Shortlog - a log of everyday things
Entries from 2010
Today, I learned about Java reflection, and got to actually write a patch for
one of the Extreme Blue projects. Yay!
UI design for the schedule planner begins. Matt and Kyle and I met on IRC to
present mockups (although Kyle was the only one with things actually mocked up)
and to analyze what we liked and didn't like about them. More to come later.
My family got home from their vacation to Canada.
I've started writing this shortlog thing. A mini-blog of sorts. I'll probably
just put occurances or interesting things here.
I took Nicole out to Distant Worlds - the San Francisco Symphony played music
from Final Fantasy. Nobuo Uematsu, the composer of almost all the Final Fantasy
music, was there, and had the most delightful smile the whole evening. The
performance was amazing, inspiring goosebumps and evoking tears.
I started reading Aldous Huxley's Island. I still haven't figured out which
side of the book's argument the author is on.
I set up a Mumble server again. This time around I knew about qdbus, which
made life much easier. And even without qdbus, now I have a python script that
mimics a good deal of the introspection functionality, and I know enough python
that I'd be able to work through configuring it again.
My laptop (phoenix) now has a defunct graphics card, or at least that's my
diagnosis. It powers on and boots, and the backlight works, but there's no
video, neither on the internal monitor nor the external VGA or DVI (on docking
station) ports. Ordinarily, this would be a major downer, but since I'm not
exactly using phoenix at the moment, and my Dell Complete Care expires in less
than a month, I'd consider this to be a well-timed failure. Dell Support was
great, and the man I talked to ("Michael") was very helpful and recognized that
I had already adequately diagnosed the issue, so we didn't go through the
"do-exactly-as-I-say" flowchart, which was particularly awesome. Somehow I was
in a very pleasant mood when I hung up the phone, which is an impressive feat
for a support agent. Job well done, Dell.
Chisanbop is interesting.
Today is laundry day.
I've completed the first quick-hack implementation of shortlog, my
super-low-time-investment blogging engine. It uses mod-python and a folder of
text files. Fancy features like HTML entity replacement, auto-hyperlinking,
and in fact, anything other than paragraphs of text will be yet to come.
The primary purposes of this exercise are twofold. First, I wanted to make
myself get more comfortable with actually putting ideas into code, rather than
overthinking them and never getting around to implementing them. Second, as my
life circumstances are changing, I've decided that it might be worthwhile to
write a blog. Since previous blog attempts have failed, due to my lack of
keeping up with them, I wanted something really low-barrier-to-writing. I
figured something where I'd just write text files in Vim would be appealing,
since I'm almost always ssh'd into this server. We'll see how successful this
attempt turns out.
Since everyone has been ranting and raving about Inception, Nicole and I
went to see it.
I got the box from Dell to ship my laptop off for service today. It should go
out tomorrow. Yay!
WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW. Inception is a thinker of a movie, but I have
some complaints with it. I can accept suspension of disbelief, but
self-inconsistency doesn't work for me. I also didn't like how the supposed
recursive timing was inconsistent (not to mention wildly imprecise). The whole
concept of the "kick" was ill-defined - rolling the van wouldn't awaken them,
but somehow backing off the bridge would? And then the fact that none of the
characters are particularly interesting. Nonetheless, despite the mindless
action, I did enjoy the movie. Possibly because I was more interested in the
technical mechanics of such a world than the people inside it. SPOILERS END
HERE.
I've had some seemingly random lower back pain lately, and I have no good place
to decompress my spine. This annoys me.
And the nVidia binary drivers on Linux suck - kraken has locked up twice in the
past two days when OpenGL compositing is enabled. The nouveau stack is getting
more promising, despite its poor performance.
Ginger ice cream is amazing.
I'm trying out a wide variety of monospace fonts, to see what I like best for
coding and use in the terminal.
Today I went to an event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
NPR's Guy Raz interviewed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and The Facebook
Effect's author David Kirkpatrick. The discussion was preceded by a
reception with lots of small tasty foods.
The discussion itself was interesting. Zuckerberg speaks at great length in
response to questions - it's quite clear that he's passionate about what he's
building. Guy Raz asked a good deal of questions pertaining to data security,
responsibility, and privacy, most of which were answered in a
politically-correct fashion. The thing that struck me as most interesting was
that Zuckerberg comes off as having no respect for people behaving differently
in different social groups - he described such behavior as lacking integrity.
In some sense, yes, behaving two opposite ways would be without integrity;
however, he seemed to fail to grasp the concept that in different groups you
would highlight different subsets of who you are. Perhaps he is wholly the
same person to everyone, but his users are not. This all hot on the heels of
the presentation Julia Grace gave yesterday morning, in which she described the
largest problem people have with Facebook being the fact that it's difficult to
separate your membership in different social groups from each other. Perhaps
his seeming misunderstanding explains this issue - Facebook is the social
network platform that Zuckerberg would want to use, just as the iPhone is the
phone that Steve Jobs wants to use.
Making a product that's exactly what you yourself want provides a lot of
motivation, but it seems it can blind you to the desires of other users.
I really need to find housing soon.
One medium pizza with everything and extra cheese.
Today, Nicole and I went to the local nickel arcade and played hours of DDR
until we were both utterly exhausted. It was fantastic - neither of us had
played DDR in quite a while. I am going to be SO sore tomorrow.
I am now the proud owner of three new fitted dress shirts. Hooray, blue!
Today Nicole baked Tuscan bread and white chocolate chip + cashew cookies.
Very tasty. And now I can honestly say that I've used a hair dryer on a loaf
of bread.
I'm still reading Island and searching for a suitable apartment.
Oh dear, I've started playing Chrono Trigger. And I've clocked three and a half hours on it already.
Reasons I am frustrated today:
- Printer drivers unable to print correct aspect on Linux
- Printer drivers hang on Windows
- The roll of paper in the printer is glossy, but when it ran out, all the other rolls of paper are non-glossy and super thin
- I ought to have fifteen posters printed before I leave work today, and I've got one and it's 17:17
- Printer takes 20 minutes to error out and fail to print a poster
- I'm hungry and sleepy and just want to go home
I'm better today. So far. I'll be checking out apartments this evening in
Berkeley - hopefully I'll have a place to live next year by the end of the
week.
I'm thinking about writing tools to help in editing this blog - in particular,
a search tool, so I can find an entry based on content. But that might be a
little silly and fancy, and it's probably not exactly a common use-case for me.
It might be cool to have a search function in the site, though. We'll see how
things turn out. In any event, it's good programming practice, which is how
this blog started out - a fun attempt to create a blog from scratch (well, with
liberal tool reuse) in thirty minutes.
Well, I've submitted a rental application. Here's hoping that Andrew and I get
the place - it's in really good condition.
My laptop has had its mobo and touchpad assembly replaced, and is en route back
to California.
Nicole and I played DDR at the arcade again after work. I'm getting better,
though I still get tired too quickly. That arcade needs a fan by the DDR
machine.
Our rental application was (tentatively) approved. I will have a place to live
for another year. Excellent!
My legs are stiff. I need to stretch.
Today I got a package in the mail from Sarah Hodde (with regards from Sarah
Luna) containing a book of piano music and what must have been a full pount and
a half of brownies. The packaging had suffered some damage, so there were
brownie crumbs EVERYWHERE, but they were still delicious. Yay! I ate a few
with some leftover frosting. AMAZING. Thank you, Sarah and Sarah. You
totally made my day. :)
Today I'm filing the official paperwork for my new apartment. I'll probably
not move my stuff up for another week and a half, but it'll be nice having
everything squared away.
Homemade Philidelphia cheesesteak sandwiches are WONDERFUL. YAY!
I sliced my thumb on my Leatherman today. My thoughts in order:
- Ouch. That must have broken skin.
- Dang, now I have to use my left hand to use the spacebar.
- I probably won't be able to play Chrono Trigger as comfortably now.
- I should get a bandage
I'm only mildly broken.
Nicole went back to Texas. SADFACE.
I'm in New York City. This deserves a good deal of writeup that I will get
around to when I'm less tired.
UPDATE: I've recapped everything but August 6th, which will be done after more
sleep.
NYC, day 2: Today was great. Amazing, even. I slept in until 11 or so, then
waited for other interns to get up and dressed and ready to go places until a
little past noon. We wanted to visit the financial district, possibly see the
Statue of Liberty, possibly visit SoHo, and wanted to see some museums
(particularly since IBM employees have free entry (yay, corporate
sponsorship!)). We opted to head to museums first, since the museums have a
firm closing time, and none of the other targets did (it was Saturday, so there
was no trading on Wall Street). So, we took the MTA north up to 79th street
and went to the American Museum of Natural History,
where I remained until the museum closed (about 5 hours later).
The exhibits were nothing short of fantastic. We started in the Gottesman Hall
of Planet Earth, an exhibit about the formation of the Earth, and thus, about
different kinds of rock/rock formations (remember igneous, sedimentary, and
metamorphic?). There was a cool half-sphere display, which we kinda mocked
since one of the intern teams has a full sphere display that they are working
on. I spent a little longer looking at the exhibits than the other five
interns, so I started to fall behind. Once we got to the Hall of Biodiversity,
I was completely left behind, which was totally okay, because there was a
STUFFED TIGER and a bunch of cool stuff on African wildlife. I visted the
Milstein Hall of Ocean Life, a huge two-story room with evolutionary trees of
all sorts of sea creatures, pictures of various bioluminescent creatures, a
full-scale model of a sperm whale, and numerous other breathtaking sea life
forms. I skimmed through the North American Forests exhibit, along with the
Warburg Hall of New York State Environment, pausing to note the cool display on
how farming was done through different time periods. It's interesting to note
how a smaller and smaller percentage of the population farms as time goes on,
despite having many more people to feed. This reminded me of the sad fact that
our population eats so poorly and is growing unsustainably. But that's a talk
for another time. Go watch Jamie Oliver's TED Talk, it's worth your time.
This accounts for about the first 90 minutes of my time in the AMNH. My next
stop was the Spitzer Hall of Human Origins, which talked about human
evolutionary ancestry - so a good deal of background information on DNA,
evolution, etc. was involved. I particularly liked the display about the
differences between human and ape hands, noting our comparably large opposable
thumbs. There was also a bit explaining the fossil record, how few humanoid
fossils we've found, and the different brain sizes of various creatures. After
the Hall of Human Origins, I continued to the Ross Hall of Meteorites, which
was mostly boring since I knew most of the content there (stuff like meteorites
are usually named after where their pieces strike the ground). The real value
of the Hall of Meteorites was that it was the only entrance to the Guggenheim
Hall of Minerals, which was the COOLEST EXHIBIT I'VE SEEN IN A MUSEUM EVER.
I'd guess that I entered the darkened hall at around 15:00. I was greeted on
my left by a lovely display of different types of gold crystals. But that
wasn't the part that really got me excited. No, I was most impressed by the
series of glass cases on the left wall of the room, which contained a HUGE
assortment of minerals, impeccably organized - each glass case contained
minerals with a particular anion (say, halides, carbonates, oxides, or
sulfides). Within each case, the samples were grouped with a number, and each
number refered to the group in the periodic table that the primary cation was
in. Then, each individual specimen was named, and at the bottom of the case,
its chemical formula was provided. The organization of the collection awed me,
along with the sheer number of minerals that I'd never heard of, as well as the
fun of seeing ones that I did recognize. Random: I saw a guy wearing a
Debian shirt. On the back, it said "apt-get into
it!" which I thought was hilarious.
And that was only the half of it! Huge crystals of the most beautiful colors,
explanations of how minerals are classified (hardness, streak, fracture, color,
luster, etc.), a case of the most common minerals (I knew most of those!),
infomation on the various crystal structures, and some gorgeous geodes. Mix in
a display of radioactive ores, minerals that glowed under ultraviolet light,
and the various properties of quartz, and then just for kicks, add a whole
exhibition on gemstones. Countless beautiful cuts of sapphire, opal, garnet,
diamond, quartz...they were breathtakingly lovely. You might not get that
excited about rocks, but I loved the exhibit. I left the minerals exhibit two
hours after entering after seeing my fill. It's a good thing the other interns
left me behind - there's no way they would have wanted to stay that long.
My next stop was a quick trip up to the fourth floor, so I could visit the
three dinosaur exhibits upstairs (I skipped floors 2 and 3, since I find dinos
cooler than most other animals, and the other exhibits were mostly about lesser
animals or peoples). There were two exhibits - one on Saurischian Dinosaurs
("lizard-hipped") and one on Ornithischian Dinosaurs ("bird-hipped," despite
birds actually being descended from the Saurischain line). The former was home
to Apatosaurus and a big Tyrannosaurus rex, while the latter
featured Edmontosaurus and others. There was much visualization on
similar bone structures, and how birds are descended from dinosaurs, but
obviously the best part was the GIANT dinosaur skeletons. Those things were
terrifyingly huge, back in their day. I want to ride one.
And then the museum closed, and I went back to the hotel, recharged (both
myself and my phone), and then I located the Nintendo World, because that store
is awesome. I got a picture of myself next to a stuffed KingSlime (yay, Dragon
Warrior series!). There were all sorts of Kirbys - last year, I only saw the
cutter and parasol Kirbys. This year, there were also Chef Kirbys, Sword
Kirbys, Ninja Kirbys, DeDeDes (with hammers!), and ADORABLE Waddle Dees. I
eventually left and got dinner at a nearby sushi restaurant, which concluded my
exciting events for the day.
NYC, day 3: We checked out of the teensy hotel around 10am, in time to make it
to Grand Central Station (our prearranged meeting point) by 10:15. We did all
manage to make it on the same train, and we even all got off at the same
(correct) stop, so I declare the train ride to have been a success.
Armonk Expo, day 0 (because there weren't really any important expo activities
today, mostly just arrival): people practiced presentations. Some sites were
better-prepared to give their presentations than others. Foosball was played
after dinner, and I pretty consistently tore apart everyone I played. Good
times.
Armonk Expo, day 1: Started with an early breakfast (delicious sausage and
made-to-order omelettes). Our keynote speaker talked a good deal about the
importance of innovation, ending with the memorable line "If you shoved radios
up the birds asses, we'd have music in the sky." He kinda reminded me of Dr.
Rodney Hill from TAMU.
The presentations were all decent, though I found Almaden's to be the most
entertaining. The projects on the whole were mostly good, with the exception
of the one that was supposed to be an improved recruiting tool for universities
- the team explained things poorly, had no data to support their (broad) claims
of improved efficiency, and all in all were entirely unconvincing. The worst
part was the bit where they tried to show a graph of number of grad students
vs. terms remaining. Heck, the grad students don't know when they're going to
finish - don't pretend to have accurate data when you don't have any real data.
RANT RANT RANT.
The rest of the projects, however, were pretty cool. The guys who implemented
hot-data migration to SSD for btrfs worked all summer on GPL'd code that will
hopefully get reviewed and merged into btrfs by 2.6.37, which is awesome (and
so were their benchmarks). The project on Java runtime sharing (share JIT'd
libraries! share JVM! decrease memory footprint and load times!) was also neat,
and their mentor mentioned that he'd be going to Finland soon to pitch the IBM
JVM for use on Nokia's MeeGo devices, which is cool. Clever hackers have
already ported the IcedTea OpenJDK to the N900, but an open-source IBM Java
stack probably wouldn't be bad either (Android uses the IBM class libraries
with the Dalvik VM, and Nokia uses IBM Java on all their S60 line, so this is
precedented).
Sam Palmisano (IBM's CEO) came to the demo showcase and visited five project
teams. I took some HDR photos of Sam with the team that worked on a
spherical display on my phone with
FCamera. I need to composite them
now. After Sam visited the five chosen projects, he gave a brief talk on how
IBM has always been about tackling hard problems for the enterprise, bringing
really smart people together, and integrity. After a few more photos, he was
on his way out...but he stopped as he was leaving to shake my hand. Jeanie,
the woman who was escorting him around the various project booths, introduced
us and mentioned that I was an Extreme Blue intern last year, and that I'm
starting my PhD program in the fall. He asked where, and I replied Berkeley,
with a focus on HCI. He mentioned that he visited California recently, to
which I replied "It's a beautiful place." Then he noted that he was right on
the coast, in which case it was slightly more chilly. But it was super neat
that he took a minute out of his day to talk to me, the random intern.
Later, Jeanie informed me that she told Sam the following as they walked away:
"He's crazy smart, you know." I'm honored - the CEO of IBM might just think
that I'm crazy smart.
Armonk expo, day 2: the interns have a career fair; I have packing
responsibilities. I managed to hit the snooze button about 6 times this
morning.
Flight back: uneventful. I finished reading Island and am now halfway
through Watchmen.
Happy birthday, Andrew Wang!
I'm packing my belongings in preparation for moving to Berkeley.
After work today, I made a trip to Berkeley to drop off the majority of my
electronics. I'll be taking the rest of my stuff up tomorrow.
Today was the last day of Extreme Blue. One of the teams gave me an adorable
pixel-art pin of Link (from the Zelda series). I believe I have completed all
of the thousand or so things that I needed to finish before I left.
