe this was not done because it’s somehow hard?
At any rate, the solution appears to be: manually edit wpasupplicant.conf. Manually edit a text file that only root can edit, in this, the Year of Our Lord 2019. I don’t have a problem with this. I have a PhD in making tiny robots go and have been using Linux for 15 years, because everything else is worse for my use cases. Normal humans, who are perhaps entering college and just want to check out Linux and maybe try writing a little Scratch or Python, they are going to have a problem with this.
Also, the same startup script asked me if my screen had black bars around the edges. It did, so I said yes (more fool me!). When I rebooted, the edges of the desktop (you know, where the UI goes) were mostly off the edge of the screen. Setting the hostname with the network config tool on the toolbar caused host name resolution errors every time I use sudo, apparently because sudo wanted “ouija1” but “ouija_1” got written into /etc/hosts. That’s not actually a valid hostname (my error), but it got written into /etc/hosts (an error by whoever wrote the alleged network config tool). Again, I know what /etc/hosts is, editing it isn’t an issue. I’m weird. For most people, this is an issue.
So in general, my experience with the Raspberry Pi and Raspbian is that it’s not ready for end users who want to use it to do things. If you want it in order to do things to it, rather than with it, and are already an experienced electronics enthusiast and Linux user, you’ll be fine.
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