Now, to pack up the rest of my belongings for my second trip up to Berkeley...
Moved the rest of my stuff up to Berkeley today. Andrew and I are busily
trying to recover keys for wireless networks nearby.
After moving in and ordering Internet and a cable modem, I packed up and drove
down to Carpinteria, to visit Sarah Luna and her family. I was glad that my
surprise was indeed a surprise. I was greeted by the (usual) line: "Ahhh! What
are you doing here!" I wish I'd been awake and witty enough to reply
"surprising you," but I can't remember what I said.
I obtained some dinner and went to bed (and by bed I mean couch, since all the
beds were taken).
I awoke at 7 this morning when Sam gave Sarah a wet willy. The three of us ran
up and down the beach, then did an abdominal workout. I had a tasty bagel with
lox and an egg burrito for breakfast, then finished reading Watchmen. I also
worked a decent bit on a 750 piece jigsaw puzzle.
Later, I did battle with a family-size can of baked beans. When the
hand-operated can opener proved that it was noy up to the task, I brought out
my trusty leatherman (Nicole, that thing has come in handy so man times.
Heart!) and proceeded to stab the lid around the edge until enough of it was
movable to empty the can. This happened in an awesome splash of baked bean
juice that wound up on my arms, shirt, face, and all over the counter. The
beans were fine, and I declared it a victory.
Hopefully I'll get to kayak later tonight.
UPDATE: Sarah and I went kayaking. Heading north on the beach, we saw a pod of
dolphins (about 6) feeding/playing. They were jumping out of the water, and we
were about 50 meters away. They were swimming in our general direction right
up until a couple on a jetski flew by. "Did you see the dolphins?!" they asked
as they scared them off. Yes, we were watching them until YOU GUYS SCARED THEM
OFF. Blah. We also paddled over to the kelp beds, which were cool, and saw
some schools of fish jumping about. Fun stuff. I got completely dumped into
the ocean as I came back in, though, losing my sunglasses in the process.
Today was a much less active day than yesterday. I spent a good deal of the
day indoors, reading Daemon by Daniel Suarez. Since Suarez is an IT
consultant, his hacking and systems information is spot on, which made the book
a very enjoyable read. He mentions and demonstrates such things as
NetStumbler, SQL injection, and all sorts of identity theft.
This evening, I introduced Sarah's family to the card game Set. Like everyone
I've ever shown the game to, they were slightly confused at first as to what
constituted a valid set, but unlike most groups, once they figured it out, they
didn't brush it off as too difficult or not fun. No, they got competitive. By
the end of the evening, I was pulling out all stops and had to really focus to
keep ahead of my new competition. I was particularly impressed by Sam Luna -
he kept me on my toes. As a whole, the evening was wonderfully fun, and by the
end, I was mentally exhausted. It's a delightful feeling.
This morning was absolutely beautiful. I walked up and down the beach for a
while, looking for shells and enjoying the sound of the ocean. Sarah and I
talked about life goals and where we currently stand on them - I think
we're both on the right track. We said our goodbyes, and then drove back
up to Berkeley. Sarah's family reminded me that I'm always welcome to
visit them, even if Sarah's not around. I'm amused.
I've returned from my fun trip to Carpinteria! I spent my late
afternoon/evening unpacking further, finally organizing my closet and making
enough floor space to lay down the air mattress that I'll be sleeping on until
I get a real bed.
Orientation is tomorrow. Hope I learn a lot.
Today was the Berkeley EECS orientation. I ended the day much less confused
than I started out - I even have a dependency tree of things that I need to do!
Things I accomplished today:
- Got my Berkeley ID card
- Got my EECS accounts activated
- Got a much better understanding of how infrastructure works at UCB
- Obtained many handouts
- Made new friends
Tomorrow I plan to get access and keys to the EECS buildings, figure out my
registration/funding specifics, work out how I plan to get residency, and
probably get a California driver's license.
Also, after all the business events of today, there was a dinner and game night
for all the new grad students. A group of us played Set intermingled with
Fluxx for quite some time.
Also also, I met two people today who had also competed in ARML back in their
days. This is the first time that more than one person in a room other than me
has heard of ARML. Good times!
It becomes clear to me that I will be waking up at 7am from this day forward
whether I want to or not, unless I get some nice blackout drapes.
Billmonk is a cool service that lets you track,
shuffle, and settle debts between you and your friends. My roommate and I are
using it to stay square on rent and other living expenses.
This morning, I was in need of a mattress and a desk, as both items are crucial
to my effective living in my apartment. So, to attend to this desire, I went
to IKEA. I've never been to one of the stores, but visiting is an interesting
experience. The fact that the store is a one-way (well, supposed to be
one-way) path is neat. I wondered if they used a space-filling curve, or just
winged it. The food sold at very good prices is a fine way to keep patrons in
the store for longer, as well as get those with low blood sugar into a
sufficiently pleasant mood to close sales.
I purchased a fairly soft queen-size mattress (I'm pretty skinny, and I tend to
sleep on my side or my stomach). It fit (with some effort, compression, and
adjustment of seat locations) in the back seat of my car, thanks to the fact
that it was rolled up and sealed in plastic. The thing reeks of
freshly-constructed mattress, which gave me a headache this afternoon.
Hopefully I'll be able to sleep okay tonight; otherwise, I'm going back to the
air mattress until this thing airs out.
My other significant purchase of the day was my desk. I really wanted a LARGE
(gotta put my 30" monitor on something), very stable desk with as little around
my feet as possible. Basically, I wanted a nice table. I found a roughly
three by five foot desk with narrow legs and no other nonsense. Initially, I
wanted the one with black glass, but they were out of stock. I almost opted
not to get that desk, but convinced myself that if I got the white-glass one
instead, I could also use the surface as a whiteboard. So I got the glass desk
and four legs (they make an A-frame, sorta).
My car is a large sedan, but neither the trunk nor the cabin can accomodate a
solid three by five chunk of glass. Thus, I hung it out the back of my trunk
with the trunk open, and secured the box with twine tied to two anchor points
in the car's chassis. When I got on the highway and finally broke 30 MPH, the
wind slammed the trunk door shut-ish on the desk box. I feared that it had
broken the glass, but it turned out just fine. Andrew and I took several trips
upstairs, dropping off our newly acquired wares. Then, I set out to assemble
my desk. It was at this time that I discovered that I also needed to purchase
a frame for the desk.
So, I said I went to IKEA today. In actuality, I went to IKEA...twice. On the
bright side, I got to use the coupon that I got on the first trip to save some
seven dollars on the second trip, so that's a plus. After retrieving the
appropriate frame, assembly went sensibly, and I set up my desktop and a good
deal of my electronics. My room is much neater now that I have a horizontal
surface other than the floor to put things on.
Andrew had found someone on Craigslist who was moving out, so we dropped by to
see what stuff he might have for sale/free. I really wanted to get the piano,
but I realize that I have no good way to move it, and our apartment complex
doesn't like people playing musical instruments, in any event. The guy also
had an IBM Thinkpad T40, minus hard disk and broken backlight for free. I
grabbed it - maybe I'll put a disk in it, or make it netboot with NFS root.
Both would be fun. I also bought some shelves from the guy, and Andrew got a
couple of mugs.
I'm excited to have my desktop up and running again. I'll probably write more
on this blog now that I have a proper keyboard to work with.
My shower is broken. In particular, the cold water faucet is defunct - the
knob spins freely, but no water actually flows. I'll note that while taking a
shower with only cold water is unpleasant, taking a shower with only hot water
IS NOT DONE.
Back to fooling around with computers.
I spent a good while this afternoon doing some usability testing for Kontact
Mobile (see this blog post). Currently, it's so slow that I can't be bothered to test it
again until performance improves. It kinda worked, which was kinda cool, but
was so overshadowed by frustration at the poor performance (we're talking over
5 minutes between pressing the on screen button and anything happening) that I
wouldn't even dogfood test it. Maybe when it gets faster...
I felt almost bad sending tough feedback to the developers, but they asked for
it. And ultimately, if I were a developer, that's what I'd want - to improve
my product, at the expense of my ego. I look forward to my Usability/Design
class.
The more I learn about Dan Ariely's works (I'm currently reading The Upside
of Irrationality; you should watch his TED
Talk as well
as Dan Pink's TED
talk), the more I wonder
if my past academic successes are in fact largely attributable to my
nonchalance toward them, simply learning by myself as much as I'm
interested. Ariely's studies show that for intellectual work, high
incentives worsen performance. I also wonder how much of said nonchalance
I possessed as a child, and if I've grown more productive or less
productive. Hard things to gauge.
Our shower is now fixed. I am clean!
Random fascinating observation: a year ago, I used to switch back to my email
tab way more than I do now. Why? Because a year ago, I didn't have a
smartphone. My phone makes noise when I have a new message in my inbox, and I
can see in about two seconds whether it's something that I ought to read now or
something that can be put off until I go through emails in batch.
A funny thing, considering that most people spend more time on email once they
obtain a smartphone. I seem to have done the inverse.
Today, my room was 94.5°F. That was unpleasant. In addition to it being a
record-setting hot day in Berkeley, our heater decided to turn on. I suppose
the giant window not having proper curtains and all of my electronics didn't
help either.
I obtained a mattress cover and sheets today. Yay.
Today I washed my new blue sheets along with the rest of my dirty clothes.
Now, I'm pretty sure all my shirts are a slightly darker shade of blue.
According to the thermometer on my desk, it is now 102.5° in my room. What
the hell, California.
I now realize that that means that by being in my room, my 98.6° body is,
in fact, cooling the room.
I used the word "that" three times in the space of four words in the previous
sentence. I should be more creative.
I had my vehicle smog check done today, and on the forms I put down my previous
license plate number. Whoops.
The radio is playing Michael McDonald's "Ain't no Mountain High Enough," which
reminded me of my mom, who loves that artist/track.
The trip to the DMV was mostly uneventful, although both people who helped me
commented on how many Berkeley students they had coming through recently (side
note: it's a prerequisite for getting in-state tuition). I am now licensed to
drive in California, registered to vote in California, and possess California
license plates. I did forget to get HAM radio operator plates, unfortunately,
so I'll have to see what I can do about that later.
Pleasant surprises: checking your bank account's balance and finding that your
checking account has an extra digit in it.
I now have a safe deposit box. Also, the bank has different systems for
California and Texas accounts, so apparently they have to ship off all
transactions to Texas before processing them. Also their website is down.
I finished reading Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl: The Atlantis Complex. It
was decent, but not quite up to his usual genius, in my opinion. The twists
were not quite as shocking as they usually turn out (though that might be a
side effect of my becoming accustomed to them), and frankly, the whole plot did
little to develop anything other than Artemis' mental disorders. As for the
action: the main cast was in very little convincing danger for the majority of
the time, perhaps a result of Artemis' obsessive nonchalance. It's not so bad
that is spoils the series, in my mind, but I'd rather go back and reread the
bits with time travel and goblins and awesome support from Foaly behind the
scenes.
Today, I spent way too much time catching up on the past month of /. articles
(yay, RSS feeds). I feel much more up-to-date.
I thought my GPS had been recalled, but found out that my serial number was
safe. Hooray, my battery isn't going to explode.
My homework for CS260 has me reading "one of the most far-sighted articles
published in our field." Far-sighted doesn't say the half of it:
"Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of
associative trails running through them..." - Bush, Vannevar. "As We May
Think." The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945.
Holy crap, that's Wikipedia. Foretold in 1945. My mind has been blown.
Remember, that's just one quote from a series of very accurate predictions
about machines of the future.
I found info about piano practice
rooms, so I'm going
to go practice my hands off some time this week. I seriously missed playing
piano.
I am extremely frustrated at the EECS department for not knowing how to set up
IT infrastructure cleanly. They have Kerberos, but don't use it. The default
shell is some broken variant of csh that won't let you logout with ^D. But the
best part of all this is the Unix password
policy, which I
quote:
"Please follow the instructions to change your password. When you are done, you
will be logged off. Currently your password must be 8 characters in length;
characters beyond the 8th character will be ignored."
THIS IS A BOX WITH PORT 22 OPEN TO THE INTERNET. This cannot possibly be
secure. I have half a mind to run a dictionary attack on my own account to see
what happens.
Oh, and the best part? SSHD supports Kerberos (it's even enabled!) but the box
doesn't have a keytab, so it doesn't work. Homedirs are mounted over NFS (and
not until authentication has been done (not that NFS mounts are actually
authenticated (which could totally be done with the Kerberos setup they already
have via Active Directory))), so publickeys don't work either. No, the ONLY
way to log into that box...is with an insecure, exactly 8-character password.
At least my classes are interesting (read: going to be a lot of reading). But
they'll be fun, make no mistake.
I went to the nearby Thai restaurant (which only takes cash, interestingly) for
lunch with a couple of my labmates. It turns out Anuj also has an N900, which
was awesome (he worked at Nokia this summer). A pleasant lunch came to a
painful end when I put my dishes in the bin to be washed and stood up into a
metal box on the side of the building.
My day continued to be frustrating when I got out of my second class and found
the lab empty. Since I STILL don't have key card access (it's been over a week
now since I requested it), I can't get in to retrieve my laptop.
Since I had a great/terrible day, I went to the practice rooms (my laptop was
locked away, after all) and played piano (despite not having my music) for a
good 40 minutes. I think I should leave my books in the lab - it's (roughly)
on the way to the practice rooms, and my memory is a little on the flaky side
(hey, it's been nearly four months). As I left, I heard someone else playing
Jon Schmidt's "All of Me," so I went over and told her that I knew it as well.
It was nice and helped improve my fading morale.
PhD students read a lot of papers. I need to learn to read papers more
efficiently.
Today, I played 2½ hours of volleyball after class. I will be sore tomorrow,
but it was a lot of fun, and I need the exercise anyway.
Congratulations, sharpobject, you've gotten me started working on Project Euler
Problems again. Today's successes:
How about that.
Also, I'm excited that Sarah is finally
toying with Ubuntu. Took you long enough. :P
I signed up to help with the CS Graduate Student Association (CSGSA,
henceforth) social event this week, which was a barbecue. I successfully lit
grills without burning down the entire state of California. YAY. The event
was a success - probably 30 or so people came and ate and drank and socialized.
Good times.
ALSO my cable modem arrived today. Comcast is set to come out Monday. I will
have fast internet soon.
Interesting things today:
- Made breakfast burritos in bulk with Andrew, my flatmate
- Taped down the long run of CAT6 running from the cable modem in the far corner of the living room to the far corner of my room neatly and in such a fashion as not to make people trip and break their faces
- Videochatted with Nicole before it was super late in her timezone and before all light in my room had faded (still haven't built my strand of LEDs...hmm...TODO?)
Fun times.
Interesting thoughts on the
equal-odds rule. Yet another reason for me to force myself to get around to
creating things as often as possible. Like any of the things on my TODO list.
I got my California driver's license and title in the mail today. I wonder
what I'm supposed to do with my old (invalidated) Texas license.
Andrew and I played a bunch of DDR today, which was a good workout. It was a
lot of fun going back through all my favorite songs (and getting A after A on
heavy :D). I wonder if I'll be sore tomorrow.
Tonight I went to a house party where we watched The Empire Strikes Back
and Return of the Jedi. A couple members of our group of 10 CS majors had
never seen the movies before - WHAT? HOW? I did my best not to recite every
single line, lest I be slain before Luke makes it off Hoth.
Andrew and I went to Berkeley Bowl, which has an incredible amount of varied
produce. Speaking of which: wow, produce is super cheap compared to
meat/cheese. I should eat more fruit and veggies.
Some time I'm going to tabulate exactly how much I spend on things, so I can
get a baseline for my current monthly expenses. Then I can do all sorts of
fancy analyses on the data.
Learn about computer memory hierarchy speeds with a nice kitchen analogy:
- The contents of your hands are CPU registers (access limited by thinking power)
- Things on the stove or counters are CPU cache (takes about a second to use)
- Things in the freezer in the garage are like main memory (takes about a minute to use)
- And things that you buy on Amazon and have shipped with Prime are like disk storage. (WAY WAY LONGER)
This is actually not quite accurate for orders of magnitude, but hopefully the
suffering that is disk access time comes across.
I have now changed all of my website over to HTML5. This consisted of deleting
some text inside the <!DOCTYPE> tag for each HTML file. That was easy.
Yay, no class on Labor Day. This means I have only two days of classes this
week. It also meant that I could be home at 10am for the Comcast guy to come
out and phone up Comcast HQ to have them activate my line and tell them my
cable modem's hardware address. Now I have 15/2 Mbps internet, instead of
tethering my phone. Life is good. I set up my internal network on my gigabit
switch, and I'll be doing Kerberos/NFS when I get a chance. I can hit my
desktop directly on port 22 and 80. So much win - now I can run
Kerberos/NFS from kraken, my dekstop.
Before I go to bed, I need to have read three more papers. I should not have
put them off this long. Oh well, how bad could it be? Deadlines aren't
actually until Wednesday.
Today was awesome. Why, you ask? Because the class I'm auditing titled
"User Interface Prototyping Design Clinics" is amazing. Storytime:
During the first hour, we discussed the design process, and exactly
what we (and other big thinkers in the industry) thought "prototyping"
was. We noted that it could demonstrate a piece of interaction, how
something looked, or how something functioned. It's easiest to make
a prototype that does just one of the three, and hardests to create
one that does all three. We also brainstormed random things for this
year's CHI Student Design Competition (CHI is the ACM Special Interest
Group (SIG) on Computer-Human Interaction, my field's largest and most
prestigious conference). In what could almost be considered unfair, the
design problem this year
is "...to design an object, interface, system, or service intended to help
us appreciate our differences." OH THAT SOUNDS RIGHT UP BERKELEY'S ALLEY!
We thought about differences between people, contexts in which people people
would benefit from appreciating each other's differences, and what sort of
users would value such a system. In what would probably have insulted one
of my friends who truly loves diversity, one of the students noted that we
should be careful to avoid overemphasizing differences, as they can carry
a certain amount of stigma.
I'll also note that I successfully ordered lunch for the lab from SF Soup
Co. during the first hour of lecture via my phone, saving us from having a
foodless lunch seminar. But that's offtopic.
The second hour was where the class got really awesome. Lora, the graduate
student instructor for the class (also one of the senior members of the BiD
lab, where I currently sit), is getting her PhD studying what she refers
to as "Design Doodling." Basically, the quick sketches to show off an idea
that are guaranteed not to get any better after 3 minutes. And we spent the
rest of the period getting everyone brought up to speed at the super-basic
art skills that would help us draw up our ideas more clearly.
We started with points on opposite ends of a sheet of paper, and practiced
drawing straight lines. Suggested: place pen(cil) on point one. Keep eyes on point two.
Connect in a single swift stroke.
Next was concentric circles. Toy around with which direction you prefer to
move your arm, and where you prefer to start and stop the motion. You'll get
a feel for how you have to move your arm for circles of various sizes. If I
took the time to compare with a circle drawn with a compass, my circles are
probably skinnier at the ordinal directions than the cardinal ones. But I'm working on it.
Stick figures: Drawing people (or parts thereof) gives an intuitive sense
of scale to pictures that doesn't hit home the same if you merely label them
with dimensions. Traditional xkcd style stick
figures are unfortunately very inflexible. It's hard to make them look at
things, bend their bodies, sit, or demonstrate anything to do with clothing.
As a result, Lora suggested "star people:" draw the head, place pencil on neck,
and add limbs until you have four. These you can at least put pockets on.
For even better poses, the "tunic + pants" approach can be deformed and shown
in many orientations.
Hands tend to show up a lot in user interface mockups, since a lot of interactions
involve *gasp* manually manipulating something. As a result, it's a good idea to learn
how to draw hands. They don't have to be photorealistic - just squint and draw the big
blobs. Best quote of the day: "In the worst case, you have a template for a hand
attached to you!" I cracked up.
Faces: you will learn to draw 12 different emotions. Draw three rows of four circles each. Add dot eyes in roughly the center of each face.
Top row gets mouths with edges pointing up, middle row gets flat horizontal line mouths, and bottom
row gets frowny curves. First column gets regular horizontal eyebrows (like ‾ ‾), second column gets up-pointing eyebrows (/ \),
third column gets down-pointing eyebrows (\ /), and fourth column gets one eyebrow raised and one regular (‾ \). Congratulations! You now have:
| happy |
cute |
mischievous |
flirty |
| meh |
nervous |
frustrated |
confused |
| sad |
worried |
angry |
completely lost |
Sounds: how do you visualize sounds? You can use ♫ ♩ ♪
♪ for music. You can draw vibration as wiggle lines. You can draw
speech bubbles around things, even
Onomatopoeia. We were tasked with
drawing a cell phone ringing with a call. I also thought to add rays of
majesty where the display was illuminated.
Practice: draw a picture of a person jumping on a trampoline. And you know
what? Using all the advice given over the past hour, it was quite clear that
there was a person, and he was having a good time jumping on a trampoline.
The anime exclamation point over his head makes you aware of his alertness.
No one else in the class was familiar with the concept. WHAT? ‾(°_o)/‾
So. I can't draw. I have never considered myself a good artist or even to
have good handwriting. But thanks to one hour, I'm comfortable enough to draw
design doodles.
I can't help but hope that all the seminars I go to will be this good.
My classes are hitting stride, and while it's a vigorous pace, it's an
enjoyable one. In HCI we discussed Ubiquitous Computing - basically, the idea
that use of technology becomes so widespread and intuitive that we no longer
think about it when we use it, the same way we no longer think about reading
text - we just gain information by doing so.
Texas A&M had a power outage today; I noticed when IRC went down and I
could no longer whine to my friend Matt about how NFS keeps dropping on
mirror.cs.tamu.edu. Apparently it took out a large chunk of campus. My heart
goes out to you, system administrators who had (or still have?) to make sure
everything came back up. To quote the LUG: "power failures kill uptime -
boycott them."
In Operating Systems we discussed filesystems. Holy cow, they're just putting
trees on disk in a fast manner. And now I *actually understand* journaled
filesystems. They're pretty cool. Maybe I should start reading more of the
Linux source; I might actually understand a good chunk of it.
Tomorrow I get to play around on rooftops.
Today, I had the fun opportunity to enjoy the view from the roof of a
University building. In particular, I was atop the Space Sciences Laboratory
installing a dish antenna for an access point that will operate on the 5GHz
band. Some assembly required. I particularly enjoyed climbing the wall upon
which the pole upon which we mounted the dish. It reminded me of the days when
I used to do Parkour, back at TAMS. I took amazing pictures with a view of the
whole bay.
Today was a day of errands. I went to the bank, the grocery store, CVS, and
the post office. I also finished up my homework, wherein I implemented the
Bubble Cursor (pdf)
as described by Grossman and Balakrishnan.
The next project is to implement a multitouch input device. I want to get a
projector.
I'd really like a hug right now.
Random: I got my amateur radio operator license two years ago today.
Today, Andrew and I invented the bubble-wrap beanbag: noisy and one-time-use.
I updated my resumé today. This
week will play host to infosessions from IBM, National Instruments, Microsoft,
and D.E. Shaw. I have t-shirts that associate me with three of those four
companies. This will be fun.
As I write this, I hear Lora playing electric guitar in the BiD lab. My
colleagues rock.
Today is day 1 of industry recruitment^Winfosession week, and the company of
the day is...IBM. Wonder if I'll see anyone I know from Almaden.
Answer: yes, I will see Regina, my manager. I gave her my updated resumé to
take back to folks at Almaden. I also got to speak briefly about what the
Extreme Blue project teams did this summer, which was fun. Met a junior named
Austin who sounded interested in Extreme Blue. I hope he applies - he seemed
nice.
I got my bill from Comcast today, so I signed up for automated billing. It was
in the process of going through my account information that I discovered that:
- I have a monthly bandwidth cap of 250GB
- I (and my roommate) have used up 92GB (36%) of said bandwidth...
- ...over the course of seven days (23% of billing cycle).
So we'll be cutting back on the ol' internet usage just a tad.
I got full credit on my first HCI assignment. Yay.
Today, on my way to the lab, I was passed going down a staircase...by a guy
riding a bike. He then proceeded to hope the bike up a foot-tall curb. I was
impressed.
Björn has loaned me a PS3 Eye modified to only see infrared for the
purposes of building a multitouch table. I pulled out my code from whitepages
v2 (one version the predecessor to what I have published on this site),
adjusted the framerate that I capture video at, fired up the program, and
adjusted the lens until I got a fairly crisp image of myself in infrared. I
was quite pleased that my (and KDE's, since I had originally taken pieces of
code from Kopete for video handling) two-year-old code was still useful and
effective.
Knowing me, that same old code is going to wind up getting used in our final
project.
I just got to use 80/20 aluminum for the first time. Cool stuff.
Today, after a minor panic attack last night/this morning, I went to see a
counselor at the Tang Center. As I left, I saw a coffeetable on the side of
the road labeled "FREE." So I carried it the mile or so back to my house. Now
my shoulders hurt.
My new laptop battery arrived (a day early, I might add), so I took the extra
wireless card out of the battery compartment and the battery is charging now.
I look forward to having decent battery life once again.
My PG&E bill also arrived, addressed to Andrew Fischer. GUYS, I SPELLED MY
LAST NAME OVER THE PHONE WHEN I SIGNED UP. You have no excuse. On the upside,
the call to get that corrected took about two minutes total, and the first 90
seconds of that was going through the automated receptionist.
Today, I met Ted Selker, IBM Fellow and inventor of the TrackPoint. He had
lots of ideas regarding innovation. Most of them reminded me of what other
things I'd heard about innovation in the past - come up with tons and tons of
ideas, even though most are crap (Equal-Odds principle); only further develop
the good ones; focus on real problems that human beings have.
Today was an excellent day. Important events:
Luke and I discussed our architecture
for our multitouch table for CS260, and came up with our desired layers
and implementation ideas. Luke will be responsible for getting data from
the camera into our TouchEvent protocol. Note that I discovered the Qt
Multitouch framework after we discussed all this - perhaps I should just be
leveraging that.
Nicole and I worked out most of a contract of understanding which defines
clearly (for the first time) exactly what we consider acceptable behavior from
each other. It took discussion (that probably should have taken place
something like a year ago, but better late than never) over the course of three
and a half hours. The outcome was both of us feeling much, much better, and a
somewhat-joking, somewhat-serious contract, with lots of amusing fake legalese.
It was fun.
I took a three-hour nap.
Also, both of my hips are bruised from carrying back that coffee table that I
found yesterday. Bah.
The more I read of The Upside of Irrationality, the more I appreciate it.
Nicole, Sarah L.: I think you would both enjoy reading this book.
Never did I expect it would be both cheaper and easier for me to purchase a
replacement motherboard battery online and have it shipped to me than it would
be to buy it in a store. This is what Amazon Prime does to me.
Today, I spent most of the day working on my HCI project - a multitouch table.
Luke and I obtained acrylic, wood, wood glue, and angle brackets, and assembled
most of the stuff. The camera we have has some dead spots on the CCD, which
makes me sad.
Now, it's 21:30 and my next-door-and-down-half-a-story neighbors have lit up
their grill, and the wind is blowing all of their smoke into my house. Grr.
Today, someone on one of the mailing lists I'm subscribed to wrote an email
that misspelled the term referring to a computer disk as "hard driver." I
cracked up, remembering the guys from TAMS who did a prank call to Fry's,
pretending to be fresh-off-boat and looking for a "hard driver."
Also, I'm getting sick. Need to buy more citrus fruit.
Today, on my walk home, I was passed by an elderly man on an electric scooter.
His helmet flashed white lights in front and red in the rear. I watched him
carve wide esses in the sidewalk and street as I made my way home. Berkeley is
home to interesting people.
Today was pretty great. Of interest:
- I got to play psychologist, observing other people and how they interacted and communicated when making junk prototypes, then report on my observations
- Upon senior advice, I ordered massive amounts (15 people's worth) of sushi for BiD lunch. This week we're preparing papers for submission to CHI, the premier conference in Human-Computer Interaction. Since about 12 people showed, I got a giant lunch and sizable mid-afternoon snack.
- I also got to give real, detailed, tangible experience feedback to Wes, my labmate who ran the study I recently participated in, for his CHI submission.
- My CMOS battery for my desktop arrived in the mail (yes, the one that was cheaper to order on Amazon than buy from the local Safeway)
- I went to a great talk
on Design. I met Alice Agogino, a
professor at Berkeley who helped design Computer Software Engineer Barbie;
Ame Elliott, an IDEO human factors specialist;
and "Jofish" Kaye of Nokia Research Center Palo Alto.
Also, there were CupKates.
I did wind up spending over 12 hours on campus today, though, which was tiring.
UPDATE: bonus cool thing of the day: Jofish wrote a paper that includes a
graphic (Figure 7) that I saw as a 7-foot tall poster on Julia Grace's door when working at IBM
this summer. You too can have such a poster.
In other news, I'd like to get around to writing an Atom/RSS feed for my blog.
Spec-reading is in progress, and I'm limiting the features I'm implementing to
things I can do that require no server state information that is not provided
by either the text file backend or the filesystem upon which it sits. This may
make proper UUIDs impossible, since the only way I can think of to generate the
same UUID for an entry is to hash it, which has the problem of changing in
value should the contents change. And just hashing the file timestamp or
something also is a bad idea, in my opinion - too easy to wind up with a
collision somewhere if someone else does the same. An interesting problem.
Quote from today's class: "Stack Overflow is like World of Warcraft, only more
productive."
I'd feel sorry for myself and the lack of sleep I'm getting, except that I know
my advisor is burning the candle even more than I am. I'm quite impressed.
I wonder if there's data on people who can live successfully on unusually small
amounts of sleep, and whether nurses and grad students have a higher
concentration.
I crashed overnight in the lab. It wasn't the most comfortable thing ever, but
I was tired and frustrated.
The sun will be up soon.
I love it when I find a bug in a piece of software, and then I find the
bugreport on the project's bugtracker, and it turns out that it's a recent but,
it's been reported, there's a fix, and a package was released in the last three
hours.
I'm consistently scoring free food this week. This is awesome. My only
concern is that all my produce at home will go bad.
So my code isn't working. Why? I dove into the Qt sources and found: "// Note: TouchUpdate and TouchEnd events are never propagated" WELL THEN, I HAVE
TO ROUTE THEM MYSELF. CURSES.
Lora is teaching about Myers-Briggs type identification in the BiD lab to her
group of "wondergrads" and explained she's an INTP. I'm pretty sure all of my
readers at the time of this writing know that I'm an INTJ. And now you do too!
I'm really looking forward to sleeping in my bed tonight, since I haven't the
past two.
It is possible, when working on a project, to throw away the entirety of your
codebase, start from scratch with off-the-shelf open-source components, and
have a working demo within 12 hours. Luke and I did just that for our
multitouch table. We learned an awful lot trying to do everything the hard
way, though.
Today I got up early and remoted in to the Berkeley Programming Contest
(which is like the pre-ICPC
Regionals competition). It lasted for five long hours, during which I
hastily relearned the C++ STL. I don't know exactly how I did (scores
aren't posted yet) but it was in the top three, based on the number of
problems I solved, so I'll probably be going to Regionals. If I do super
well there, maybe I can finally land a trip to World Finals.
It was also super hot today. Berkeley, it's fall. You're not supposed to hit
the nineties in my room again.
Apparently, I use over a gigabyte and a half of data on my phone per month.
Nice.
Per RFC4287, the Atom
Syndication Format, section 4.1.2:
"o atom:entry elements MUST contain exactly one atom:id element."
This atom:id is a UUID that stays with the particular entry, persisting through
time and remaining through edits.
I haven't been able to come up with a good way to uniquely associate a
persistant hash with a file, short of putting it inside each file, or making a
database of them. I'm trying to see just how far I can stretch the
filesystem...if you have any ideas, let me know.
According to my CS 262A prof, there is a great divide between the "systems"
folks and the "database" folks in computer science. I fall quite clearly in
the first category.
Random: I want one of these. And a group of people to play it properly.
I really like the Droid Sans and Droid Serif typefaces. They have very slender
letters and narrow kerning, which I assume is ideal for reading text on
handsets. Droid Sans Mono doesn't quite strike my fancy - for one, the zeroes
aren't slashed, so it's hard to distinguish them from capital Os. And it just
plain doesn't look as good as Liberation Mono or Inconsolata for my terminal.
I'll totally use the Droid typefaces for everything else, though - I like
tightly-packed text.
I accidently opened World Without End, and wound up reading the last 150
pages or so again. That book is still incredible, and I urge anyone who wants
to enjoy a thrilling, mentally stimulating, emotionally wrenching tale to read
it. Just make sure you have a good chunk of time stored away for it.
What do you get when you take a dating site and hand all the data over to
people who like doing data analyses? OkTrends, the
OkCupid blog. I found the most recent
article
(at time of this writing, of course) fascinating. It's really cool to look at
what people of different backgrounds say about themselves.
This is kinda turning into a linkdump, but I consistently love reading Dan Ariely's work
on how people are predictably irrational (watch his
TED talk,
and how to work around said limitation. I found
this article
particularly illuminating on what brings close friends together, and how such relationships
are maintained. It's not by talking about the obvious or casual or easy things that
we make our deep friendships - it's by making ourselves vulnerable, finding points of likely
disagreement, and then seeing that maybe we're not so different after all. Or if we are,
then we may at least come to appreciate and respect each other's views.
I may write more on this at some future point, since I consider it important.
Also, I'm apparently a nitwit - atom:id is supposed to be an IRI. Like,
oh, say,
http://zarvox.org/shortlog/2010/09/27.
I'll hyperlink that as soon as it can become valid. (UPDATE: Successfully
implemented on 2010-10-07.)
I now have car and renter's insurance. Which is good, because the policy my
parents have for me expires with the month.
I am rather concerned by this
article.
Granted, it's from Salon, which is about as left-leaning a reporting outlet as
they come, but the facts appear to be accurate: an American citizen believed to
be a terrorist is placed on an assassination list by the US government. The
problem is that this prevents due process, explicitly provided to US citizens
by the Constitution (and found in common law all the way back to the Magna
Carta). On top of that, the Constitution explicitly states in Article 3,
Section 3, that "No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the
Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open
Court." I don't like the recent erosion of civil liberties in the United
States.
I got a $50 Amazon gift card for having the best feedback for one of the
studies I participated in. Strangely, all I can think of is why you shouldn't
incentivize intellectual work
much.
AUGH I CAN'T GET NFSROOT WORKING AHHH.
On the upside, I can get Ubuntu installed on Sarah's old HP a1520n, despite it
showing a black screen on boot. The magic? Hit F6 on the CD boot menu, select
"nomodeset", and remove "quiet splash" from the boot options. Apparently the
GeForce 6150LE doesn't get along usplash nor nouveau KMS.
Oh, and then after the install, set those GRUB options, and make them permanent
by updating the line in /etc/default/grub
I discovered recently that I'm in the PGP strong
set. This
means that I could (if I found the time) become a packager for open-source
projects. That would be neat.
Today I donated to the ACLU. It's
interesting to see how many people with strong technical backgrounds support
the work of the ACLU. I have the greatest respect for their stance.
Items meriting more of a writeup:
- Trip to Willow Garage
- BART trip back
- Facebook Infosession
Yesterday, Björn and I took a trip to Willow Garage, the company that
makes the PR2 robots that I'll be working with. We were hoping to find out
more about how demonstration and teleoperation of the robots are currently
done, and what deficiencies existed in current options, and where we might come
up with new methods that would be more effective.
Willow Garage as a whole is awesome. There was neat hardware EVERYWHERE -
numerous PRs, and these 5 foot tall robots called Texai with a screen, webcam,
and speakers. People use the Texai to telecommute from all over the place, and
it's totally ordinary to see them just driving around the lab. Lunch was
amazing as well - quinoa salad, green beans, build-your-own salad with lettuce,
strawberries, cheeses, cucumbers, soybeans, pear, and glazed walnuts, brown
rice, and these delicious mini sandwiches with mayo, tomato, and portabella
mushroom. Lunch was also amazing because we got to sit down and chat with some
really brilliant folks about what we were looking to do, and what's been done
so far. I love how at Willow Garage, it's practically assumed that you can get
access to whatever fancy hardware you want. After lunch, we grabbed coffee (I
had a cup of Earl Grey), talked to different folks for another couple whiles,
and then Leila (our host) gave us adorable shirts and PR2 chocolate bars with
HILARIOUS nutrition facts (example: Warning! May contain nuts. And bolts...).
If I had support for images in this blogging engine, I'd embed them here.
Around 2pm, Björn and I said our goodbyes to that awesome lab in order to
make it back to SF before the massive traffic hit (which we did successfully).
He dropped me off at the BART station, and I rode back to Berkeley. On the way
there, two people sat across from me - one was a young black man reading the
book of Isaiah from the Bible, and the other was a slightly-older black man
reading the Qur'an in Arabic.
Later that evening, Facebook hosted a technical discussion/recruitment session,
which was interesting. The speaker went into great detail about the various
languages that Facebook uses (basically: whatever you're most comfortable with,
we'll do it), their RPC platform (Thrift) that allows them to do so, a decent
bit about the ridiculous scale that their system has to run at, a block model
of the ads subsystem that Facebook uses, and details on how the People You May
Know functionality was first implemented, adapted to scale up, and made smarter
with machine learning algorithms to provide good results. It was quite
in-depth, ran 10 minutes long, and was a delight to listen to. The speaker was
animated and entertaining, which was nice.
Today, I spent a good deal of time reading papers for HCI, learning about WSGI,
reading papers not relevant to my field but still interesting like (pdf
warning) The Chronic Dependence of Popular Religiosity upon Dysfunctional
Psychosociological
Conditions, and watching
The Last Lecture. I think that last item was the most impactful.
For those who are unfamiliar: CMU professor Randy Pausch was diagnosed with
untreatable pancreatic cancer and was given four to six months to live. On
September 18, 2007, he gave his penultimate last lecture, titled "Really
Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" to a crowd of 400 people.
It's not often that I'm brought to tears by a lecture, so let me simply repost
some of the quotes that I found most noteworthy:
- "When you're screwing up and nobody's saying anything to you anymore, that means they gave up. And that's a lesson that stuck with me my whole life - that when you see yourself doing something badly and nobody's bothering to tell you anymore, that's a very bad place to be. Your critics are the ones telling you they still love you and care."
- "Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted."
- "Most of what we learn, we learn indirectly." (and later:) The best way to teach somebody something is to have them think they're learning something else.
- "When you're pissed off at someone and you're angry at them, you just haven't given them enough time. Just give them a little more time and they'll almost always impress you."
- I called up my mentor - I called up Andy van Dam and I said, "Andy, I just gave a two-week assignment, and they came back and did stuff that if I had given them a whole semester, I would have given them all As. Sensei, what do I do?" And Andy thought for a minute and he said, "You go back into class tomorrow, and you look them in the eye, and you say, 'Guys, that was pretty good, but I know you can do better.' "
- When you're taking Building Virtual Worlds, every two weeks we get peer feedback. We put that all into a big spreadsheet, and at the end of the semester, you had three teammates per project, five projects. That's 15 data points, that's statistically valid. And you get a bar chart telling you on a ranking of how easy you are to work with, where you stack up against your peers. Boy, that's hard feedback to ignore. [...] The best gift an educator can give is to get somebody to become self-reflective.
- " 'Randy, it's such a shame that people perceive you as so arrogant, because it's going to limit what you're going to be able to accomplish in life.' What a hell of a good way to word 'You're being a jerk.'"
- Never lose the childlike wonder. It's just too important. It's what drives us.
- Get a feedback loop and listen to it. Your feedback loop can be this dorky spreadsheet thing I did, or it can just be one great man who tells you what you need to hear. The hard part is the listening to it. Anybody can get chewed out. It's the rare person who says, "Oh, my god, you're right," as opposed to, "No wait, the real reason is" -- we've all heard that. When people give you feedback, cherish it and use it.
While I won't write them down, there are names in my head next to each of these
quotes. You know who you are. If you haven't seen it before, go watch The
Last Lecture. There are few ways
to better spend an hour than being reminded of what's important in your life.
I just baked a batch of brownies. I forgot to set a timer, but I
calculated in my head what time they should be done based on when I put
them in. When I suddenly smelled the brownies in the midst of my coding,
it was precisely that time. Baked goods are awesome because they tell
you when they're done.
I have ported the backend of the shortlog to web.py.
Everything works great on a machine with somewhat recent python libraries.
Note that as this does NOT include our dedi, you, dear reader, are still
seeing the old, feature-lacking version. Oh, Debian stable, I love you,
but you make me cry.
I shaved today for the first time in weeks. It took quite a while. I can't
shave more than every three days or so without my face breaking out angrily,
and then when taken with late nights and early classes, I often don't have time
to shave in the morning. In any case, now my face is cold, but smooth.
I have also discovered that I don't dislike brown rice! I just tend to dislike
dry rice, and people don't tend to prepare brown rice in a sticky fashion.
I wish I knew how to lead a conversation that other people would find
interesting. Lately it seems that I'm failing at that. :-/
HCI class today discussed fieldwork, and more importantly, ethnography.
Interesting snippets (which may or may not have anything to do with
ethnography):
- "A good way to have conversations with complete strangers it to have a notebook." People are very much interested in telling pretty intimate details of their lives to complete strangers, because they're likely safer people to tell. Also, because they're American.
- People don't know what they actually want. They know what they don't want from the visceral reaction, but they don't think about what they do want, so they tend to not be able to describe it in a way that's useful to people. People don't tend to think about what they want until you probe them. Solution: ask the right questions once to get them to think about it, and then again
- "In business, success means dollars. In positive terms."
- "There are two ways to bridge the gap - make everyone rich, or make everyone poor."
- On Ghanan scammers: "It is a highly...productive process."
There were many more things that we talked about that I've already forgotten.
I love the CS grad lounge in the mornings. The great big windows fill the room
with light, it's quiet, and I seem to read papers with an unusual efficiency
when I'm located there.
I've been on campus for 14 hours today. :/
Looking at the code I wrote yesterday: I produced way more code than I usually
do in a day. The numbers:
(00:24:31) zarvox@kraken ~/git/shareboard $ cat *.cpp *.h | wc -l
646
Compare that to whitepages v3, which I designed and wrote over the course of a
summer:
(00:25:47) zarvox@kraken ~/git/wp3 $ cat *.py | wc -l
1383
Not bad for a day's work, even given the verbosity of C++ as compared to
Python.
To make this entry display correctly, I added proper support for the
<pre> tag to my old blog engine.
Today, our lab cleaned out some of the cabinets. Long story short, I now own a
projector and an HP printer/scanner. I love it when labs get rid of cruft.
I think I've finally hit stride with my paper-reading. The solution is to be
in the grad lounge at 10:30 am with lots of sunlight and a hardcopy printout of
the paper I'm to read.
Now, I just have to get into the habit of doing this one day earlier. And then
one more day earlier...
I figured out why web.py wasn't working: turns out in web.py 0.2 and earlier, you were
expected to print the output to stdout instead of returning a string. A few lines of
s/return/print/ later, and you have what
you see here.
Yes, it doesn't look very much different. You may notice the permalinks. I'm considering
adding breadcrumbs, since now I can support those too with urls like
https://zarvox.org/shortlog/2010/10.
Maybe I'll just add those for permalinks.
Note that the backend shift and new features were not without purpose -
permalink support is a prerequisite for implementing Atom feeds, as previously
discussed. However, implementing Atom
is going to wait until I finish my HCI project due Friday.
OMG xkcd map of online communities.
This project is exhausting. I don't think I ever had to code so much
in such a short time during my entire undergrad experience, and I tended
to put off my projects until the last minute, so that's saying something.
That said, this project may become something of a showcase piece.
It performs beautifully, and shouldn't be too tough to polish into
something that I'd actually enjoy using.
My labmate informs me that the volume and state of my hair speak volumes
to how much sleep I've had recently. Yeah...
Rock climbing tonight, which should be fun. I'd be more excited if I
weren't so tired.
I slept for six hours, then was awake for three, then slept for another
seven. I lack the words to describe how much better I feel now than I
did 24 hours ago.
Toward the end of my second sleep block, I remember several dreams.
The last one involved me pushing a shopping cart (which I think I was
using as a luggage cart) around what looked kinda like a hotel courtyard.
I got in the elevator after first watching six people pack in to
the right half of the elevator like sardines in a comical fashion.
Then the elevator started moving laterally, and I realized that it
was in fact a train. The six people and my luggage were now gone,
and there were seats on the sides (like a subway train, only the car
was still the same size as the elevator), and we were passing by large
multilevel parking structures. In retrospect, it seems a lot like an
airport monorail with very small cars. Then there were two women sitting
across from me. One of them offered me a token for my return trip (for
some reason, I knew that the trip there cost 3 tokens' worth), which I
accepted, mentioning that I might still have a token on my Charlie Card
(apparently, my subconscious decided that this elevator-turned-train was
owned and operated by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority).
The same woman asked me if I'd been talking to anyone lately, to which I
replied that, no, I'd been spending a huge majority of my time on campus
working toward my PhD, which was the first thing that's proving to be
really difficult for me. Apparently my subconscious is also mildly
bitter about this. And then I woke up.
As I ate a sandwich and some yogurt with fruit, I realized that I still
pulled about the same number of all-nighters (or at least late-nighters)
per semester in undergrad than I'm currently scheduled to for this
semester. The difference in my mind is that those I chose to do by
putting off my work, whereas here I feel I haven't been putting off my
work. This suggests that while I feel that I've been procrastinating
less, perhaps I'm just playing the game with the same skill level,
except the difficulty just rose. In turn, I shouldn't worry about
feeling exhausted all the time - I just need to get more proactive about
the use of my time and be more intentional about my downtime, so I feel
like I'm getting more out of it. Then I'll feel like the late nights
are justified, since I chose to go do $FUN_THING instead of working.
I find it amusing that I'm consciously plotting to subvert my
subconscious. I should finish reading Dan Ariely's book.
Why I'm frustrated right now:
--- 24.7.112.1 ping statistics ---
255 packets transmitted, 139 received, 45% packet loss, time 254798ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 6.171/22.678/85.815/13.199 ms
(19:25:34) zarvox@kraken ~ $ ip route
24.7.112.0/22 dev eth0 proto kernel scope link src 24.7.114.10
default via 24.7.112.1 dev eth0
Comcast is coming out tomorrow to investigate (and hopefully, fix) this
issue. I only hope that the problem remains long enough for their tech
to diagnose properly.
I have finished implementing an Atom feed for this blog.
I'll get around to modifying the site template to link it later;
for now, if you want to add my blog to a feed reader, use
this link.
The internet is back to normal, and the Comcast guy hasn't made it out
here yet. This, too, frustrates me, since it means I'll probably get
charged $40 for a service call.
I cancelled the service call. No sense having the company examine my
working cable when it's functioning.
My feed generator had a bug where it would also generate feed entries
for the vim swapfiles that get created when I'm editing entries. Whoops.
It's fixed now. I'll probably break it in other delightful ways in the
future - who knows what might happen!
Time to read papers and make slides for my presentation tomorrow.
Today's reading for HCI includes a paper coauthored by
Ed H. Chi.
In searching for background on the authors to better understand their
places in the field, I found his autobiography. What I found interesting
was this section:
"College was a breeze, but I worked hard to finish early. I had set my
goals, and nothing was going to stop me from becoming a famous computer
scientist. Little did I know how hard it is to do that. It was the fortune
of a young punk who didn't know the limit, and tried anyhow. This drive,
which I still carry to this day, was the major reason of being where I
am now."
Heh, sounds somewhat familiar. And then this one:
"There is nothing more shocking than the realization of becoming someone
who needed change, because of the single-track focus I had. Toward the
end of my Ph. D. in early 1998, I started to change my life philosophy
and went through a personal metamorphosis. Before this period, I had
rejected the possibility of ever becoming a true Renaissance man,
because I had thought that, given all the knowledge in the world, it
was impossible to be a good and true Renaissance man. But I gradually
realized that it wasn't the END GOAL of being a Renaissance man that
mattered, but that the PROCESS of trying is what really mattered."
Most people who know me well know that it is (and has long been)
one of my goals is to be a Renaissance man (or at least, as close as
I can get). I can't remember exactly who first described me as one,
but I remember the glowingly happy feeling I get every time I hear the phrase.
Granted, I realized a while ago that being a true Renaissance man now
is impossible (as my father put it, "You're a couple hundred years too
late to be a Renaissance man"), but in my mind I still see that as the
impossibly high goal that I want to strive toward. It may be impossible
to get there, but as Chi writes, it's the process of trying that matters.
So, Renaissance man or no, I shall continue to strive for greatness, for
knowledge, and for what it is to be a Renaissance man.
I know Sarah will remind me that Renaissance men had impeccable physiques,
so I will need to start a more strenuous exercise regimen.
I love Felix von Leitner's slides on what optimizations compilers
do. The question "how much does a cache
miss cost" was raised in OS today, and in about 20 seconds I re-found slide
47. The whole talk basically says "the compiler is smarter than you are"
and gives all sorts of evidence. GCC produces very good code in most of
von Leitner's tests, and consistently outperformed icc/sunc/msvc.
Impressive stuff, though I'd love to see the content updated for 2010.
Matt Might, an assistant professor at University of Utah, writes on successful
PhD students. I
found this posting (and others) particularly interesting, so I'm going to do my
best to avoid reposting the entire page and just quote the particularly
noteworthy paragraphs:
"Smart" qualities like brilliance and quick-thinking are irrelevant in
Ph.D. school. Students that have made it through so far on brilliance
and quick-thinking alone wash out of Ph.D. programs with nagging
predictability. Let there be no doubt: brilliance and quick-thinking
are valuable in other pursuits. But, they're neither sufficient nor
necessary in science.
(aside: I need to come up with some CSS and support in my blog engine
for indented blocks, so it's clear what's original and what's quoted.)
This matches everything I've heard so far, and it remains scary to me,
because I have gotten this far on brilliance and quick-thinking.
The questions I have for myself are:
- Is this all that there is to me? If so, I should figure that out promptly, if possible, so I can determine:
- Is this something that I can change about me? It seems very often we accomplish something beyond the ability of who we were when we started trying.
- Is this what I want? And even if not, is anything out there better?
Second quote from the article:
For students that excelled as undergraduates, the sudden and constant
barrage of rejection and failure is jarring. If you have an ego problem,
Ph.D. school will fix it. With a vengeance. (Some egos seem to recover
afterward.)
Hehehehe, I've mostly learned how to not have such an ego that I put
others off, but inside I'm still probably a bit on the cocky side.
Thus, any future frustration I express here can possibly be attributed
to my ego being deflated. I do appreciate the relevant practice certain
people have given me over the past few years - I'm getting better, really!
Final quote from the article (emphasis mine, and apologies for quoting
four paragraphs without having indent block functionality (I really need
to implement that, I see)):
"Generally, grad students don't arrive with the ability to communicate well. This is a skill that they forge in grad school. The sooner acquired, the better.
Unfortunately, the only way to get better at writing is to do a lot of it. 10,000 hours is the magical number folks throw around to become an expert at something. You'll never even get close to 10,000 hours of writing by writing papers.
Assuming negligible practice writing for public consumption before graduate school, if you take six years to get through grad school, you can hit 10,000 hours by writing about 5 hours a day. (Toward the end of a Ph.D., it's not uncommon to break 12 hours of writing in a day.)
That's why I recommend that new students start a blog. Even if no one else reads it, start one. You don't even have to write about your research. Practicing the act of writing is all that matters."
Another excellent reason for me to continue writing (and at possibly
greater length) in my blog. Even better - now my blogging can
be described in terms of benefit to the larger goal of my PhD and
communication in general; thus, blogging is no longer procrastination.
Messing around writing code to support it might be, but now I have an
(if only in hindsight) adequate rationale for continuing to spend time
writing.
That's it for my musings of the day, so now I'll briefly mention a
couple events:
Ordering food for lab lunch: this is a rant. I wanted to order food
for 15-20 people from Viet Nam Village. I called a day in advance,
trying to explain what I was after and place the order in advance,
so they'd have time to fill it. I was asked to "call back tomorrow."
I thought this odd, but thought "hey, they probably know what they're
doing," so at 9am this morning I dutifully called back. No one answered.
I continued to call back at 30 minute intervals until 10:30, when a man
who sounded like the same man I'd talked to the night before picked up.
As I tried to place the order, he informed me that it was "too much!"
I explained that, expecting this, I had tried to call last night, and
had been told to call back in the morning. He apologized, but there was
nothing more he could do. So, note to self: don't try to order lunch for
the lab from Viet Nam Village. In a state of mild panic, I SMSed Luke,
who is also half-responsible for lab lunch, and he came through with
the suggestion of La Val's pizza, which delivered and was delicious.
Second note to self: don't bother ordering plain cheese pizza; just get
another BBQ chicken.
Microsoft Tech Fest: MS set up five booths for tech talks in the Woz
lounge, got burritos, and brought cupcakes frosted in the red, green,
yellow, and blue hues that match their windows branding (I need to
implement photos for my blog too, it seems). I enjoyed talking to the
Kinect guy in particular. It seems that it's still probably a bit early
to try using the Kinect skeleton-capture as a video input for my research
- currently, the SDK only supports running on the Xbox360, and the PR2
is strictly x86, so it's not likely that I could share a codebase,
which is important to me. Further, the resolution is only 320x240,
which may not be precise enough for tracking fine movements. I guess I
could run some back-of-the-envelope calculations to guess at precision,
but I doubt it's anywhere near the millimeter accuracy I'm going to get
with the motion capture system that I now have access to.
OH YEAH. I HAVE ACCESS TO A MOTION CAPTURE RIG. Apparently there's one
in my building, in the Teleimmersion lab. It's almost directly above the
lab I sit in. Björn got permission for me to use it. It tracks up to 32
points at millimeter accuracy in 3D at 480Hz. That is quite impressive,
for those of you not familiar with motion capture. I'm excited.
BONUS: From the PhaseSpace (the vendor of the motion capture system I'll
be using) website: "PhaseSpace also includes a full C++ and Python API
to allow you to write your own custom software. All of our software runs
on both LINUX and WINDOWS." Also cool: their appliance that does the
processing also runs Linux. I can't wait.
Today I saw a random person who I didn't recognize wearing an EC shirt.
Small world.
I also went to a talk on full-duplex radio, which was absolutely
fantastic. Incredibly cool stuff - basically, in analog circuitry before
they hit the ADC, they feed in an inverted copy of the TX output wave.
There's some fancy adjustments necessary to get it to line up and cancel
just right, but properly calibrated, the team has gotten 55dB S/N ratio.
Very impressive work.
Apparently, I burned my left index finger a while back, because the
whole tip is peeling.
I am not (yet) very adept at statistics. It's a subject I spent one
semester on my first year of undergrad, and it hasn't exactly come up
again until now. Hopefully I can produce accurate plots and correctly
determine statistical significance.
I also seem to have issues with noticing when my blood sugar is too
low. I was really grumpy and depressing this evening, and I felt worlds
better after I made myself a steak and some veggies.
By necessity, I've learned the basics of using matplotlib, a Python
library for industrial-strength plotting. I have to say, it's pretty
neat. I would not mind getting to be more proficient with it, since
I never really learned how to use Mathematica, Matlab, Maple, and
R.
I have a team for College Puzzle Challenge.
I'm excited - I had a ton of fun participating in (and winning, at the
TAMU site) the competition the past two years, and I feel like after
joining Death From Above for the MIT Mystery Hunt this last winter,
I'm even better prepared.
It's a goal of mine to write a puzzle hunt of my own at some point. It would
be an intense intellectual venture to write that many puzzles with varying
mechanics, and have the whole thing fit together under a unified theme (which
I'm having terrible difficulty coming up with, by the way). This is the sort
of thing that inevitably gets put off until a long break period occurs, since
writing so many puzzles is not an overnight task for a single man. As
described by puzzle hunt writers over many years, one writes the hunt
backwards, starting with the meta-meta puzzle, then writing the meta puzzles
(each of which belongs to a particular round with a different subtheme), and
then writing the individual puzzles themselves.
I wonder if there's a way to tie puzzle hunts into my research. THAT would be
an awesome motivator.
I made this quiche for dinner tonight.
Well, minus the ingredients that I didn't have on hand, which happened to be
the onions, thyme, and nutmeg. Also the sour cream. Nonetheless, it was a
great success and quite filling, to boot.
Today was notably colder than most days this fall have been. I enjoyed
wearing a long-sleeved shirt and my green corduroy pants (that are way too
short for me to wear anywhere except home) and having my feet get cold.
It pleasantly reminded me of my time in Massachusetts, so I called my aunt who
lives there and touched base. Then I called my mom and dad and chatted
for a bit. The best part of today was wearing my black trenchcoat. I hope
it's cold enough tomorrow for me to wear it again. I love winter.
I went to a ramen place for dinner. Actually, I meant to go to a ramen
place for dinner, but got distracted by the street fair that was going on
and had three blocks of the street blocked off and tons of tents set up.
There were booths with all sorts of foods, scents, textiles, clothing,
and jewelry. I particularly like the booth with jewelry that looked
like tiny foods - earrings with slices of cake, bell peppers, cupcakes,
and so forth. I walked up and down the blocks, trying to see as much as I
could before the fair ended. I stopped and listened to the Berkeley High
School Jazz band, which made me think of Steven Schrag and his awesome
jazz piano skills. And then it was 6pm and the fair started closing
up, so I made my way to my original destination, the ramen restaurant.
The food was pretty tasty, and the water was flavored with sesame.
I ran some numbers, and since moving to Berkeley, I've spent almost
exactly an average of six dollars a day on foodstuffs. This includes
eating out on occasion. I'm not sure if this number is high, low, or
average. It will probably go up as the number of industry-sponsored
free dinners drops off.
In a curious instance of software misbehavior, my desktop now thinks the "Media
Stop" button on my Saitek Eclipse II is, in fact, another "Volume Down" key.
The two keys are different keycodes (174 and 122, respectively), but apparently
are both getting mapped to keysym 0x1008ff11.
I was going to put off investigating this until I realized that I still have an
old (and broken!) ~/.Xmodmap. Mystery solved.
I got spam in the mail today from the "church" of scientology. Weird.
Also arriving in the mail today was something very much not spam: my
ACLU membership card. Yay!
I know I'm nearly a month behind on the Not So Humble Pie blog, but oh my
goodness, that is a lot of
cupcakes.
A periodic tableful. And ones with Feynman diagrams. And a benzene resonance
cake. So many adorable delicious-looking sweets. This makes me want to bake
cookies. I need to go to the grocery store.
A brief discussion with Sarah today led to me thinking about professional
tools. In particular, I got to thinking about whether or not professional
tools for a specialized task should be intuitive. Background: Sarah is
planning to get a DSLR and get more professional at photography. I suggested
that she play around with digiKam, KDE's (notably
powerful) open-source tool for professional photographers. She replied "I
tried digikam previously...it's not intuitive." My first thought was to
protest, since I love the tool. After a moment more thought, I realized that
her statement was valid - digiKam is NOT as intuitive as other tools for super
simple editing. Then I thought: "And it shouldn't be."
Back to the interesting and more generalizable question: should
professional tools be intuitive? A tool's level of intuitiveness
is a reflection of how well the user's mental model aligns with the
tool's presented model [1, 2]. I suspect that for professional tools, the
user's natural mental model is less efficient in the long run than
adopting the superior model used by the tool. This means that at some
point, the user is going to have to suck it up and deal with learning a
nonintuitive system for a greater long-term benefit. Example: compare the
efficiency of a master programmer using Vim against someone using Notepad.
The model of the former is anything but intuitive to a first-time user,
but you'd be hard-pressed to find a master programmer who didn't accept
that Vim is a far more effective tool for writing software than notepad.
The same applies to professional photography - there's a reason the pros
choose Lightroom over MS Paint - despite being a pain now, it's less of
an accumulated pain in the long run.
The second interesting question is thus: how do you know when to force
a superior model on the user? When is "good enough" good enough? Or,
put in another way, how should a user know when it's a good idea to
take a temporary performance hit for a long-term benefit as a result of
switching tools? People tend to be bad at making short-term sacrifices
for long-term goals (see Dan Ariely's introduction to The Upside of Irrationality), so I suspect that this
irrationality keeps people from using effective tools.
I should note that tool "professionality" isn't an excuse for poor
design - even the non-intuitive tool model should be well-thought-out
and optimized for the user's long-term benefit. It just need not match
the novice user's initial mental model. I wonder what other papers I
can find on this topic.
- Direct Manipulation Interfaces, Edwin L. Hutchins, James D. Hollan, and Donald A. Norman, Human-Computer Interaction, 1(4), 1985, pp. 311 - 338.
- User Technology: From Pointing to Pondering, Stuart K. Card and Thomas P. Moran, ACM Conference on the history of personal workstations, 1986, pp. 183 - 98
Since I am a technology enthusiast, I tend to be an early adopter and thus,
I hit on bugs that other people may or may not see. Since I already write
about the random bugs I hit, I'm going to give such postings a name: the
Computers Are Magic series.
Computers Are Magic, part 1: audio whine. On Ubuntu 10.10, it seems that
when I play a single stream of audio, there is this high-pitched whine
that I hear over whatever it is I'm supposed to hear. The addition
of a second playing audio stream makes the whine go away, even if the
second stream is completely silent. I believe this to be a Pulseaudio
bug - no such whine is present when I play straight to the ALSA device.
The upshot of this is that I can add or remove whine to my audio playback
by pausing or unpausing a muted audio stream. This should have you
thinking "Wait, WHAT?"
Sidenote: I finally figured out what the title of
Lennart Poettering's blog
means. TBFKAYIBYNYAANB = The Blog Formerly Known As "Yes,
I Broke Your Network, Your Audio, And Your Boot." Why?
Lennart wrote
Avahi,
PulseAudio, and
systemd.
You know you're on Berkeley Time when you arrive in the classroom one
minute after your class's official starting time and find one other
student and zero professors. Good times.
It would appear the bug that I hit
yesterday
has already been reported. Given more time, I may help the reporter/assignee
track down exactly what went wrong.
Oh goodie, the ACLU has finally taken a (rather strong) stance in support of
Net
Neutrality.
I was wondering when they'd get involved - I see net neutrality as one of the
issues that will define the future of the internet.
Kirby's Epic Yarn
looks...epic.
I haven't thought about video games in a while, but this one looks
awesome. Aside: that's one of the more awesome domain names I've
encountered in a while.
I went to the Oracle infosession today, hosted by Larry Lynn, Oracle's
VP of Recruiting. I left with an unusually large amount of loot and
two particular salient thoughts:
- Wow, Oracle is ridiculously loaded.
- Wow, Oracle is ridiculously elitist. (Jury is still out on whether that's a bad thing or not.)
There was food, but it had so much pepper flake that my mouth stopped
tasting and just started hurting. My lips were on fire, and NOTHING
HELPED. I sought milk, but found none. After a while, the pain subsided
and I returned to my normal state of rational thought. Some might debate
that last adjective.
Today I learned that T-Mobile has an
IPv6 beta.
I'm considering signing up, but I don't really have anything else with
an IPv6 address. I can't get on the Comcast IPv6 trial any more, and
I don't think my dedi will be handing out v6 addresses any time soon.
All that said, I definitely DO get globally routable addresses while on
campus at Berkeley, so perhaps I can do testing there.
Augh. I'm way behind on blogging. Things that will get written up later:
- Friday's conference at IBM Almaden
- Saturday's house party and Wii hacking
- Berkeley's EECS mailserver debugging
Nokia released firmware PR 1.3 for the N900. No big UI changes, as far as
I see, but syncing with Google Calendar works properly now. I'm pleased.
I do believe I am getting sick. Pity.
I threw up this morning, so I stayed home today. Which is a shame, since
BiD hosted social hour today for the CS Graduate Student Association.
I have slept 16 of the past 24 hours. I'm going to go see if I can get
a mononucleosis test done tomorrow.
Update: no longer nauseated. Still super tired. Slept in until it was too
late to reasonably wait in triage for a mono test.
Today I went to the
Tang Medical Center. The staff at the Urgent Care office were super nice and
friendly, and the atmosphere was jovial. Their chipper attitudes put me
in a good mood. While I didn't show any notable symptoms of mononucleosis
(except, of course, the constant sleepyness), Dr. Hope noted that they've
had a spate of mostly asymptomatic mono recently. Another possible cause
that popped into my head as I was describing my situation to the nurse
was that I might have hypothyroidism - my mom does, after all, but I've
typically had a high metabolism. Dr. Hope found nothing indicative of
worrisome problems, so we decided that if I don't feel better by Thursday,
I should come in and have blood drawn for a mono test and a thyroid test.
After visiting the Tang Center, I walked to my favorite sushi restaurant,
since I was already on the south side of campus. I had a delicious
lunch, and by the end, it was raining lightly outside. I walked home
in my trenchcoat, which kept me, my papers, and my book dry.
I beat Kirby's Epic Yarn, with the exception of all the apartment-dweller
minigames. Those things feel more like a chore than a game.
I have finally reached 0 unread items on my RSS feeds. This is more of an
accomplishment than you would probably guess, considering that I follow
42 blogs, several of which are agregators of a collection of sources.
I believe this is the first time in several months that I have reached
the equivalent of "inbox zero" for my feeds. It'd be interesting
to see how much time I spend reading each one of my feeds to analyze
what I find the most interesting or what I derive the most value from.
It'd be fairly accurate, since if an article is utterly boring, I'll
skip to the next one.
I'm interested to know what other people think
about the use of focus-enhancing drugs, like
Modafinil
(aka Provigil) or
Methylphenidate
(aka Ritalin, Concerta). I came across
this
article, which prompted several thoughts.
Friends and family: don't freak out, I'm not going to go illegally obtain
and consume these medications.
- People who have taken these drugs: how do they make you feel?
Did they work as prescribed? What side effects do you experience?
- People who haven't taken these drugs: go read about them, if you
haven't yet. Would you want to take them to enhance your ability to
focus and do productive work? Why or why not?
- Everyone: I note that diagnoses of ADD/ADHD are on the rise.
Do those diagnosed really have a problem that requires medication, or
might these drugs be overprescribed? How do we draw the line between
who needs medication and who just needs to get a grip on themselves
and exercise self-discipline? Should people be allowed to elect to take
the medication rather than develop self-discipline?
- Playing devil's advocate: In some sense, we could say that
parents/psychiatrists mandate the use of these drugs in what we might call
"underperforming" children. Why should or shouldn't we apply this standard
equally across society? If your IQ is lower than X, or you can't do task Y
as well as we'd like you to, why don't we medicate that?
Really neat compounds, but a stickerbrush of ethical issues.
Reader, if any of this interests you, I'd love to hear your views on
this matter.
Random sidenote: I really shouldn't look up diseases on Wikipedia before
I go to bed, because the images of afflicted people will inevitably be
stuck in my mind as I try to fall asleep, and that generally doesn't
help me relax.
I talked to the EECS department today about why I have a four-digit bill
for tuition that they said they would pay for. Apparently, there was a
data entry error, and whereas in-state students pay fees but no tuition,
out-of-state students pay both. Thus, the department somehow managed
to miss that I was out-of-state in one of the various spreadsheets and
has not yet paid for my tuition bill.
This will be resolved by the end of the week, and I will have my
registration block removed.
I am actually getting things done with respect to my research projects. This
is a welcome change.
My throat is starting to get sore. This is not a welcome change. This lends
evidence to the mono theory.
I've swapped my desktop colorscheme to dark colors, in the hopes that it'll
make things easier to read when it gets dark outside.
Now, time to see what the rest of the State of California thinks about our
opportunity for direct democracy, as the precincts report in.
I am trying VERY HARD not to write a very passive-aggressive post right now. I
think it's working.
I've had a major headache since I woke up this morning, so that colored
my day slightly darker than usual. I was somewhat detached from the world
all day - had a hard time tracking discussions and thinking critically.
I had an interesting idea in HCI today - a tool that helps automate
dialogue replacement for movie producers by logically binding speech
tracks to audio channels (or combinations thereof) based on video and
voice recognition. About ADR: most of the audio from the original shots
can't actually be used due to noise on the set, wind, and so forth.
As a result, the actors have to come back in, sometimes six months
after they originally acted that scene, and rerecord the dialogue in
a studio at exactly the same rate of speech and with the same emotion.
This is a pain for all parties involved, so tools that can help speed
along the process would be quite useful for the movie industry.
Since Picasa and other photo software can auto-tag faces in pictures not
only as faces, but also with (correct!) names learned from past taggings,
I don't see this idea being too difficult on the computer vision side if
one throws some object tracking in as well. I'm not sure how effective
computers are at distinguishing and recognizing different people by
their voices - this comes across as a much less-easily-solved problem
(probably because audio interfaces are the unloved child in HCI). Heck,
if the algorithms are crazy good, perhaps it's possible to extract the
voices from the background, reducing the amount of ADR needed for a movie.
I should see if these ideas already exist in products or patents.
I'm kinda surprised that I came up with this in the midst of being
unable to hear/process what my brainstorming small group was saying.
It feels strange that one of the few marketable ideas I've had recently
came to me when I was mentally falling apart. Brains are weird.
I went to the Amazon tech talk, which was all about computing of the
future. The takeaway: computing used to be hard to use. Now it's gotten
fairly usable. In the future, it needs to be fun, because everyone likes
having fun. It was an interesting talk. I missed the pizza at the end,
but that prompted me to go home to make dinner, which turned into the
beginning of today's Epic Adventure™!
Well, perhaps I'm being a tad melodramatic. I took my normal route home,
and on the way I passed a rather long green couch on the sidewalk that
appeared to be in decent shape. It had a sign that read "FREE COUCH -
GOOD CONDITION." I walked by it, but when I reached the end of the block,
I couldn't continue. I SMSed my housemate, Andrew, noting the couch's
status and location, and that we might want to pick it up. We agreed to
claim it, and I sat down on the couch to establish and fiercely defend
my new territory until Andrew arrived. In the meantime, I broke out
my laptop and tethered with my Nokia N900 (I love that phone) to read a
few emails and grab a paper. As the sun went down, I got more nervous
about having my laptop out with me on the street, so I packed things up.
Andrew arrived shortly thereafter, and we carried the couch the few blocks
home, taking breaks along the way. The couch wasn't terribly heavy, but
hauling a couch around town is no mean feat. We successfully got the
couch back to the apartment complex, but it was too long to fit in the
elevator, so we let the hydraulics take the cushions up and we toughed
it out to get the couch up the three flights of stairs. Turns out the
stairwell was quite crowded with that couch. We finally got it up to our
floor and through the stairwell door, only to discover that we couldn't
get it into our apartment from the hallway - the hallway was too short,
and the couch so invitingly long. At this point, Andrew and I are both
exhausted and our arms and hands are shaking something fierce, so every
new angle attempt is punctuated by a minute or two of rest. We tried
to partially back the couch into the room across the hallway, which
has a better angle from the stairwell, but that too proved unsucessful.
On the upside, we met our neighbor Peter! A slight feeling of panic and
despair began to set in, as we realized that we would have to take the
couch back downstairs and out, since we couldn't get it into our space.
Knowing my arms would give out catastrophically at this point if I tried
to carry the couch downstairs, I opted to take a two-minute break and
get a glass of water and think about the situation again. And when I
finished that glass of water, I came up with the winning solution.
We tilted the couch on end in the hallway by lifting one end straight
up and swinging the other underneath, moving by the wide dimension of
the base, and carefully avoiding the ceiling lamp that obstructed the
path that normally tilting the couch on end would have taken. With the
couch now standing in the hallway right in front of our doorway, we were
able to lift the couch enough to move the end-turned-base in through
our doorway, rotating the couch back down. Victory.
So! Now Andrew and I have a free couch to join our free coffeetable,
and can entertain guests. This was a good end to a long day.
I have my airfare for visiting Texas and Massachusetts over the winter
break. I am SUPER excited for MIT Mystery Hunt 2011!
I got my blood drawn today for mono and thyroid stimulating hormone tests.
I warned the nurse that I've had vasovagal episodes in the past when I've
had flu shots, so she asked me to tell her about my life. It's hard to
give someone your life story when they're poking about the inside of
your left forearm, but it threw me for enough of a loop that I didn't
have any adverse response this time. Perhaps the fact that my blood was
drawn within about two minutes of my entering the lab was also helpful -
no waiting time to let the anxiety build. Yay!
Update on financial aid: everything has come through properly, and I
don't owe a cent. Glad that's neatly resolved now.
Today is the Microsoft College Puzzle Challenge.
I will be competing, and thus will be completely unreachable all day.
I love puzzle hunts so much!
Results: We got 2nd place for the Berkeley site and 43rd overall (just
outside the 90th percentile). Our team solved all but one puzzle (which
happened to be the least-solved puzzle in the hunt). Food was plentiful,
but space was a challenge. We didn't have any rooms reserved, so we
got booted from the room we'd set up shop in...twice. Still, we all
had a ton of fun, solved the meta-puzzle, and won $50 Amazon gift cards.
A nice warm-up for Mystery Hunt.
Daylight Saving Time is about to end. Prepare for your
second 1am. I do wish that the US would get rid of the whole
Daylight Savings Time nonsense, but I suspect that kinda falls
into the same realm of likelihood as getting people to use
ISO8601 timestamps and
[SI units] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units).
Why am I against Daylight Saving Time existing at all?
- The standard claim "it saves energy" doesn't hold up.
A 2008 study in Indiana
(lay summary)
shows DST increased residential electricity consumption by 1%-4%, since
electricity savings from not using lights as much were overwhelmed by
increased expenditures by air conditioning and heating units due to hot
afternoons and cool mornings.
- It's a major pain to deal with. Although more and more devices pull their
time from the network, the rest have a problem: make them unaware of DST,
and the user has to reconfigure the device. Make them aware of DST, and
when the legislation changes again (like it did in 2005), they now behave
incorrectly, possibly causing major disruptions to
businesses.
- It has annoying economic effects that favor some industries (like the golf
industry) and adversely affect others (like companies that use any software
that needs to work 24 hours a day).
- (subjective) People suck at adjusting to clock shifts.
- From my mom: Daylight Saving Time means it's darker earlier in the day when
kids are going to school. This means that because of DST, kids are walking
to school when there's less light, and thus it's less safe for the kiddos
to be walking during the spring and fall when DST is applied.
The more you know.
Bruce Schneier on TSA
absurdity:
"A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy our contry's way of life; it's only
our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage." I have the
utmost respect for Schneier, one of the most eminent security experts in the
world. I think he's completely right.
Schneier hits on a very interesting problem: that when something
negative happens, everyone wants something do be done about it. They
want to see responsive action being taken. I'd like to make a case for
the argument that that's not always the right response to the problem.
(I'm not going to try to defend it for the specific case of terrorism;
Schneier does a fine job of that.)
Why not? The existence of a problem means that something should have
been handled differently, right? Perhaps, for a given case, something
could have been done differently to avoid the mistake. The question
is: at what cost? The concept of diminishing returns (as well as the
impossibility of perfection) applies to a great many fields. The most
correct or efficient action could be to take no action at all.
While a great many failures would benefit from corrective action,
I think people too often get so caught up in the iterative refinement
process that they stop thinking about the efficacy of continued effort.
In the end, some things are going to break. Accidents will happen. Deal.
An analogy to computer science is the concept of system reliability
through component failure. Redundant components can reduce the risk of
losing system operability, but everything is expressed in terms of Mean
Time To Failure and Mean Time To Data Loss. We know that eventually,
redundancy efforts be damned, stuff is going to break. We can extend that
time to an acceptable level. And then we operate with that accepted risk.
Another parallel is the concept of servicability - rather than trying to
completely prevent failure (which is extraordinarily costly), we design
systems that can cope with failure, and have failed components replaced
even while the system remains online. It's not perfect, but it's more
efficient than trying to solve the problem in the wrong manner.
Another important point is that due to our human irrationality, we are
extraordinarily poor at gauging when we should be taking such action.
(Can you tell that I can't get enough of Dan Ariely's work?) When people
suffer the consequences of a failure, they lose trust in a system that
they assumed would protect them from such failures. Perhaps this
is an issue of how we present these systems to the public - it's a
great marketing ploy to show off some technology as "risk-free," or
"guaranteeing safety." It's wildly comforting to our ears, and readily
opens our wallets, but these terms come back to haunt us when the claims
in question are shown to be false. People lose the faith they had in a
system they were convinced was perfect - and then they want to see that
system modified so that it is perfect, so they can have that faith back.
The problem is the premise: the expectation that a system or service
or product will be without fault is flawed, but our society has come to
accept it as fact. False advertising has long effects.
In summary: yes, many failures deserve action to prevent future failures
of the same type, but we seek such action more often than is wise.
I'm depressed again. I slept throught my HCI class today. Not because
I was sleepy - because I didn't care anymore. I know this is not healthy,
so I'm going to see a counselor tomorrow morning.
I have neither mono nor hypothyroidism. These are both good things.
I went to see a counselor today. It wasn't the best thing in the world,
but it helped a little.
Far more effective were the collection of caring and supportive emails,
SMSes, IMs, and real-world talks with people who checked in on me
and asked how I was feeling. Lora and I went and played piano for a
couple hours, and that was a fantastic way to destress. I've missed
playing piano. I should probably start making time for it in my week -
I really enjoy it, and it's helping me get out of my mental rut.
To everyone who showed me today that I am loved: thanks. You made
a difference.
Having Facebook tell me that I aced their interviews probably didn't
hurt my self-esteem, either.
Today, I'm going to write briefly about someone who impresses and
inspires me: Hector Martin. Why do I find Hector (hereafter referred to
by his online handle, marcan)
so cool, even though I've never met him?
He's a very skilled hacker and reverse engineer. Yes, there are surely
a large number of talented hackers out there. That said, he's got an
impressive portfolio:
But the thing that really strikes me is the
fact that marcan uses his powers for good. He's been
consistently
outspoken
against
piracy.
He donated the prize from the Kinect hacking bounty to buy more hardware
for skilled folks to hack so they can continue empowering the world to
use hardware in exciting, interesting ways. Giving people the freedom
to tinker. That is something deserving of respect.
Hector Martin, you are my hero for today.
I made fresh bread today and took it into the lab. Mark had a jar of Nutella
lying around (don't ask me why). This was a fantastic combination.
By the glow of my monitor, I work...
Sarah writes on the role of scientists in influencing policy
makers.
This sparked Opinions and Thoughts™, which I felt were Too Long To
Properly Fit In A Comment, so here they are in a post. At the risk of appearing
to miss the forest for the trees:
I disagree with this use of the term "rationalities" when referring
to how people make decisions. It carries too much of an implication of
intent and consciousness. There's enough experimental record on
the
books
to show that humans are not solely rational creatures, and
I see no argument to convince me that a group of humans trying to make
decisions will be any more or less self-affected than their bretheren.
Perhaps a more suitable word would have been "interests" or "motivations,"
either of which would reflect the humanity of the policymakers. Moving on,
though:
Yes, you can look at a problem in different ways, and depending on the
person, you might feel that a particular aspect of a situation is more
important than another. I think these are similar to the aforementioned
"lenses" with a key difference: they are all bent into a different form by
the people who view them. There is, in general, no objective, closed-form
answer to "how would $ROLE act in this situation?" Even your scientific
lens and my scientific lens may show a different picture. When it comes
down to it, it's how individuals see things that actually matters.
Aggregating people isn't perfect, but it does scale better than trying
to understand each person.
"Politicians can be utilitarian and focus on the outcome or they can be
ontological and focus on the process."
Oh, sure, politicians can be utilitarian, provided the utility function
represents their personal interests. Snarky comments aside, politicians
have to face tons of different interest groups on a regular basis.
They're doing their best to satisfy whoever will get them good press
and reelection - it's "rational" for them to do so. How can they get
reelected? Right now, it's done through extensive (and expensive)
advertising, which gets funded primarily by donations from industry
groups that are looking to buy policies favorable to them. Systematically,
we get precisely the legislation industries want to buy.
Except that again, there's that unpredictable human element, and the fact
that industries are run by people. So we wind up getting the legislation
that industry leaders want, because it serves their self-interest.
"As scientists, we need to create a demand for evidence and play off of
the policy-makers' need for legitimacy to advance our own research." Wow,
Sarah, I didn't know you could actually say something that manipulative
and evil. Spot on, though - as scientists who want to influence politics,
we have to play their game. Industry gets this, and flexes as
much power as they can. Structurally, academia doesn't reward sociopaths
the way industry does. Time to step up our manipulation...
"(As evidence providers, we cannot be our own advocates but must remain
unbiased.)"
...well, that ruins that idea. The fact that we lose credibilty if we
try to be remotely prescriptive puts us at a distinct disadvantage when
competing with industry for influence. We have to go at the problem
indirectly, but industry doesn't. So industry wins, unless we beat
them at their own game, by convincing policymakers of the following:
- That we can get enough of the public to understand the topic, or at least well enough to recognize
- that they are acting in opposition of what their now-educated electorate would want them to do, and
- that said electorate care enough about this topic to influence their voting decisions as a result.
We can only really directly affect point 1. Point 2's truth value
is the indirect change that we'd like to effect (+1 word reuse).
It's interesting to note that we have little to no influence over point
3, and that in fact, point 3 can't hold if the two-party system doesn't
disagree on the issue. The system is not designed to allow us influence.
So, after a bit of deciphering, I think we've divined the key point -
that we scientists need to present the knowledge we create in ways
suitable for consumption by our particular audience. An audience of
policy makers is much different from that of scientific researchers.
I think this is in no way different from what one should learn from any
technical writing class. As has always been the case with rhetoric,
the burden lies on the speaker (or writer) to create a compelling and
convincing fact-based argument.
tl;dr Know your audience, and manipulate them by playing off their motives,
'cause industry sure will.
Arg, this all sounds incoherant. That's what I get for trying to write
critiques at 4am.
(Note: due to backlog, this was written a few days later and then post-dated.)
Today was the ICPC programming contest.
Last night we (1 prof and 9 students) drove (in 2 cars, including mine)
to Stockton. We were a few minutes ahead of the other car, and we hadn't
had dinner, so at 9pm, we find a Super Buffet. This was a major win, and
I and one of the other guys ate so much sushi and fried seafood and other
delicious Americanized Chinese food that we could barely move. But then,
we went on an Adventure™!
We arrived at the hotel shortly thereafter. It was kinda hard to find,
on account of the fact that the adjacent city block had no electricity
whatsoever, and thus, no lights illuminating any of the signs. You know
what else they didn't have? An estimated time of repair from PG&E.
Further, since the hotel's power was out, they couldn't pull up our
reservations, and give us card keys, so we couldn't check in. And to top
it all off, we couldn't break out our laptops for long without power. FAIL.
We drove to University of the Pacific (which did have power) and went on a brief
nighttime tour of the campus, led by our faculty sponsor for the trip. This was
mostly uneventful, but somewhat cold.
After we got back to the hotel, they had power restored to the main building,
but none of the rooms. Good enough to check in and go up to the rooms by phone flashlight.
Yes, with the flash LEDs constantly on. Good times.
One rather poor night's sleep later, we gathered for breakfast, headed
out to the University as rehearsed the previous night, and waited around
for a couple hours. One fun surprise: Regina Zaliznyak (my supervisor
from IBM) was there recruiting for IBM (since IBM is the primary sponsor
of the programming contest). I jokingly told her she had to give her
presentation in four minutes. She shortened it from IBM LONG to 10,
likely doubling its positive impact. I was pleased.
Then competition. My team solved 5 of 11 problems, placing 13th out
of 75 teams. I was particularly proud of my solution to one problem,
which consisted of a wildly inefficient precomputation step in which
I prepared every single possible response to the problem statement (a
15 minute task). I wrote this out to a second C source file, and sent
that one off for judging. Very fast, correct results.
After the drive back, Andrew and I went to Greg's birthday party, which
was fun, and good decompression. I brought yogurt-covered pretzels,
which were well-received. Andrew and I are now referred to as the "guys that
always bring awesome stuff." Definitely not a bad thing.
Today was the first time I've actually been listening to music on my
phone and had it automagically suspend the media player while a call
came in, then resume it when the call ended. Even though I knew about
the feature, it caught me off-guard and pleasantly surprised me.
Github went down today, hard. It
was a rather dumb error - a testing script which drops the entire database was
run against the production servers. That's an awful big "oops." I'm more
concerned with their restoration procedure - they allowed read-write access to
the data from the site while they were still recovering data. This is very
bad, since you can break history, orphan data, and basically make a lot more
work for everybody in the meantime. And in fact, that happened - they had to
take the site back down and restore again.
I noticed this because the OpenKinect project was (until today) hosted
on github. Hopefully we'll have our own hosting and wiki up at
openkinect.org soon.
I spent the night in the lab again last night. Oops.
I've been doing some analysis of the data I get out of the Kinect depth
camera for research. My preliminary findings indicate that over 97%
of the pixels have a standard deviation of less than 1% of the device's
dynamic range. This is really good data, folks. It also appears to do
the spherical -> rectilinear coordinate transformation for you, so you
can just use the data as (x, y, z) tuples directly.
Well, almost. The depth camera and the RGB camera don't actually have the
same field of view, so you'll have to transform one camera's coordinate
space into that of the other.
Also, I've done some exploration
of what happens when we send only some of the init messages to the Kinect. Later,
I'll probably mess around more along this line.
I've been on campus for 31 hours. Now, I need to get home before I wind
up sleeping in the lab two nights in a row.
I should totally find more things to reverse engineer. I'm having more
fun reversing the Kinect for hours upon hours than...well, most things
I've done for hours on end lately.
Things I will forgo when presented with a really interesting puzzle:
- Food
- Water
- Sleep
- Blogging in detail
Today, I went to Target. I found all the things I was looking for
(except a good cheap floor lamp), and a bunch more. I found:
- A drying rack for dishes (yes, I finally got one)
- A trash can with a lid for the kitchen
- More cleaning supplies
- Eggs for $1/dozen (yeah!)
- Bread flour
- A floor mat so my feet don't get quite so cold when I'm sitting in front of my computer
- Shampoo and soap
- A Kinect (I was pleasantly surprised that they had any in stock!)
Now I am baking bread and reading papers for HCI, and then I shall do
as much of a register dump of my new Kinect as I can, since I have an
opportunity to see what one looks like fresh from the factory.
Discovery of the day: Macs are utterly unusable without a mouse.
There's no notion of keyboard-selected focus, anywhere. After trying
out random keystrokes for the better portion of 5 minutes, I think that
every web browser on OSX is completely missing this functionality. This is
particularly bad for dialogs, since OSX also decided to skip the whole
underline-the-shortcut-key in dialog boxes. Your only discoverable
options are to accept the default, or hit escape. That's not really
empowering the user. :(
This came out of an attempt to update an unpatched Mac Mini that (at
the time of my arrival on the scene) had no mouse. Logging in was easy
enough, as was launching applications (yay, spotlight!), but then I
needed to authenticate with the wireless so the Mac Mini could actually
download the updates in question. And I couldn't find a way to click
the darned "Log In" button without a mouse. Eventually I stole the
one from the computer next to me, but I was frustrated on principle.
After all the talk of how "easy-to-use" Macs are, I throw one quirky
setup at it and it fails miserably.
Then as soon as Software Update had run, I saw why the system wasn't
patched: it had 2GB of disk free, and needed some 7GB free to apply
the patch. A little du(1)-fu discovered that the entire disk was full
of a former grad student's video editing clips. Since I didn't know
if it was safe to delete the lot, I opted instead to gzip all the giant
files up (bzip2 would take waaaay too long) and then see if I could do
the patches one at a time. This seems to be working.
(Note: I need to get better about finishing posts that I start in a timely manner.)
Observation: I need to stop freezing up and thinking about ideas so much, because
every time I do, I wind up not getting around to implementing them.
I also need to prioritize activities better. And that means facing the hardest
task I have each day first. Even if it's only for an hour. Just so long as I'm
making some forward motion. Once I start moving, the inertia isn't so brutal.
The more I learn about developing software on other platforms, the more
I realize that Linux really is the best platform to go with, if you
ever want to use anyone else's code, or if you want anyone else to use
your source. While there may be a plethora of versions and libraries
to deal with, the open-source community has learned to face these
problems and try to solve them. I think back to my Political Science
class, in which we noted that perhaps the reason that homogeneous groups
have higher social capital is because they haven't had to deal with the
problems that come with wide integration of cultures, social groups,
and approaches to problems. I wondered if this might also apply to the
production of better code-sharing ecologies in the open-source world. I'm
as of yet uncertain how to measure such a thing, but I certainly have a
strong gut feeling about it.
As I shared my revelation with my labmate Anuj, he remarked "productive
day." At first, I was confused - this wasn't productive, this was just
my abstract musing. He explained "if you came up with an answer to an
interesting question, why wouldn't it be a productive day?" We then
discussed how this actually rather relates to the topic of HCI, and it
was fascinating.
I went to see a counselor this morning. Psychologists make a business
out of catching all the small hints that you drop, and saying plainly
the things that you don't want to admit to yourself. I was pleasantly
surprised.
Afterwards, on the way to my advisor meeting, I saw a truck from a local
microbrewery with Facebook and Twitter logos emblazoned on the back.
I wondered: why do people follow businesses on Twitter? Businesses have
long had email; why don't people use that? (Other than, of course,
the fact that people rarely use the best technological tool for a task.)
What's the benefit to the follower in using tweets over email?
First, Twitter may allow for conversations, but tweets are generally
a broadcast communication, whereas email is typically intended as a
conversation in which one expects an eventual reply. The fact that a
tweet need not receive any attention makes it less of a mental burden
on the subscriber than an equivalent email: we can ignore tweets if we
want, but if we stop trying to process our email inboxes, eventually
someone's going to notice. Since company-to-people advertising follows
this broadcast pattern more closely, perhaps we like it better because
it's a better fit for the content.
Second, following a company on Twitter may be a more privacy-preserving
act than offering your email address to a company. Since email basically
supports anonymous senders, once someone has your address, they (and their
affiliates) can spam you as much as they want, and there's little you can
do in retribution. Yes, there are such things as filters and the like,
but I'll venture a guess that the average person doesn't use them. But on
Twitter, (assuming no security holes (which is admittedly generous))
a company can't autosubscribe you to affiliate sites: the follower
is in control. And if the company in question is making excessive or
annoying tweets, the follower can stop following them. The end user
is more in control of this relationship, so perhaps end users are more
comfortable following the company.
I should also note that it could turn out that, in fact, none of this
matters, and Twitter exists solely as a result of being the biggest
player in the market and hype.
While I am dropping CS262A, I think I'm going to keep going to lectures. I
enjoy them, Dr. Brewer enjoys having me, and I really do love the learning that
I get out of them. Today's 262A lecture discussed the classic Turing Award
presentation by Ken Thompson "Reflections on Trusting
Trust," which I've read before and
absolutely love. The discussion prompted a number of ideas for things that I
may implement, either as class projects, or general proofs of concept.
Thanksgiving day.
I attended a rather large gathering. I brought a baker's dozen little loaves
of fresh bread and a 9x13 pan of pineapple bake. Here's the recipe for the
latter:
Ingredients:
- 16 oz can crushed pineapple in heavy syrup
- 3 tablespoons flour
- 2 eggs, beaten
- 1 cup sugar
- 6 slices worthless white bread (the cheapest crap you can find in the store), cut into cubes, crusts on
- 1 stick butter
Butter 9x13 pan. Mix first four ingredients in bowl, pour into
prepared pan. Saute bread cubes in melted butter until lightly browned.
Spread evenly over pineapple mixture. Bake at 350°F for 40 minutes.
At maximum headcount, I saw 28 people at this gathering, many of whom
were new faces, since they were visiting other friends. There was a
sister visiting from LA, students from MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and UVA,
among others. There was also a huge amount of food. We fried three
turkeys, which is a slightly nerve-wracking endeavor, since if anything
caught fire we'd wind up burning down the entire state of California.
Fun things that happened:
- At least three people at the event could juggle 5 balls, even when fairly intoxicated
- Rubik's cube competition (one guy had two cubes in his car, I kid you not)
- Telephone pictionary
But after all that socialization, I definitely needed my alone time.
Ugh. Today has not gone well, and it's only noon. The past few days
were decent, though; hopefully I'll make time to write about them today.
This made my day:
19:58 <+marcan> oh, btw, segher is looking at the primesense blob
19:59 <+marcan> he has a thing for reverse engineering unknown ISAs by staring at them (seriously) :P
We will figure out the Kinect audio. :)
Dear Willow Garage folks: we should talk about working
smoothly with upstream. While we absolutely appreciate
your efforts in figuring out things like direct access to the
IR camera, mixing the code that provides that functionality into a
1600-line patch that also reformats tons of whitespace
is generally frowned
upon. Not only do developers not like huge invasive commits that don't
actually change much, but when you break the code style of the parent
project, they don't care much for that either. It's funny that the
ROS Style Guide
actually addresses this, in section 1:
"Above all else, be consistent. Follow this guide whenever
possible, but if you are editing a package written by someone else,
follow the existing stylistic conventions in that package (unless you
are retrofitting the whole package to follow this guide, for which you
deserve an award)."
Also, (probably for the reasons mentioned above), I haven't seen
a pull request for the IR cam functionality. I understand that
you're quite busy around Thanksgiving, so I won't complain yet.
But...I can't help but get the feeling that you don't care to work with
upstream any more, which makes me sad. We could make some great stuff
together. If you have a chance, could you maybe read the project's
Code Integration HOWTO? Thanks.
Random thought of the day: Cirque du Soleil should back an intensely
technical section of one of their acts with the track
Vicious Delicious
by Infected Mushroom.
Today, I met qDot, the code integrator
for the OpenKinect project, for dinner.
We talked about lots of highly nerdy things, and agreed that the OpenKinect
community is moving at an impressive pace. Good times, and I'm sure we'll
see each other again. :)
Link dump (yeah, most are outdated, but nonetheless interesting):
Aww, man, I just found out 27C3
is over winter break, but at this point, airfare to Germany would be excessively expensive.
Note to self: make arrangements far, far in advance to attend 28C3. Anyone want to join me?
"I think it's made out of Atoms." - Dr. Brewer,
on a (theoretically) proportional-power system being built by
LoCal. <everyone laughs at
the obvious joke>
Also, OMG:
Today, I:
- Attended the final lectures of each of my classes. Björn encouraged
us to attend the talk this afternoon by Barbara
Liskov, the Turing Award
winner. He also encouraged us to attend the presentations next Wednesday,
on the grounds that we're presenting our projects. Eric Brewer gave us an
hour-long talk on planning our careers, and what we should be doing as
graduate students, and how to succeed in academia.
- Was reminded how good it feels to hear your work described as "good
progress!" That alone made the rough night worth it.
- Attended Barbara Liskov's talk. It's amazing to me that the concept of
abstract data types weren't widely understood 40 years ago. Like the
Internet, it seems so obvious in hindsight.
- Acquired a 9" DisplayLink monitor
for use with my Kinect project. The drivers are kinda a mess on Linux -
there's a driver in staging in mainline kernels since 2.6.32, which gives
you a framebuffer device. This works. I can't get the Xorg driver for it
to compile - missing headers. I'll see if I can get it running atop the
classic fbdev driver. I may have to do some FANCY stuff to get OpenGL
working or blitting elsewhere or something. Blah.
- Helped a long-time friend with his Statement of Purpose, as he applies to
graduate school. On a rather tight deadline. As in, we had about two
hours to go from a couple-sentence paragraph to something that "seems half
way respectable."
- Went home after spending 36 hours on campus.
I've been following the news coverage on
Wikileaks with a good deal of interest over
the past few days, and I think it's an important thing to re-share with the
world. If you somehow haven't heard what's going on: a few days ago, WikiLeaks
released a few hundred US embassy cables from a collection of over 200 thousand
cables to various media outlets. They give a very detailed, transparent view
of the state of government corruption the world over.
An article from Forbes
(and the associated interview) pretty solidly explains the ideas behind WikiLeaks. The most important quote, in my opinion (ahh, I need to implement quote blocks for my blog ahhh):
Julian Assange: "[Wikileaks] just means that it's easier for honest CEOs to run an honest
business, if the dishonest businesses are more effected(sic) negatively by
leaks than honest businesses. That's the whole idea. In the struggle
between open and honest companies and dishonest and closed companies,
we're creating a tremendous reputational tax on the unethical
companies."
The same is true of government, but at a larger scale. I completely believe
that a government should fear its people, rather than its people fearing the
government. The fact is that people are much more vulnerable to temptations
when they're free from oversight than when they're held accountable for their
actions. When you're employed by the public, you should be accountable to the
public, and secrecy in government tempts civil servants to take actions that
wouldn't fly if everyone knew what was going on. Obviously, most government
heads are against this, since it reduces their personal freedoms to what they
should have been when they became civil servants. This opinion
piece
pretty accurately summarize why I support the mission of Wikileaks.
As a result, I am appalled by many of the public statements made against
Assange and Wikileaks. For instance:
- Palin thinks we should treat Assange like a terrorist.
I'll note that despite panicked claims to the
contrary,
the material released by Wikileaks was reviewed by the Pentagon and found
not to have endangered the
US.
While we're at it, I can't find any reports of harm coming to a single person
who was mentioned in the leaked documents. You'd think that the government
would have published this information if they had it to support their case.
Oops.
- Hilary Clinton thinks the Wikileaks release is an "attack on America's foreign policy interests".
Apparently, America's "foreign policy interests"
involve having our diplomats spy on the UN, collecting their email addresses, phone, fax
and pager numbers (okay, we might need to reach them), frequent-flyer numbers
(really?), and credit card details (that's definitely not okay). If that's
what our "foreign policy interests" entail, then I'd attack them too.
If we won't let industry do it, why should we let the government?
If you have differing opinions, I'd love to hear why. Which means I really
ought to implement some form of comments on my blog. Sadly, that won't happen
for at least another week; it's project crunch time at Berkeley.
Oh, here's a link to the Guardian's reposting of the leaked
cables,
if you'd like to read them at length.
Sarah sends in
this article
with contrasting views on the motivations behind secrets and
lies, as they pertain to Wikileaks. "In place of candid assessments and
provocative analysis, many important decisions will now be based on oral
briefings and meetings that are not recorded in minutes. Decision-makers
will be wary of openness even with their closest staff." Perhaps,
but secret undocumented conversations have always been the norm. Such a
change just means that said corruption is harder to orchestrate in today's
quick-moving world of internet communication - passing around the message
of the details of the unsavory deeds to be done is now more difficult
for those that would do so. This comes across to me as a good thing -
it turns an evil government into a slower-moving government, unable to
keep up with the transparent, honest one.
Today I slept a lot, which was much needed. Unfortunately, it also meant that I slept
through the first several hours of ARDevCamp. Oops. I'm on the train over now;
hopefully there will still be interesting people and demos there when I arrive.
My router/NAT device is currently being DoS'd. I am not amused.
UPDATE: as far as we can tell, a distributed hash table got REALLY huge
and managed to push enough traffic at us to overwhelm the crappy router.
Hopefully, the load will fall off as we refuse more and more connections
over time, and the DHT figures out we've left.
UPDATE2: Network conditions are back to normal.
For the caffeine addicts in my life: you should drop the coffee, tea, and
fizzy beverages permanently, and
here's why.
Ugh. I spent over two hours searching for bug that turned out to be
a misdeclaration: I put ints as parameters in the declaration, but
meant floats. The compiler happily and silently cast the floats that
I passed as arguments in the implementation. Since all of my 3D models
were normalized, this means that every single point in the model wound
up getting floored to (0, 0, 0). SO! Don't say int when you mean float.
I have to give a practice presentation tomorrow, and my system is still
not fully operational. I don't have my slides together yet, and I'm
getting rather concerned. Give me a hug if you see me.
Observation: when I'm more stressed, the number of virtual desktops I
use increases as I try to keep everything quickly accessible.
Postdated, because I was instructed by my labmates to "go home and sleep
until you are done."
Today was perhaps the most stressful day of the year for me: the CS260
final presentations. Over the past 48 hours, I'd failed to get my system
running, created my presentation and poster sans meaningful results, and
fought sleep deprivation and lack of focus as I prepared for Presentation
Day. Fourteen teams gave four-and-a-half-minute presentations. Many ran
overtime (mine did not), which resulted in Bjoern's laptop buzzing and
Lora grinning widely as she rang a tinkly bell.
In retrospect, I shouldn't have worried so much about today. Turns out
that I wasn't alone in not having results (or a working system) yet.
Despite this, my presentation was decent (if a bit targeted at the UIST
audience more so than the CHI audience). The audience seemed to like
it, while the judges critiqued it as amounting to "depth cameras:
what do we do with them?" They gave me lots of constructive criticism
on how I should clarify and present my core research question, as well
as how to present my work as a novel and valuable contribrution to the
scientific community.
The following poster session was uneventful. I couldn't show my (as of
yet non-working) demo because there was no power outlet within 20 feet,
and the Kinect requires 12VDC. OH DARN. I did get an email (during
the talks, no less) from another professor who saw my poster and thought
it interesting, so I'll follow up on that.
I'll finish up my project/paper this weekend, and hopefully catch up
on sleep. When I'm done, obviously I'll add a subfolder to the root of
my website, detailing this project and its findings.
I've slept 24 out of the past 48 hours. Goodness, it's good to rest. I
vacuumed and cleaned up my room, which was surprisingly therapeutic.
I finished reading The Upside of Irrationality. I recommend it widely, as
it gave me many new insights into the way people think and interact.
There will be a total lunar eclipse on December 20th/21st. I have a telescope. Yay!
I wish I could see the next total solar eclipse, but
full umbra will only be visible from the middle of the ocean. It won't be
until August, 2017 that a
total solar eclipse is viewable from the US. I'm going to go ahead and block
that day out on my calendar.
I wonder how the Internet will change between now and then. Is it a far cry to
hope that link will still be valid in another 6 and a half years?
I want a pair of Vibram Five Fingers, but they're
kinda expensive. Also, I need to measure my feet precisely.
Recently, OpenKinect banned a user from the mailinglist for repeatedly
hijacking threads with condescending and vitriolic political commentary.
There was a minor outcry against what was seen as censorship, and one
suggestion was "just don't feed the trolls." I felt compelled to share
this blog entry
to the list, explaining why simply ignoring trolls isn't good enough, when
trying to build a healthy, vibrant community.
Now, this may appear to be in conflict with my views on Wikileaks and the
associated censorship, to which I offer the following defense:
- I am disappointed in companies like Amazon, Mastercard, Visa, and the like
which have spurned Wikileaks, likely due to government pressure. However,
I defend their right to choose their customers in a free market. The
government, however, claims to offer freedom of press. I find it ironic
beyond satire that the US will be hosting the UNESCO World Press Freedom
Day, given the
government's recent pressure to suppress the press. (Oh snap,
wordplay.)
- I fully encourage a rational, facts-based discussion - it's one of the
reasons I write about what I think are controversial topics on my blog, and
like to hear other people's thoughts on them. By laying all of our
concerns out on the table, we can see what others feel, and perhaps both
benefit. Debates are rarely a zero-sum game, and the more constructive,
cogent discussion we have, the better.
- The banned user was advised to express his concerns in an appropriate
constructive manner, which he chose not to do. Only after repeated
incidences of this community-hurting behaviour was the user banned.
Thus, I find my views to be consistent.
Coder's rant: my project uses three libraries (Qt, OpenCV, and
libfreenect), and all of them have their own eventloop. This is somewhat
annoying. Rather than give each its own thread and deal with all the
locking issues that are bound to occur, I made my own mainloop and call
the equivalent processEvents() function for each library.
It'd be cool if the libraries let you plug in other eventloops, or at
least call the event-processing functions that power other eventloops.
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if you could with Qt and glib, but
OpenCV has a single function that processes events (cvWaitKey(), which
actually burns CPU time waiting for more events, which is annoying).
It is questionable whether my system is actually going to work,
particularly in time to do a user study to write up by Monday morning.
I think this goes down as the most emotional thing I've written here.
The semester in review (or, "the first step is admitting you have a problem"):
This has not been a good semester for me. I've fought depression.
I've failed to accomplish anything of value in my classes. I haven't
met people outside my lab or classes. I haven't gotten involved in
extracurriculars. I've spent more nights in the lab than I can count
on one hand, and I've got little to show for it.
I have, however, learned a lot about what being a grad student is like.
It's a long series of trial and failure. I've never felt this inadequate
in my life. Right now, I'd say I'm about 80% less excited about being
a grad student now than before the semester began. I recognize that
my ego has never had to deal with failure before. I'm probably better
for having to face it now, but I have to say: I hate the feeling.
This probably annoys the crap out of the people who have felt like this
their whole life. Forgive me, I never understood before.
Here's something that bothers me: in academia, everything you do
is basically toward the goal of getting published. And every paper
starts with an idea. In fact, every paper consists entirely of an idea.
That's the only contribution that's really expected of a paper - an idea,
and a little experimental evidence in its favor. And now, having seen
these experiments run, these tests devised, I can't help but wonder if
everyone is just aiming for the minimum proof needed for publication.
Another problem: you can come up with a ton of neat ideas. And in all
likelihood, they won't change much between when you first conceive them
and when you put your results into a paper, weeks, months, or years later.
Brewer's advice was "know what your graphs should look like before you
implement anything." It hurts me that the investigation is basically
limited to proving things that were correctly intuited many months
earlier. And at such high cost - the systems built to make the proof
needed for publication are rarely used outside of academia. This is
the price of testing hypotheses, and while I fully respect the need for
objective testing of these hypotheses, I can't shake the feeling that
it's so damned inefficient.
I'm wondering if academia is the right place for me. Maybe I'm just
incurably an engineer, and I belong in the workplace, hacking things
together for fun and profit. All I know is this: I feel like I don't
belong here. I know (and care) too much about how real things work.
I derive little joy out of my work, despite learning much from it.
How did this happen? I used to live to learn.
I feel like I've let a bunch of people down, lately.
- To the professors at A&M who spoke in my favor during
applications: I may never know what you said about me, but I hope I
haven't made liars of you.
- To my parents: I'm sorry for being so caught up in my miserable work
that I didn't take the time to be a loving son. You would go to the ends
of the earth for me, and I can't even call you on a weekly basis.
- To my advisor: I'm sorry that I haven't been the star you deserve.
I'm going to keep trying, and if I'm not that star yet, maybe I can
still become one. In all fairness, I also find being your only graduate
advisee to be a lot of pressure. You're one of the nicest people I've
ever met, and I can't help but fear that I disappoint you every time we
meet, and you're just too kind to say it.
- To my friends: I'm sorry I've given you cause to worry so much about
me. I love you, and I wish you didn't have to see me going through this, but
I'm thankful to have you and the support you offer me.
You all believed in me, and I spent the past five months failing you. No
more. I'm getting help. I'm making changes. If I can't make this work,
I'll make something work.
Aaaaand it's about now that I prescribe myself sleep and a healthy
dose of perspective.
UPDATE: OR I WOULD IF I HADN'T JUST LOST MY WHOLE TERM PAPER.
What a shitty way to end a semester.
UPDATE2: Once the panic subsided, I got crafty.
I have /home and / on separate partitions. Ran
PhotoRec
on /home, recovering to a folder in /, set to save .zip files (since .odts are
really just a memory dump with angle brackets, zipped up with some
metadata), and let it run for a few hours while I slept. When I got back,
I scripted opening every .odt file found to see if any of them were my
paper. There were probably 40 old versions. Most of them were hopelessly
behind, but one such file held my paper in an only-a-little stale state.
I finished my paper and submitted; now I'm sleeping for real.
I got a number of email replies to my most recent blog entry. This tells
me that I need to implement comments on my blog in fairly short order.
My housemate gave me a lengthy explanation of how I have NIH syndrome
and really ought to suck it up and use a proven blogging engine/service.
I came up with approximately a million excuses, and he rebutted every one
of them. Darn. Now I both have NIH syndrome AND I'm in denial.
Also on my TODO list:
- implement per-entry timestamps for my blog
- code up a patch for high resolution camera modes on the kinect
- code up a patch for low-level camera control on the kinect
- figure out if California is going to deny me residency if I don't return at some point over winter break
- pack for my flight tomorrow. prerequisite: determine if I'm taking a suitcase or a suit bag
- convince (certain members of) my family that I Don't Need More Stuff, Really™ and that I really would rather they donate to
Wikipedia or
the KDE e.V. or
the EFF or
the ACLU
on my behalf rather than give me stuff
Today I opted out of the nudie scanners at SFO. The TSA staff were very
professional, and I received a normal pat-down (not to be confused with the
"enhanced" heavily invasive ones that led to an Indian ambassador vowing never
to return to the USA).
Things I have seen at the airport today so far include a kid playing WoW on the
airport wifi and a guy watching C-SPAN on his iPod Touch. And you thought
I was unusual.
11:59 - flight boarded successfully.
17:08 - flight landed, a half-hour early
Today was a day of rest. I slept in past noon, talked with my mom for a
good while, and did a bunch of random chord improvization on the piano.
I also took my trenchcoat to the Korean tailor, since I managed to rip
a hole in it right where one of the important buttons goes while going
up a set of stairs. That woman pays incredible attention to detail.
I wrote a 16-line python script to play N random songs from my music
library. I'm rather pleased with the results - it's a very low-overhead
replacement for amarok or anything else, since I usually leave the latter
in "all random" mode anyway. I may also look at MPD to see if it suits
my needs. It's sad that amarok is no longer stable enough for me to
rely on it as my media player.
Now I'm going to go set up ownCloud
and see if it's usable or not. I would really love to have my own
open-source dropbox equivalent, seeing as I have this dedicated server
sitting here that does little besides host my website and a screen
for IRC. Particularly after that instance of not having a working copy
of my paper. That was very uncool.
I should also push out a quick-hack implementation of comments, because
if I keep thinking about it too much, I'll never get it done. I'll make
it a one-hour project tomorrow.
I rather like the concept of the one-hour project. About a week ago, I
was listening to some folks in #tamulug (on irc.tamu.edu) talk about how
they had a bunch of projects that they never got around to doing. I thought of
the concept behind my blog, in which I decided I would have a working blog
engine in an hour's time. I then decided to do an experiment, to see if
the one-hour project was something realistic to repeat or not.
I told them "I give you an hour. Go implement [one of the projects
they'd been putting off]." And at the end of the hour, they had each
made decent progress toward the project, if not completed it. It's not
that I really expected everyone to finish a standing project in an hour
(although you can certainly get a lot done in that time if you opt to
satisfice rather than go for perfection). The point was to force the
transition from planning to implementation. Based on initial results,
I'd say the first trial suggests that people can accomplish a decent
amount in an hour, if they start prototyping. I should follow up on that
initial test and see if people have continued working on the projects
they prototyped, or if they stopped after that hour. I know I've kept
up with my blog since; I wonder if the same will hold true in general -
that once you've invested time and effort into creating something, you're
less likely to abandon it than if you left it as an idea. I wonder if
I can turn this into a hypothesis and test to suggest to Dan Ariely.
Summary: perfect is the enemy of good, and real artists ship.
Today's accomplishments:
- Shaved my beard with minimal face damage.
- Actually implemented a patch to support multiple resolutions for the kinect. It breaks in strange ways, however - going to have to get review for it tomorrow.
- Came up with an xmas present idea for my sister.
- Ran up and down the block barefoot in the cold and then stretched.
- Installed the StayFocusd extension for Chrom{e,ium}.
- Set up ownCloud. It works, though the apache user has to own the whole installation directory (not just the datadir). I'm not sure if this is intended or a bug. I'll explore more.
Sarah wrote an interesting short
essay
on why she's going to wean herself off Facebook. I've long thought that people
spend way too much time on unproductive things on the internet (I'm guilty of
reading way too many RSS feeds, myself), and I've also historically expressed
(rather verbosely) my concerns regarding privacy and civil rights (exempli
gratia the whole rest of this blog). It's wonderful to see one of my friends
taking this to heart and acting to change her life accordingly. It makes me
feel validated and trusted.
In a similar thread, I asked my little sister what goals she had for the
future. She shared, and I suggested that she write them down on a large sheet
of paper that she'd see every day, as a reminder for her to focus on the things
that are valuable toward accomplishing her goals.
Which brings me to the fact that I need to set some more specific goals for
myself. TODO.
Today I realized that my ideal home directory system (network mounted homedir,
but with offline access) is in fact, impossible to implement. Provably so,
thanks to the CAP theorem
aka Brewer's theorem.
So: I have to choose to lose one of: Consistency, Availability, or
Partition-tolerance. Let's review the options:
- Give up consistency. You keep a cache of the most recently seen copy of
every file, and work with that. You can synchronize when the link is up,
and you can always access some version of the homedir (albeit not
necessarily the official global copy). As I understand it, this is what
Dropbox does (or rsync + some clever scripts).
- Give up availability. Now, you lose access to your files under some
conditions (notably, network outages). This is pretty uncool, and
applications don't like this.
- Give up partition-tolerance. This is the classic
homedir-is-on-the-network-drive system. Now, you lose the ability to cope
with network outages. This is not good if you're using this system for
your home directory, and in particular, is unacceptable if you store your
wireless connection secrets on the network drive itself.
Conclusion: the best of all worlds is impossible. If you can guarantee network
stability, then by all means, give up partition-tolerance, and use a pure
network filesystem with a single authoritative copy of the data. If you expect
network outages, or need access to the data before network is up, give up
consistency, and use something like Dropbox that keeps a local cache and syncs
that with the remote "authoritative" copy.
It's interesting to note that the best possible solutions to this problem
already exist (and see wide deployment). Thus, I claim that network-based
storage and synchronization is, for all intents and purposes, a solved problem.
I have made a first crude implementation of comments. They appear to
work so far. We'll see how long it takes for me to break them.
They are currently only shown in the single-day view, for the record.
I eagerly await email notifications of new comments on my blog posts!
I've worked to make my blog something interesting for (some) people to
read, and based on some of the feedback I've gotten from said readers,
some things I write have been comment-worthy, so that's exciting
for me. I hope that the addition of comments will enable more two-way
communication through my blog, since until now it has served strictly
as a broadcast mechanism.
Of note: I've written just enough code to actually support submitting
comments and showing approved comments. The glue in between is currently
manual; I plan to automate this.
Also, for a one-hour project, this took way more than 60 minutes.
At least I finished enough of it to show. Another benefit to forcing
myself to do these projects: over time, I'll get a better sense for how
long it will take to do something.
Future comments work:
- Fix the backend so that I don't have to write shell script every time I want to approve a post
- Add gravatar support
- Make things not quite so ugly (maybe)
- Add comment counts to the multi-day view (and maybe the Atom feed)
Yesterday I went to see Tron: Legacy with Nick and Eric, a couple of my
old friends from Texas A&M who were in the area. It was SO SO SHINY,
and I think the plot that it had was decently executed, but it didn't
evoke anything terribly deep within me. Also, Olivia Wilde (who played
Quorra as well as Thirteen in House) FTW.
Last night marked both the winter solstice and a total lunar eclipse.
I set up my telescope. The best part was seeing that the shadow on
the moon was curved; a fact used by ancient scientists to show that the
earth is at least circular in profile, and the moon spherical (suggesting
that the same would be true of the earth).
During the first half of the eclipse, the sky was fairly
clear, and I was able to take some (somewhat) decent pictures with my camera
looking through the telescope. As the evening progressed, clouds came in,
which made it much harder to get any decent shots.
Click on each picture to view the linked full-resolution versions.
Today was...long. I went over to Nicole's and had gingerbread pancakes
and a Talk. I wish I knew a better way to tell my friends when I think
they need to face and be proactive about their issues. I don't like
making my points so painful, but my experience has been that I didn't
heed my friends' advice and warnings until they said something that got
me angry and made me really consider their point of view. Those of you
who've helped me grow: I thank you.
We had a whole ham, pineapple bake, and asparagus for dinner, which was absolutely delicious.
The family went to see The Tourist, which I came away from with no
strong opinions whatsoever. I was sleepy the entire movie, though,
so maybe that's part of it.
After arriving home, I improvised on the themes of a variety of video game
songs on the piano. Favorite songs of the evening included Terra's theme
from Final Fantasy 6, and Guardia's Millenial Fair from Chrono Trigger.
Then I made some science cookies, inspired by Not So Humble Pie">Not So Humble Pie:
Beakers, test tubes, a ring stand and wire guaze, and a petri dish
Chromosomes!
An Erlenmeyer flask, and something that's supposed to be a test tube rack
Another shot of the lot
And one Raphael. I managed to smear red frosting everywhere with the toothpick I was using to apply it about, so there are stains all over his face. OH WELL.
Two days ago: Danny and his girlfriend Amanda came and visited me. We
went to Cafe Brazil for noms (I had a spinach-feta cheese omelette), the
movie theater to see True Grit (good movie), and back to my house where
we played Parcheesi
with my dad. The game with four players takes quite a while. I should
have won, but I managed to blow 12 turns at the end where I simply could
not roll a 2 to advance my last pawn home, and my dad brought his last
pawn out of the nest, all the way around the board, and home during my
stagnation. It's a great game - it can feature very interesting twists,
depending on both luck and strategy.
Yesterday: I went to REI and got a pair of Vibram FiveFingers
KSO (black/black
colourscheme, for the record). I rather like the feel of them, and hope that
they will help change my gait to something softer on my feet, as well as
encourage me to be more active. Another plus: my friends can't give me grief
about my socks when I'm wearing my Vibrams. HA.
Yesterday evening: A group of a dozen or so TAMSters
got together for a potluck dinner. There were gyoza, egg drop soup, pork
tamales, thai noodles, stuffed mushrooms, cookies, pumpkin bread, and a
gingerbread house. I made pineapple bake (recipe posted in this
entry) and took my science
cookies to share. We ate delicious
foods, caught up on the stories of each others' lives, watched random videos,
played piano and Go, and had a good time together.
Today: my dear friend Sarah is flying to the area to visit me for a couple days
before heading down to central Texas to visit additional friends from A&M!
I am very excited to see her in person again. Our lives seem to be unlikely to
cross paths unless we make concerted efforts for them to do so, so we live with
the expectation that we'll probably never see each other in person again. As a
result, when we do, such times are particularly joyful.
